Thanks for your reply! I largely agree with drossbucket’s reply.
I also wonder how much this is an incentives problem. As you mentioned and in my experience, the fields you mentioned strongly incentivize an almost fanatical level of thoroughness that I suspect is very hard for individuals to maintain without outside incentives pushing them that way. At least personally, I definitely struggle and, frankly, mostly fail to live up to the sorts of standards you mention when writing blog posts in part because the incentive gradient feels like it pushes towards hitting the publish button.
Given this, I wonder if there’s a way to shift the incentives on the margin. One minor thing I’ve been thinking of trying for my personal writing is having a Knuth or Nintil style “pay for mistakes” policy. Do you have thoughts on other incentive structures to for rewarding rigor or punishing the lack thereof?
It feels partly like an incentives problem, but also I think a lot of people around here are altruistic and truth-seeking and just don’t realise that there are much more effective ways to contribute to community epistemics than standard blog posts.
I think that most LW discussion is at the level where “paying for mistakes” wouldn’t be that helpful, since a lot of it is fuzzy. Probably the thing we need first are more reference posts that distill a range of discussion into key concepts, and place that in the wider intellectual context. Then we can get more empirical. (Although I feel pretty biased on this point, because my own style of learning about things is very top-down). I guess to encourage this, we could add a “reference” section for posts that aim to distill ongoing debates on LW.
In some cases you can get a lot of “cheap” credit by taking other people’s ideas and writing a definitive version of them aimed at more mainstream audiences. For ideas that are really worth spreading, that seems useful.
Thanks for your reply! I largely agree with drossbucket’s reply.
I also wonder how much this is an incentives problem. As you mentioned and in my experience, the fields you mentioned strongly incentivize an almost fanatical level of thoroughness that I suspect is very hard for individuals to maintain without outside incentives pushing them that way. At least personally, I definitely struggle and, frankly, mostly fail to live up to the sorts of standards you mention when writing blog posts in part because the incentive gradient feels like it pushes towards hitting the publish button.
Given this, I wonder if there’s a way to shift the incentives on the margin. One minor thing I’ve been thinking of trying for my personal writing is having a Knuth or Nintil style “pay for mistakes” policy. Do you have thoughts on other incentive structures to for rewarding rigor or punishing the lack thereof?
It feels partly like an incentives problem, but also I think a lot of people around here are altruistic and truth-seeking and just don’t realise that there are much more effective ways to contribute to community epistemics than standard blog posts.
I think that most LW discussion is at the level where “paying for mistakes” wouldn’t be that helpful, since a lot of it is fuzzy. Probably the thing we need first are more reference posts that distill a range of discussion into key concepts, and place that in the wider intellectual context. Then we can get more empirical. (Although I feel pretty biased on this point, because my own style of learning about things is very top-down). I guess to encourage this, we could add a “reference” section for posts that aim to distill ongoing debates on LW.
In some cases you can get a lot of “cheap” credit by taking other people’s ideas and writing a definitive version of them aimed at more mainstream audiences. For ideas that are really worth spreading, that seems useful.