Please vote—What topic would be best for an investigation and brief post?
Followup to: Systematic Search for Useful Ideas
I’ve set up a pairwise poll for this question and additional suggestions are welcome. My original proposal was to examine topics that haven’t already been covered here, but instead of that, I’d like to ask people to consider the existing level of discussion on a topic in evaluating what would be “best.”
ETA: There are currently over 500 pairs. You don’t have to go through all of them—answer as many or as few as you like.
I started doing the poll, but I found that my preferences were so weak that there didn’t seem much point in spending that much time. My preferences were weak because I had no idea what sort of angle you were thinking about taking on the topics.
I’d rather do a poll which asked for something like my three favorite and least favorite topics.
Assuming that there is a end to the questions, you might want to mention in the post how many pair-judgements people will be asked to make. I stopped after 76 or so because it seemed like they wouldn’t end soon.
Shouldn’t these items be lotteries? which would you prefer: 50% chance of Design Patterns or 100% chance of Political Science?
Why? Would the idea be to take account of the cost of writing about the different topics?
I was referencing the standard way to talk about identifying utility functions. If you did that you could try to approximate a LW utility function over topics. I was mostly joking and should have made that clearer.
Interesting observation: about twenty answers in I suddenly got paranoid about the consistency of my answers, and started trying to keep track of them. About 35 answers in, I was confronted with a dilemma (I think it was logistics vs. diplomacy) but couldn’t figure out how these compared in the existing hierarchy, and found it impossible to decide between the two on an intuitive basis as well.
Is my difficulty in selecting an intuitive preference isomorphic with my difficulty in calculating their relative position in my preference hierarchy, or is it inherited from that calculation difficulty?