I would also be interested in this. Being able to update our canon in this way strikes me as one of the key goals that I want the LessWrong community to be able to do. If people have any UI suggestions, or ways for us to facilitate that kind of updating in a productive way, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It so happens that I’ve given some thought to this question.
I had the idea (while reading yet another of the innumerable discussions of the replication crisis) of adding, to readthesequences.com, a “psychoskeptic mode” feature—where you’d click a button to turn on said mode, and then on every page you visited, you’d see every psychology-related claim red-penned (with, perhaps, annotations or footnotes detailing the specific reasons for skepticism, if any).
Doing this would involve two challenges, one informational and one technical; and, unfortunately, the former is more tedious and also more important.
The informational challenge is simply the fact that someone would have to go through every single essay in the Sequences, and note which specific parts of the post—which paragraphs, which sentences, which word ranges—constituted claims of scientific (and, in this case specifically, psychological) fact. Quite a tedious job, but without this data, the whole project is moot.
The technical challenge consists first of actually inserting the appropriate markup into the source files (still tedious, but a whole order of magnitude less so) and implementing the toggle feature and the UI for it (trivial on both counts).
(And that’s just for claims of fact, per se! It would be a whole additional informational challenge to identify parts of the reasoning in each essay, and conclusions, which depended in some way on those claims. That may be too ambitious for now; I’d be happy if the basic version of my idea could be implemented.)
Now, if there’s community interest in such a project, I can, with relative ease, put together a simple platform for crowdsourcing the informational challenge (it would be something as simple as adding “talk pages” to readthesequences.com, or something along these lines, which would not be terribly difficult to do). Or, alternatively, I would be more than happy to lend advice and support to some similar effort by you (i.e., the LessWrong team), or anyone else.
The question is whether this is worth doing at all, and what we can reasonably expect the result to be. Are the Sequences worth updating in this sort of way? I genuinely don’t know (even though, as I’ve said many times, I consider them to be a supremely useful and excellent body of writing).
I don’t think just tagging the claims would be very valuable. To be valuable the website would need to provide information about how well the particular claim holds up.
The informational challenge is simply the fact that someone would have to go through every single essay in the Sequences, and note which specific parts of the post—which paragraphs, which sentences, which word ranges—constituted claims of scientific (and, in this case specifically, psychological) fact. Quite a tedious job, but without this data, the whole project is moot.
This could take a while, and it’d be important to have it so that if someone ‘abandons’ the project, their work is still available. If I decided to read (and take the necessary notes on), if not a “page” a day, then at least 7 “pages” a day, then that part of the project would be complete...in a year. (The TOC says 333 pages.)*
You (or anyone else who wishes to contribute) should feel free to use these talk pages to post notes, commentary, or anything else relevant. (If you prefer to use Google Docs, or any other such tool, to do the required editing, then I’d ask that you make the doc publicly viewable, and place a link to it on the relevant Sequence post’s Talk page.)
(A list of every single essay that is part of Rationality:A–Z—including the interludes, introductions, etc.—along with links to Talk pages, can be found here.)
Edit: You’ll also find that you can now view each page’s source, in either native wiki format or Markdown format, via links at the top-left of the page.
I would also be interested in this. Being able to update our canon in this way strikes me as one of the key goals that I want the LessWrong community to be able to do. If people have any UI suggestions, or ways for us to facilitate that kind of updating in a productive way, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It so happens that I’ve given some thought to this question.
I had the idea (while reading yet another of the innumerable discussions of the replication crisis) of adding, to readthesequences.com, a “psychoskeptic mode” feature—where you’d click a button to turn on said mode, and then on every page you visited, you’d see every psychology-related claim red-penned (with, perhaps, annotations or footnotes detailing the specific reasons for skepticism, if any).
Doing this would involve two challenges, one informational and one technical; and, unfortunately, the former is more tedious and also more important.
The informational challenge is simply the fact that someone would have to go through every single essay in the Sequences, and note which specific parts of the post—which paragraphs, which sentences, which word ranges—constituted claims of scientific (and, in this case specifically, psychological) fact. Quite a tedious job, but without this data, the whole project is moot.
The technical challenge consists first of actually inserting the appropriate markup into the source files (still tedious, but a whole order of magnitude less so) and implementing the toggle feature and the UI for it (trivial on both counts).
(And that’s just for claims of fact, per se! It would be a whole additional informational challenge to identify parts of the reasoning in each essay, and conclusions, which depended in some way on those claims. That may be too ambitious for now; I’d be happy if the basic version of my idea could be implemented.)
Now, if there’s community interest in such a project, I can, with relative ease, put together a simple platform for crowdsourcing the informational challenge (it would be something as simple as adding “talk pages” to readthesequences.com, or something along these lines, which would not be terribly difficult to do). Or, alternatively, I would be more than happy to lend advice and support to some similar effort by you (i.e., the LessWrong team), or anyone else.
The question is whether this is worth doing at all, and what we can reasonably expect the result to be. Are the Sequences worth updating in this sort of way? I genuinely don’t know (even though, as I’ve said many times, I consider them to be a supremely useful and excellent body of writing).
I don’t think just tagging the claims would be very valuable. To be valuable the website would need to provide information about how well the particular claim holds up.
This could take a while, and it’d be important to have it so that if someone ‘abandons’ the project, their work is still available. If I decided to read (and take the necessary notes on), if not a “page” a day, then at least 7 “pages” a day, then that part of the project would be complete...in a year. (The TOC says 333 pages.)*
A way that might not catch everything would be to search readthesequences.com for “psy” (short, should get around most spelling mistakes). https://www.readthesequences.com/Search?q=psy&action=search.
A general ‘color this word red’ feature would be interesting.
*I might do this in a google doc. Alternate tool suggestions are welcome. Sharing available upon request (and providing email).
I have added wikipedia-style Talk pages to readthesequences.com. (Example.)
You (or anyone else who wishes to contribute) should feel free to use these talk pages to post notes, commentary, or anything else relevant. (If you prefer to use Google Docs, or any other such tool, to do the required editing, then I’d ask that you make the doc publicly viewable, and place a link to it on the relevant Sequence post’s Talk page.)
(A list of every single essay that is part of Rationality:A–Z—including the interludes, introductions, etc.—along with links to Talk pages, can be found here.)
Edit: You’ll also find that you can now view each page’s source, in either native wiki format or Markdown format, via links at the top-left of the page.