The way that we can distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that there is something there but it’s difficult to verbalize or to characterize coherently, is precisely via discussion, conceptual analysis, examination of intent behind word choices, examination of examples (or trying to think of examples), etc.
It’s not worth making most posts where implied central points are not coherently understood by the author. But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they’ve written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn’t of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already.
The incentives should carve out a niche for this kind of communication, acknowledging practical impossibility to distinguish. The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment, so any incentives should actually want to point the other way, possibly on orthogonal or correlated considerations that can actually be resolved in practice.
But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they’ve written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn’t of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already.
Of course. I wholly agree with this.
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).
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.
It’s not worth making most posts where implied central points are not coherently understood by the author. But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they’ve written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn’t of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already.
The incentives should carve out a niche for this kind of communication, acknowledging practical impossibility to distinguish. The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment, so any incentives should actually want to point the other way, possibly on orthogonal or correlated considerations that can actually be resolved in practice.
Of course. I wholly agree with this.
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).