I’m sure you know that LW tags are broken down into sub-categories. We seem to lack the energy to apply those sub-categories. This post is tagged “world-optimization,” but might be best if it was sub-tagged with “mechanism design” and “coordination/cooperation” at the least. It takes some time to look those tags up, consider which is a good fit, and apply it, and there’s no reward for doing so. There’s an equilibrium issue as well. If few people are applying specific tags, then the tags remain underused for navigating the site, as well as unknown, thus discouraging their further adoption.
That said, signs of any kind, including these tags, can give somebody the idea to embark on a reading expedition that they might not otherwise have conceived. You’re one of our shining lights, so perhaps you are normally driven to engage in thoughtfully directed reading projects. I suspect that many just sorta consume whatever happens to be at the top of the posts list, or whatever strikes their fancy in a sub-link. The idea of reviewing the collected LW writings on blackmail may never occur to them, unless they navigate to it even with our sub-par system of tags. They function as a “suggested reading” feature, and that has utility even if it’s not nearly comprehensive or specific enough to be of use to an expert reader.
Hope you do execute some of these optimizations on your site, and let us know about your experience putting them into place.
Yes, the community equilibrium is entirely different. On WP editors have little compunction about editing categories; here, I know vaguely that tags can be added (although I didn’t know that you could refactor them or remove them), but I wouldn’t do so because there’s no particular norm to do so. Who am I go to about editing matto’s post’s tags to break down world-optimization into something more specific?
Tags could be useful, but they aren’t now, and so they stay being not useful, and it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to single-handedly fix that when there’s like 10 posts a day and approaching 12 years of backlog.
A GPT-3 proof-of-concept will certainly be interesting. If it works, it could bootstrap useful tags on larger corpuses like LW. (It might be expensive, but it’s only money, and a lot cheaper than the expert LWer time it’d take; and of course, if GPT-3 works well, then perhaps a rival model like GPT-J or T5 or Jurassic would be worth finetuning to cut costs.)
I’m sure you know that LW tags are broken down into sub-categories. We seem to lack the energy to apply those sub-categories. This post is tagged “world-optimization,” but might be best if it was sub-tagged with “mechanism design” and “coordination/cooperation” at the least. It takes some time to look those tags up, consider which is a good fit, and apply it, and there’s no reward for doing so. There’s an equilibrium issue as well. If few people are applying specific tags, then the tags remain underused for navigating the site, as well as unknown, thus discouraging their further adoption.
That said, signs of any kind, including these tags, can give somebody the idea to embark on a reading expedition that they might not otherwise have conceived. You’re one of our shining lights, so perhaps you are normally driven to engage in thoughtfully directed reading projects. I suspect that many just sorta consume whatever happens to be at the top of the posts list, or whatever strikes their fancy in a sub-link. The idea of reviewing the collected LW writings on blackmail may never occur to them, unless they navigate to it even with our sub-par system of tags. They function as a “suggested reading” feature, and that has utility even if it’s not nearly comprehensive or specific enough to be of use to an expert reader.
Hope you do execute some of these optimizations on your site, and let us know about your experience putting them into place.
Yes, the community equilibrium is entirely different. On WP editors have little compunction about editing categories; here, I know vaguely that tags can be added (although I didn’t know that you could refactor them or remove them), but I wouldn’t do so because there’s no particular norm to do so. Who am I go to about editing matto’s post’s tags to break down
world-optimizationinto something more specific?Tags could be useful, but they aren’t now, and so they stay being not useful, and it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to single-handedly fix that when there’s like 10 posts a day and approaching 12 years of backlog.
A GPT-3 proof-of-concept will certainly be interesting. If it works, it could bootstrap useful tags on larger corpuses like LW. (It might be expensive, but it’s only money, and a lot cheaper than the expert LWer time it’d take; and of course, if GPT-3 works well, then perhaps a rival model like GPT-J or T5 or Jurassic would be worth finetuning to cut costs.)