(totally off the cuff, this is not official Ray Opinion let alone a commonly endorsed LW Team opinion)
I think there’s something of a spectrum of value.
I think it’s straightforwardly valuable to add the Obvious Posts to the Obvious Tags, and this is a job that most people can do.
I think, indeed, niche specialists are going to need to make the Niche Specialist tags.
The thing that gets a bit tricky is that different people might be finding the same topics but giving them different names. Something that I think is useful for Niche Specialists to do is to also be putting some effort into “taking in the overall evolving tagging structure”. Then, thinking about how to resolve multiple overlapping tags, and or competing definitions within tags, etc.
Perhaps most interestingly: most of the LW team is currently leaning towards tags evolving in a wiki-like direction. So, one of the things we need here is not just good tagging, but good pedagogy for introducing various concepts on a given tag page. And that requires some thinking about how the concept relates to other concepts.
I guess this means that there’s maybe two types of people I’m especially excited by getting involved with Tagging: people with the niche interests (who would be even more beneficial if they learned to look holistically at the concept-space), and people who are good at pedagogy and/or mapping out the concept-space, who could probably use to learn a bit more about individual niche areas to help improve the descriptions for the niche tags.
(I find myself thinking about Scott Alexander’s Alchemists / Teachers story where you need a mix of people who are particularly good at a subject to even understand the details at all, and people who are good at education to make it easier to understand, and various points on the spectrum between to bridge the gaps)
(totally off the cuff, this is not official Ray Opinion let alone a commonly endorsed LW Team opinion)
I think there’s something of a spectrum of value.
I think it’s straightforwardly valuable to add the Obvious Posts to the Obvious Tags, and this is a job that most people can do.
I think, indeed, niche specialists are going to need to make the Niche Specialist tags.
The thing that gets a bit tricky is that different people might be finding the same topics but giving them different names. Something that I think is useful for Niche Specialists to do is to also be putting some effort into “taking in the overall evolving tagging structure”. Then, thinking about how to resolve multiple overlapping tags, and or competing definitions within tags, etc.
Perhaps most interestingly: most of the LW team is currently leaning towards tags evolving in a wiki-like direction. So, one of the things we need here is not just good tagging, but good pedagogy for introducing various concepts on a given tag page. And that requires some thinking about how the concept relates to other concepts.
I guess this means that there’s maybe two types of people I’m especially excited by getting involved with Tagging: people with the niche interests (who would be even more beneficial if they learned to look holistically at the concept-space), and people who are good at pedagogy and/or mapping out the concept-space, who could probably use to learn a bit more about individual niche areas to help improve the descriptions for the niche tags.
(I find myself thinking about Scott Alexander’s Alchemists / Teachers story where you need a mix of people who are particularly good at a subject to even understand the details at all, and people who are good at education to make it easier to understand, and various points on the spectrum between to bridge the gaps)