How to popularize LW ideas: a webcomic?
People have been asking this question here a lot lately (not sure, why, but still). MoR has been by far the most effective ad for LW so far, but this is a one-man effort. I wonder if a web comic drawn by the regulars based on, say, recent posts and comments would be another way to get people interested. Just to set the bar really, really low, here is my quick impression of this post (the idea is stolen from #lesswrong, but the obvious bad pun is mine):
I’m still waiting for Death Note and the Principle of Maximum Entropy.
I was pretty disappointed when I read Death Note that not only did the supposedly brilliant characters use plans that were too convoluted to realistically work, but Light didn’t even test some simple and elegant ideas that could potentially have resolved his major problems.
N. Enaqbz Olfgnaqre. 12:13 CZ. Fgnoorq gb qrngu ol gur qrgrpgvir pbzzbayl xabja nf Y.
“Jung qbrf gung thl’f ahzore fnl? Bxnl, V’z tbaan jevgr n qngr bs qrngu bs 2200 NQ. Frr vs vg tbrf hc.”
Jura jevgvat bar’f qrfgval, lbh pnaabg fcrpvsl bgure crbcyr. Gubhtu lbh pbhyq purng ol jevgvat: “Fgnoorq gb qrngu ol n travhf qrgrpgvir gelvat gb pngpu n ivyynva jvgu zntvpny abgrobbx.” Vs gurer vf bayl bar crefba jub pbhyq cbffvoyl svg gur qrfpevcgvba, vg jbhyq jbex.
Lbh unir gb fcrpvsl qrngu gvzr jvguva n gvzr yvzvg fvapr jevgvat gurve anzr.
V qba’g erzrzore nalbar fnlvat gung gur gvzr yvzvg unq gb or yrff gvzr guna gurl jrer nyernql sngrq gb yvir. Jul abg fcrpvsl gung gur crefba qvrf va n pbhcyr uhaqerq lrnef, naq unir n crefba jvgu fuvavtnzv rlrf frr vs gurve cebwrpgrq qngr bs qrngu tbrf hc?
Ubj gb Hfr: YIV
Va gur Qrngu Abgr, lbh pnaabg frg gur qrngu qngr ybatre guna gur ivpgvz’f bevtvany yvsr fcna. Rira vs gur ivpgvz’f qrngu vf frg va gur Qrngu Abgr orlbaq uvf/ure bevtvany yvsr fcna, gur ivpgvz jvyy qvr orsber gur frg gvzr.
Gur Ehyrf bs Qrngu Abgr
YIV: Va gur Qrngu Abgr, lbh pnaabg frg gur qrngu qngr ybatre guna gur ivpgvz’f bevtvany yvsr fcna. Rira vs gur ivpgvz’f qrngu vf frg va gur Qrngu Abgr orlbaq uvf/ure bevtvany yvsr fcna, gur ivpgvz jvyy qvr orsber gur frg gvz
What would that be like? Sort of like http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity ?
More than sort of like that.
Go for it
If it was the first of April, I’d upvote.
Upvoted for not having “rational”, “rationality”, or similar in the post title.
I apologize to everyone for asking a good sample question here. There is value in setting the bar low and it was great of you to do that, I will try to do that myself in the future. However, I think you may have overshot the optimal bar-lowering. Feel free to add another example of popularizing media, perhaps comics aren’t your thing?
Do you even need to ask? Oh, I get it, it is a rhetorical question.
I hoped that this would spark those with sharper wit to talk to those with better drawing skills, and come up with something that is memorable on a regular basis.
Your post is badly named, as it doesn’t seem to invite general discussion about how to popularize LW, but just ask for the evaluation of a specific idea, the webcomic idea.
So here’s my evaluation thereof: No, at least not in the way you describe it.
Can you give me even a single example of a webcomic drawn and written collectively that is any good? Even stick-figure comics require a consistent style, both in art and in writing. Comics seem very low on the totem-pole of things which people can work collectively on.
So, no. If the LW community is ever to do a collective effort at something, I hope it’s in some endeavour where collective efforts have actually had a chance of working.
If you consider the daily top reddit ragecomic as a webcomic of sorts, then it’s one of better quality than many “normal” webcomics (and better than shminux’s), and is the product of many many people voting together—some make comics, some vote on comics to increase the accuracy of selection, some contribute images that are reused, some make apps for creating comics. Example!
I saw the first five of those, and they all seemed absolutely horrible to me—ugly art, and stupid writing. And you say these are the top-voted ones?
As for the example you linked to, the art is so inconsistent that initially I couldn’t tell that the face in panel 4 is supposed to be the same as in panels 2 and 3. other flaws is that it doesn’t have a consistent marking for speech vs thought, so you can’t tell that Panel 3 is just thinking these things or saying them.
In short, it’s still a horrible comic for me, and something like that would drive me away from LW, not draw me in. I would probably mark the whole LessWrong site as “horribly offensive to your aesthetic, don’t you ever click here again”, only slightly above goatce.x , if something like that had been my first impression of it.
There’s a reason that many people came to LessWrong through HPMoR: Methods of Rationality is an actually good piece of fanfiction. Those comics you linked, and shminux’s also—they’re absolute crap IMO.
Eh, it’s an acquired taste I guess, though that could be said of pretty much anything. There is a lot of conventions on what faces mean, inside jokes, etc. - once you get used to those, I’d still say it’s better than most webcomics, though calling them “good” may be a bit of a stretch.
I don’t deny that lesswrong rage comics would probably be pretty bad, and may repel people more than it attracts—and those it would attract may not be the ones we want. It’s just the best example I can find of a collaboratively made webcomic that’s worth reading.
The American comic industry is built almost entirely on a ‘collective’ model—one person writes the stories, another person may turn that into quasi-storyboard script, another does all the drawing, and another may handle the inking/painting etc. There are other steps too (eg. editors), I think, but beyond that I’m not sure. (Most of my knowledge comes from reading through the Sandman extras like the scripts and marginal discussions, where many details imply such a process.) Manga frequently has similar separations as well (since it was brought up in another comment-thread, Death Note was a pair, a writer & an artist), but I don’t think it’s nearly as common.
To name 3 well-regarded webcomics just from the ones I personally read which use such an assembly line process, Dr. McNinja Girl Genius, and Erfworld. (I guess there’s Megatokyo as well, before they split, and Penny Arcade has a writer/artist split come to think of it.)
The Assembly-line process is not quite what I meant. One person writing, another person drawing like what T Campbell does (in Fans! or Penny&Aggie, etc) is one thing—same thing with what Mark Stanley does in Freefall where he writes and draws but another person colors it.
Those comics still have one writer, and one artist. And so they maintain continuity of style.
I thought shminux meant a different process where we all contribute on all levels, e.g. by each individually picking from a list of topics and each writing and drawing a complete strip of them all, much as Wikipedia has many editors which can all create articles. In short a vertical division, not a horizontal one. This would produce discontinuity and vastly different levels of quality from day to day.
Probably. American comics do not maintain a single artist or writer over their entire run, usually, even creator-dominated comics like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman rotate all positions (although there were far more artists than writers for Sandman, IIRC), but the turnover tends to be over many issues/months or years, and I imagine their general skill level would be much higher than a LW collective.
Eh, I’m not married to any particular solution, just thought that a regular strip, however produced, might attract some people not amenable to spending hours on reading either the sequences or the fanfic. Whether it is a good idea to attract attention of people like that, is a whole different issue.
The Gutters, which has provided me with a fair amount of amusement recently, seems to be consistently written by Ryan Sohmer, but drawn by whoever he can get on board for a strip.
Good point on the naming, renamed.
RSA Animations of important sequences posts are what I’d like to see. Of course I have no idea how much effort goes into making these, presumably quite a lot.
I love the idea of a web comic from some of the Sequences. But sadly my drawing skills are close to 0K so I won’t be able to help on that… Maybe we could try to contact those who made fan arts about HP:MoR (fan art about a fan fiction, I like the meta-ness in that !) ? But do you think we should select a few posts from LW and offer them to illustrate those ?
That is the coolest thing I have seen in quite a while.
Seriously, I don’t think that many people can come up with something as clever as HPMOR. To start with, it’s clever in itself, and isn’t simply an amusing reference that only people who know what Eliezer and Luke look like would get.
That said, go for it. It surely would be fun to make, and probably at least vaguely fun to read.