Just my personal opinion, but I think that you should write about “your” topics, e.g. if you are interested in biology and you know things that (a) can be interesting for intelligent laymen, (b) are not obvious for most people, and (c) you feel sufficiently certain that the information is correct, go ahead!
In my experience when people try to force themselves to write or talk about topics they don’t deeply understand, but they feel they have some kind of “rationalist duty” to write yet another article or make yet another lecture about Kahneman or Bayes, it often ends badly.
The valuable part is your expertise, whether it is your profession or merely a hobby.
My expertise, strictly speaking, is in programming and closely related technological topics; those are the only subjects where I can personally vouch for the correctness etc. of the content instead of relying on references. Everywhere else I’d be repeating what other people write, or at best providing anecdotal evidence.
But programming is an immensely wide subject. Most of the LW regulars are themselves programmers or have experience with programming (in the Israeli LW meetup there’s only one ‘core’ / regular member who’s not a programmer). I fear that most technical things I might write would be obvious to some and incomprehensible or irrelevant to others, and only useful and interesting to a minority in the middle.
On the other hand, I read a lot in subjects which I think would interest many people. I could write about those, but the epistemic status would be “I read this somewhere, here’s the reference, I can’t verify this for myself and I probably don’t even have a good prior and neither do you unless you’re already an expert in the subject.” For example, at a recent Israeli LW meetup I presented a summary of biologist Nick Lane’s books on the role of mitochondria in the evolution of other properties of eukaryotes. I’m not sure the two people in the audience with formal biological education liked it as much as everyone else did; one of them said something to the effect of “even if it’s not necessarily true, it’s a nice story”.
In general, having articles accessible for everyone is nice, but it isn’t necessary. We already had very math-heavy LW articles. Just as well we could have anything-else-heavy articles, as long as enough people here understand the topic, so they can express their opinions on whether it makes sense or is a bullshit.
You can always ask in the open thread: “Hi, I am going to write a topic about X (be quite specific here), what do you think about it?” Add options like “I wouldn’t understand it”, “I already know that”, “I would like to read it”, and maybe “I would understand it, but I’m not actually interested in reading it” and let people vote. But essentially the only part you care about it how many people will answer “I would like to read it”.
The example with the mitochondria seems okay if the formally educated people didn’t find obvious mistakes. I was rather thinking about some bad examples where either the author was saying repeatedly “uhm… I actually don’t understand this… so… maybe...” and just kept confusing everyone, or where the author was making obvious mistakes that made all present experts roll their eyes, but the author didn’t care about feedback and continued to dig deeper.
If you are not an expert, what made you think that Nick Lane’s books are better than random garbage? I see two options: either you trust his credentials, or you have already read enough books in biology that there is a chance that you would notice something off. Preferably both. That seems okay to me. (What I would hate to see is the approach like “I don’t know anything about this, but here is this cool youtube video about how quantum thinking allows you to do magic with your mind”, that is neither a reliable source, nor sufficient background to distinguish signal from garbage.)
If you are not an expert, what made you think that Nick Lane’s books are better than random garbage? I see two options: either you trust his credentials, or you have already read enough books in biology that there is a chance that you would notice something off.
Let’s run with this, not because I need to decide this case, but as an example:
He has reasonable credentials: he’s Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry (the exact subject of his books), University College, London. He has written several books on the subject with high Amazon rank. Most things he says aren’t original to him and he’s careful to cite the origins of each idea.
But with all that, I have no real idea of how other people in his field perceive him or his theories. All the reviews I found with Google were positive but also weren’t by experts in that particular field. I also don’t have a sense of how much counterevidence there might be that he doesn’t mention.
I have read many tens of books popularizing biology, paleontology, history of evolution, etc. And I studied undergrad biology for three semesters. But I don’t have a professional understanding, and I haven’t read technical literature relevant to Lane’s theories.
I do sometimes notice ‘something being off’. But in most of these cases I don’t think I’m capable of distinguishing the author being wrong from myself being wrong.
I’m afraid of spreading misinformation that only an expert would notice, because there may not be any experts in the audience (and also my reputation would take a big hit). So the question is: how (meta-)certain should I be before publishing something on LW?
Just my personal opinion, but I think that you should write about “your” topics, e.g. if you are interested in biology and you know things that (a) can be interesting for intelligent laymen, (b) are not obvious for most people, and (c) you feel sufficiently certain that the information is correct, go ahead!
In my experience when people try to force themselves to write or talk about topics they don’t deeply understand, but they feel they have some kind of “rationalist duty” to write yet another article or make yet another lecture about Kahneman or Bayes, it often ends badly.
The valuable part is your expertise, whether it is your profession or merely a hobby.
My expertise, strictly speaking, is in programming and closely related technological topics; those are the only subjects where I can personally vouch for the correctness etc. of the content instead of relying on references. Everywhere else I’d be repeating what other people write, or at best providing anecdotal evidence.
But programming is an immensely wide subject. Most of the LW regulars are themselves programmers or have experience with programming (in the Israeli LW meetup there’s only one ‘core’ / regular member who’s not a programmer). I fear that most technical things I might write would be obvious to some and incomprehensible or irrelevant to others, and only useful and interesting to a minority in the middle.
On the other hand, I read a lot in subjects which I think would interest many people. I could write about those, but the epistemic status would be “I read this somewhere, here’s the reference, I can’t verify this for myself and I probably don’t even have a good prior and neither do you unless you’re already an expert in the subject.” For example, at a recent Israeli LW meetup I presented a summary of biologist Nick Lane’s books on the role of mitochondria in the evolution of other properties of eukaryotes. I’m not sure the two people in the audience with formal biological education liked it as much as everyone else did; one of them said something to the effect of “even if it’s not necessarily true, it’s a nice story”.
In general, having articles accessible for everyone is nice, but it isn’t necessary. We already had very math-heavy LW articles. Just as well we could have anything-else-heavy articles, as long as enough people here understand the topic, so they can express their opinions on whether it makes sense or is a bullshit.
You can always ask in the open thread: “Hi, I am going to write a topic about X (be quite specific here), what do you think about it?” Add options like “I wouldn’t understand it”, “I already know that”, “I would like to read it”, and maybe “I would understand it, but I’m not actually interested in reading it” and let people vote. But essentially the only part you care about it how many people will answer “I would like to read it”.
The example with the mitochondria seems okay if the formally educated people didn’t find obvious mistakes. I was rather thinking about some bad examples where either the author was saying repeatedly “uhm… I actually don’t understand this… so… maybe...” and just kept confusing everyone, or where the author was making obvious mistakes that made all present experts roll their eyes, but the author didn’t care about feedback and continued to dig deeper.
If you are not an expert, what made you think that Nick Lane’s books are better than random garbage? I see two options: either you trust his credentials, or you have already read enough books in biology that there is a chance that you would notice something off. Preferably both. That seems okay to me. (What I would hate to see is the approach like “I don’t know anything about this, but here is this cool youtube video about how quantum thinking allows you to do magic with your mind”, that is neither a reliable source, nor sufficient background to distinguish signal from garbage.)
Let’s run with this, not because I need to decide this case, but as an example:
He has reasonable credentials: he’s Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry (the exact subject of his books), University College, London. He has written several books on the subject with high Amazon rank. Most things he says aren’t original to him and he’s careful to cite the origins of each idea.
But with all that, I have no real idea of how other people in his field perceive him or his theories. All the reviews I found with Google were positive but also weren’t by experts in that particular field. I also don’t have a sense of how much counterevidence there might be that he doesn’t mention.
I have read many tens of books popularizing biology, paleontology, history of evolution, etc. And I studied undergrad biology for three semesters. But I don’t have a professional understanding, and I haven’t read technical literature relevant to Lane’s theories.
I do sometimes notice ‘something being off’. But in most of these cases I don’t think I’m capable of distinguishing the author being wrong from myself being wrong.
I’m afraid of spreading misinformation that only an expert would notice, because there may not be any experts in the audience (and also my reputation would take a big hit). So the question is: how (meta-)certain should I be before publishing something on LW?
Well, I plan to publish articles with much less evidence. I am not a scientist, and I usually don’t check the references.
I’d say go ahead.
On this, Nate Soares’ Confidence All the Way Up is worth reading.