Making things sound better without being better is does not bring upvotes here (usually). We are blessed that it’s not required or appreciated on LW. Mod policy is an attempt to keep LW a special and better place than the rest of the internet.
...
The other thing to think of is this: if we make everyone an excellent writer without improving their thinkingk we’ll lose the signal we currently have that helps us read good ideas by noting good writing.
Okay. Which interpretation of the role of writing quality on LessWrong would you like to defend?
Jokes aside, I think everyone writing in a better manner would be better, as better writing is typically more pleasant to read and also conveys ideas more effectively than worse writing.
As to your point about writing quality being one of the best gauges we have for human thought being put into writing, I can kinda see that, but if the moderators want a better gauge for high effort writing, they should put more effort into finding new ways to measure effort, instead of just making a policy that tangentially affects this and either won’t really be enforceable anyway or lead to a lot of false positives.
I think tracking the amount of time spent editing/ number of edits on a given LessWrong post would be a good way to judge the amount of effort placed into a post (this should not be too difficult to track/implement, and for people who write their posts in google drive or word, I doubt it would be a huge inconvenience to move over to LessWrong).
Because we restrict writing to humans, things that sound better usually also are better. There’s no contradiction there. Good writing elsewhere means convincing outside of quality of ideas; here it does not.
I like that idea for tracking actual contribution. But what they’ve done in the meantime is a hell of a lot easier to implement. That would take some tricky algorithms.
...
Okay. Which interpretation of the role of writing quality on LessWrong would you like to defend?
Jokes aside, I think everyone writing in a better manner would be better, as better writing is typically more pleasant to read and also conveys ideas more effectively than worse writing.
As to your point about writing quality being one of the best gauges we have for human thought being put into writing, I can kinda see that, but if the moderators want a better gauge for high effort writing, they should put more effort into finding new ways to measure effort, instead of just making a policy that tangentially affects this and either won’t really be enforceable anyway or lead to a lot of false positives.
I think tracking the amount of time spent editing/ number of edits on a given LessWrong post would be a good way to judge the amount of effort placed into a post (this should not be too difficult to track/implement, and for people who write their posts in google drive or word, I doubt it would be a huge inconvenience to move over to LessWrong).
Because we restrict writing to humans, things that sound better usually also are better. There’s no contradiction there. Good writing elsewhere means convincing outside of quality of ideas; here it does not.
I like that idea for tracking actual contribution. But what they’ve done in the meantime is a hell of a lot easier to implement. That would take some tricky algorithms.