I agree that this is a problem. I don’t think the best way to fix it is to either change culture or change the voting system. There is probably a change to the site that would help with it. The trouble is that when something has a lot of hard-to-interpret noise in it, as is usually the case with both crackpot and crackpot-flavor-but-actually-insightful expert rambling, it’s hard to spend the time to figure out if the details resolve one way or the other. Also, like, experts can output crackpottery on their own field of expertise sometimes (I didn’t have anyone particular in mind besides yann, I asked Sonnet 4.5, who suggested Linus Pauling on vitamin c, Lord Kelvin on age of earth, Fred Hoyle and steady state universe).
Like, the whole reason we have the scientific standards we do is that even if one is an expert in a field who has made previous verified breakthroughs, it’s really easy to have a brilliant, wrong idea. Maybe the value here is in making it easy to tell whether other people will find your post easy to follow? probably the primary thing I’d suggest would be trying to organize the post progressive-jpeg-style: try to fit as much as possible as early as possible, so that it becomes clear quickly why your post is relevant-or-not for a given reader. also just, try to compress as much as you can.
of course, these are annoyingly high standards. your grid dynamic thing seems like a thing I’ve seen happen. it’s probably at least some of why I feel motivated to comment on low-upvote wacky posts. it’s a bit of a chore to do well, though, and probably the primary reason I do it is procrastination.
if cultural things are viable, probably a good one would be people being very willing to put reacts when they downvote, yeah.
(I didn’t read your post in full because I found it to be taking longer to parse than I felt like spending, fwiw. I’m responding to a skim.)
probably the primary thing I’d suggest would be trying to organize the post progressive-jpeg-style: try to fit as much as possible as early as possible, so that it becomes clear quickly why your post is relevant-or-not for a given reader. also just, try to compress as much as you can.
This is a fair point and in some cases it’s not too much additional cognitive load to structure things this way. I have noticed though that it can be ”...complex enough for me to make the associations I’ve made and distill them into a narrative that makes sense to me. I can’t one-shot a narrative that lands broadly”. Other times the fun and the motivation in writing is from crafting the narrative creatively. If narratives have to follow line by line then we wouldn’t get things like Infinite Jest.
A low-cost idea I had that could help: folks who get their post or comment downvoted could receive a message linking back to the New User’s Guide to LessWrong but mainly up-front highlighting that these contra-contrarian forces exist, and “If you’ve been downvoted and/or rate-limited, don’t take it too hard. LessWrong has fairly particular standards. My recommendation is to read some of the advice at the end here and try again.”[1]
I’ve spoken with multiple smart rationalist people in person who have described being discouraged from writing on LessWrong because of echo chamber effects / imbalanced curation.
I agree that this is a problem. I don’t think the best way to fix it is to either change culture or change the voting system. There is probably a change to the site that would help with it. The trouble is that when something has a lot of hard-to-interpret noise in it, as is usually the case with both crackpot and crackpot-flavor-but-actually-insightful expert rambling, it’s hard to spend the time to figure out if the details resolve one way or the other. Also, like, experts can output crackpottery on their own field of expertise sometimes (I didn’t have anyone particular in mind
besides yann, I asked Sonnet 4.5, who suggested Linus Pauling on vitamin c, Lord Kelvin on age of earth, Fred Hoyle and steady state universe).Like, the whole reason we have the scientific standards we do is that even if one is an expert in a field who has made previous verified breakthroughs, it’s really easy to have a brilliant, wrong idea. Maybe the value here is in making it easy to tell whether other people will find your post easy to follow? probably the primary thing I’d suggest would be trying to organize the post progressive-jpeg-style: try to fit as much as possible as early as possible, so that it becomes clear quickly why your post is relevant-or-not for a given reader. also just, try to compress as much as you can.
of course, these are annoyingly high standards. your grid dynamic thing seems like a thing I’ve seen happen. it’s probably at least some of why I feel motivated to comment on low-upvote wacky posts. it’s a bit of a chore to do well, though, and probably the primary reason I do it is procrastination.
if cultural things are viable, probably a good one would be people being very willing to put reacts when they downvote, yeah.
(I didn’t read your post in full because I found it to be taking longer to parse than I felt like spending, fwiw. I’m responding to a skim.)
Thank you for sharing your expert insight!
This is a fair point and in some cases it’s not too much additional cognitive load to structure things this way. I have noticed though that it can be ”...complex enough for me to make the associations I’ve made and distill them into a narrative that makes sense to me. I can’t one-shot a narrative that lands broadly”. Other times the fun and the motivation in writing is from crafting the narrative creatively. If narratives have to follow line by line then we wouldn’t get things like Infinite Jest.
A low-cost idea I had that could help: folks who get their post or comment downvoted could receive a message linking back to the New User’s Guide to LessWrong but mainly up-front highlighting that these contra-contrarian forces exist, and “If you’ve been downvoted and/or rate-limited, don’t take it too hard. LessWrong has fairly particular standards. My recommendation is to read some of the advice at the end here and try again.”[1]
I’ve spoken with multiple smart rationalist people in person who have described being discouraged from writing on LessWrong because of echo chamber effects / imbalanced curation.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hHyYph9CcYfdnoC5j/automatic-rate-limiting-on-lesswrong