However, I think that the “volume of writing” is not exactly the best thing to optimize. Consider this: during the era of the Sequences, LW only had one article per day, which is about three times less than it has now, and yet people didn’t complain that it was “dying”, unlike now.
It’s natural that when people find a resource they like, their reaction is: “more! more! more!”. But getting more content sometimes lowers the quality. And then people complain about the lower quality, but when you try reverting to the previous state, now they would feel angry about the smaller frequency, and you just can’t win. And when in the name of higher volume the lower quality gets accepted, many writers lose the incentive to produce higher quality.
(By the way, I am curious how many people complaining about not enough new content on LW still haven’t read the Sequences, because that’s too long.)
The quality and the volume are in tension. Yes, it is possible to increase both—in long term, by attracting new good writers, and in short term, by motivating the existing ones to give writing a higher priority—but if you stretch it too far, you can only increase one at the expense of the other.
The original division of LW to “Main” and “Discussion” tried to be a solution to this problem: keep the high quality in “Main” and the larger volume in “Discussion”. It didn’t work as expected.
My personal opinion is that as long as we want higher quality, the low volume is something we should expect. We want high-quality texts from the kinds of people who (1) are quite rare in nature, and (2) don’t make money writing texts, i.e. they are not professional writers or journalists. Doing real stuff takes time. Learning valuable stuff takes time.
I am afraid that this is a self-reinforcing problem—greater volume attracts people who spend more time procrastinating online, and in turn, those people demand even greater volume because that’s how they prefer to spend their time. And those people are going to dominate the discussions. And even get most comment karma. (Just looking at myself: the lower my productivity in real life, the higher my LW karma. It’s almost as if spending hours on LW prevents me from getting real stuff done. Almost as if time is a scarce resource.)
Maybe the whole LW should be redesigned, and split into two completely independent parts: (1) the website with the selected high-quality articles, even if it means one article per month; and (2) the chatroom. Not just two web pages, but two separate communities. There is no reason why the people most active in the chatroom should have more voice about the article publishing; they are in a completely different line of business.
(Plus the elephant in the room: the vote manipulation, and the tech support that cannot solve it. But some of the problems would remain even if this would be solved.)
I should clarify because I mixed a few problems into one when talking about them.
low volume of posts on lw
low volume of writing coming from me personally
quality of my writing
while partly trying to solve the community’s low volume problem I was trying to solve my own low volume problem. Now that I am fairly happy with my personal solution, I was planning to solve my quality problem, and that should help the LW volume problem properly.
Separate but relevant: All of the posts that I wrote and think are the most valuable posts that I have written—were not possible to predict before writing. So in a sense I have to have written out the idea before realising it’s value, and I would say also that I have to share the idea in order to figure out how much people care about it before noticing how important/valuable it is.
For perspective, I find Elo’s writing interesting maybe half the time. That’s about on par with a random LW post, for me. (Whereas, >99% of facebook posts are uninteresting.)
If he published more than about once a day, or put a little less effort into each post, I think he’d lower the LW average. (According to my subjective judgement.) Conversely, another hour or so on each post, or a slightly higher self-filter might raise the average. (Assuming his idea of what makes a good post is fairly representative of mine.)
I will try to do that. There is a reason why I post the length of time it takes me to write.
So far I wanted to ensure that “actually writing things down” wasn’t the cause of my lack of writing. Part of my problem was never allocating time to writing things. Now that I have mostly solved that, I was hoping to push the quality up. I realise that these are sometimes a bit below what I want to see here.
or a slightly higher self-filter
I am trying to improve but that’s kind of saying “I know which direction is wrong, so now I can walk in the right direction”.
I don’t suppose there are ideas you would like to see written about? Or maybe you would like to collaborate on my drafts before they hit the main group (open to anyone who wants to PM me and join the existing draft-readers). It’s hard—even for draft readers, to say—“this is wrong because...”. I recognise that what I write is not wrong but also not always right.
I have a list of future topics. This one had been on my list for more than 6 months, and I never developed a thesis, so never wrote it out in full. I am still experimenting with styles of posts. You may recall recently the chat-log, model of argument, no negative press, mental models. Mostly my ideas come from conversations with lesswrongers and developing problem solving processes around those conversations.
My basic structure is to go up and down the abstraction ladder while identifying examples and setting up a model.
It’s not as if LW has a problem of too much material these days.
I can post less if that’s what people tell me that they want. I recognised the problem of low-volume writing and am trying to solve it.
First, thank you for trying to solve the problem.
However, I think that the “volume of writing” is not exactly the best thing to optimize. Consider this: during the era of the Sequences, LW only had one article per day, which is about three times less than it has now, and yet people didn’t complain that it was “dying”, unlike now.
It’s natural that when people find a resource they like, their reaction is: “more! more! more!”. But getting more content sometimes lowers the quality. And then people complain about the lower quality, but when you try reverting to the previous state, now they would feel angry about the smaller frequency, and you just can’t win. And when in the name of higher volume the lower quality gets accepted, many writers lose the incentive to produce higher quality.
(By the way, I am curious how many people complaining about not enough new content on LW still haven’t read the Sequences, because that’s too long.)
The quality and the volume are in tension. Yes, it is possible to increase both—in long term, by attracting new good writers, and in short term, by motivating the existing ones to give writing a higher priority—but if you stretch it too far, you can only increase one at the expense of the other.
The original division of LW to “Main” and “Discussion” tried to be a solution to this problem: keep the high quality in “Main” and the larger volume in “Discussion”. It didn’t work as expected.
My personal opinion is that as long as we want higher quality, the low volume is something we should expect. We want high-quality texts from the kinds of people who (1) are quite rare in nature, and (2) don’t make money writing texts, i.e. they are not professional writers or journalists. Doing real stuff takes time. Learning valuable stuff takes time.
I am afraid that this is a self-reinforcing problem—greater volume attracts people who spend more time procrastinating online, and in turn, those people demand even greater volume because that’s how they prefer to spend their time. And those people are going to dominate the discussions. And even get most comment karma. (Just looking at myself: the lower my productivity in real life, the higher my LW karma. It’s almost as if spending hours on LW prevents me from getting real stuff done. Almost as if time is a scarce resource.)
Maybe the whole LW should be redesigned, and split into two completely independent parts: (1) the website with the selected high-quality articles, even if it means one article per month; and (2) the chatroom. Not just two web pages, but two separate communities. There is no reason why the people most active in the chatroom should have more voice about the article publishing; they are in a completely different line of business.
(Plus the elephant in the room: the vote manipulation, and the tech support that cannot solve it. But some of the problems would remain even if this would be solved.)
I should clarify because I mixed a few problems into one when talking about them.
low volume of posts on lw
low volume of writing coming from me personally
quality of my writing
while partly trying to solve the community’s low volume problem I was trying to solve my own low volume problem. Now that I am fairly happy with my personal solution, I was planning to solve my quality problem, and that should help the LW volume problem properly.
Separate but relevant: All of the posts that I wrote and think are the most valuable posts that I have written—were not possible to predict before writing. So in a sense I have to have written out the idea before realising it’s value, and I would say also that I have to share the idea in order to figure out how much people care about it before noticing how important/valuable it is.
For perspective, I find Elo’s writing interesting maybe half the time. That’s about on par with a random LW post, for me. (Whereas, >99% of facebook posts are uninteresting.)
If he published more than about once a day, or put a little less effort into each post, I think he’d lower the LW average. (According to my subjective judgement.) Conversely, another hour or so on each post, or a slightly higher self-filter might raise the average. (Assuming his idea of what makes a good post is fairly representative of mine.)
I will try to do that. There is a reason why I post the length of time it takes me to write.
So far I wanted to ensure that “actually writing things down” wasn’t the cause of my lack of writing. Part of my problem was never allocating time to writing things. Now that I have mostly solved that, I was hoping to push the quality up. I realise that these are sometimes a bit below what I want to see here.
I am trying to improve but that’s kind of saying “I know which direction is wrong, so now I can walk in the right direction”.
I don’t suppose there are ideas you would like to see written about? Or maybe you would like to collaborate on my drafts before they hit the main group (open to anyone who wants to PM me and join the existing draft-readers). It’s hard—even for draft readers, to say—“this is wrong because...”. I recognise that what I write is not wrong but also not always right.
I have a list of future topics. This one had been on my list for more than 6 months, and I never developed a thesis, so never wrote it out in full. I am still experimenting with styles of posts. You may recall recently the chat-log, model of argument, no negative press, mental models. Mostly my ideas come from conversations with lesswrongers and developing problem solving processes around those conversations.
My basic structure is to go up and down the abstraction ladder while identifying examples and setting up a model.