Curated. This is a great post. We (the mods) generally struggle to get people to write up thoughts worth hearing because they fear that they’re not yet defensible enough. Until now, I’d have encouraged people to share all their thoughts at various stages of development/research/refinement/etc, just with appropriate epistemic statuses attached. This post goes further and provides an actual specific approach that one can follow to write up ideas at any level of development. More than that, it provides a social license of which I approve.
The ideal I endorse (as a mod) is something like LessWrong is a place where you can develop and share your ideas wherever they’re at. It’s great to publish a well-researched or well-considered post that you’re confident in, but it can also be incredibly valuable to share nascent thoughts too. Doing so both allows you, the writer, to get early feedback, but also can also often provide readers something good enough to learn from and build upon. And it’s definitely much better to publish early than not at all!
A challenging aspect of posting less well-developed thoughts is they can elicit more negative feedback than a post that’s had a lot effort invested to counter objections, etc. This feedback can be hard and unpleasant to receive, especially if it’s worded bluntly. My ideal here, that might take work to achieve, is that our culture is one where commenters calibrate their feedback (or at least its tone) to be appropriate to the kind of post being made. If someone’s exploring an idea, encourage the exploration even as you might point a flaw in the process.
For people who especially concerned their thoughts aren’t ready for general publication, we built Shortform to be the home for earlier-stage material. The explicit purpose of Shortform is that you can share thoughts which only took you a relatively short amount of time to write. [However, posting as a regular LessWrong post can also be fine, if you’re comfortable. And mods can help you decide where to post if you’re unsure.]
In academia-land, there’s a norm of collegiality—at least among my crowd. People calibrate their feedback based on context and relationship. Here, relationship is lacking and context is provided only by the content of the post itself. I think we’re missing a lot of the information and incentives that motivate care in presentation and care in response. On the other hand, commenters’ opinion of me matters not at all for my career or life prospects. To me, the value of the forum is in providing precisely this sort of divergence from real-world norms. There’s no need to constantly pay attention to the nuances of relationships or try and get some sort of leverage out of them, so a very different sort of conversation and way of relating can emerge. This is good and bad, but LessWrong’s advantage is in being different, not comfortable.
This is good and bad, but LessWrong’s advantage is in being different, not comfortable.
Personally: If LessWrong is not comfortable for me to post on, I won’t post. And, in fact, my post volume has decreased somewhat because of that. That’s just how my brain is wired, it seems.
I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things but my post history reveals that I’m like you and a lot like the people this post is geared towards; I don’t share my thoughts because I never have much of an idea how to back them up. Worse though, I can’t even follow this post’s advice, as I mostly have no idea how I come up with any of the things I do, either; I’ve never bothered to pay attention to the process. :/
I think a norm of “somewhat comfortable by default; solicit maximally frank feedback with an end-of-post request” might be good? It may be easier to say “please be harsher on my claims” than “please be courteous with me.”
Oh yeah, I mean I don’t love the discomfort! I just feel like it’s more efficacious for me to just thicken my skin than to hope LW’s basic social dynamic improves notably. Like, when I look back at the tone of discussion when the site was livelier 10 years ago, it’s the same tone on the individual posts. It just comes off differently because of how many posts there are. Here, you get one person’s comment and it’s the whole reaction you experience. Then, there was a sort of averaging thing that I think made it feel less harsh, even though it was the same basic material. If that makes any sense at all :D
Curated. This is a great post. We (the mods) generally struggle to get people to write up thoughts worth hearing because they fear that they’re not yet defensible enough. Until now, I’d have encouraged people to share all their thoughts at various stages of development/research/refinement/etc, just with appropriate epistemic statuses attached. This post goes further and provides an actual specific approach that one can follow to write up ideas at any level of development. More than that, it provides a social license of which I approve.
The ideal I endorse (as a mod) is something like LessWrong is a place where you can develop and share your ideas wherever they’re at. It’s great to publish a well-researched or well-considered post that you’re confident in, but it can also be incredibly valuable to share nascent thoughts too. Doing so both allows you, the writer, to get early feedback, but also can also often provide readers something good enough to learn from and build upon. And it’s definitely much better to publish early than not at all!
A challenging aspect of posting less well-developed thoughts is they can elicit more negative feedback than a post that’s had a lot effort invested to counter objections, etc. This feedback can be hard and unpleasant to receive, especially if it’s worded bluntly. My ideal here, that might take work to achieve, is that our culture is one where commenters calibrate their feedback (or at least its tone) to be appropriate to the kind of post being made. If someone’s exploring an idea, encourage the exploration even as you might point a flaw in the process.
For people who especially concerned their thoughts aren’t ready for general publication, we built Shortform to be the home for earlier-stage material. The explicit purpose of Shortform is that you can share thoughts which only took you a relatively short amount of time to write. [However, posting as a regular LessWrong post can also be fine, if you’re comfortable. And mods can help you decide where to post if you’re unsure.]
In academia-land, there’s a norm of collegiality—at least among my crowd. People calibrate their feedback based on context and relationship. Here, relationship is lacking and context is provided only by the content of the post itself. I think we’re missing a lot of the information and incentives that motivate care in presentation and care in response. On the other hand, commenters’ opinion of me matters not at all for my career or life prospects. To me, the value of the forum is in providing precisely this sort of divergence from real-world norms. There’s no need to constantly pay attention to the nuances of relationships or try and get some sort of leverage out of them, so a very different sort of conversation and way of relating can emerge. This is good and bad, but LessWrong’s advantage is in being different, not comfortable.
Personally: If LessWrong is not comfortable for me to post on, I won’t post. And, in fact, my post volume has decreased somewhat because of that. That’s just how my brain is wired, it seems.
I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things but my post history reveals that I’m like you and a lot like the people this post is geared towards; I don’t share my thoughts because I never have much of an idea how to back them up. Worse though, I can’t even follow this post’s advice, as I mostly have no idea how I come up with any of the things I do, either; I’ve never bothered to pay attention to the process. :/
Secret secondary goal of this post: get people to pay attention to the process-which-generates their ideas/beliefs/etc.
Yeah, I’m only speaking for myself here :)
I think a norm of “somewhat comfortable by default; solicit maximally frank feedback with an end-of-post request” might be good? It may be easier to say “please be harsher on my claims” than “please be courteous with me.”
Oh yeah, I mean I don’t love the discomfort! I just feel like it’s more efficacious for me to just thicken my skin than to hope LW’s basic social dynamic improves notably. Like, when I look back at the tone of discussion when the site was livelier 10 years ago, it’s the same tone on the individual posts. It just comes off differently because of how many posts there are. Here, you get one person’s comment and it’s the whole reaction you experience. Then, there was a sort of averaging thing that I think made it feel less harsh, even though it was the same basic material. If that makes any sense at all :D