That seems hard to judge from anything empirical, you’d need to compare with the counterfactual where there is little difficulty in distinguishing and so good tentative takes don’t need to live in squalor among piles of worthless nonsense (especially well-presented “high effort” worthless nonsense). So I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly false, and similarly I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly true, since it has to rely on low-legibility intuitive takes about unobservable counterfactuals.
Also, the problems from the difficulty to distinguish are both on the side of the authors (in the form of incentives) and on the side of the readers (in the form of low availability of good content of this type, and having to endure the worthless nonsense without even being able to know if it actually is worthless nonsense).
The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment
Empirically, this is clearly false. The track record of LW in the past ~8 years makes this very clear.
That seems hard to judge from anything empirical, you’d need to compare with the counterfactual where there is little difficulty in distinguishing and so good tentative takes don’t need to live in squalor among piles of worthless nonsense (especially well-presented “high effort” worthless nonsense). So I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly false, and similarly I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly true, since it has to rely on low-legibility intuitive takes about unobservable counterfactuals.
Also, the problems from the difficulty to distinguish are both on the side of the authors (in the form of incentives) and on the side of the readers (in the form of low availability of good content of this type, and having to endure the worthless nonsense without even being able to know if it actually is worthless nonsense).