My experience of finding a post significant, in the “expect to want to link others to it in later conversations” sense, is much like the experience of learning a new word. The posts I find memorable not only explore a concept but also name it, and I happen to have the kind of cognition that handles jargon and acronyms well.
When I’m retrieving a post to link to others, I actually search the whole web based on the name I recall for the concept. Sometimes I’ll recognize and grab a LW post based on that search, and other times I’ll discover that the best concise definition lives elsewhere.
My experience of repeatedly linking a post is that I eventually start associating the winning search term with a concept, when I’ve searched it before.
For two examples of things I recall wanting to link to others, and how I found them:
Scissor statements are in the LW vocabulary. When I want to link them, I recall a prior wild goose chase failing to find a good link with “scissor statement” as the search term, so instead I search “shiri’s scissor” to get https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/. Turns out the source I wanted wasn’t on LW, just LW-adjacent.
Particularly, the two things you linked are just interesting on their own, but also although I don’t think my brain works in the same way yours does, I appreciate your perspective and how you tend to work with regards to these things. I think that I need something like a reference or a bookmark because these concepts don’t stick quite as strongly in my mind without lots of repeated exposure. I tend to be a ‘ground-up’ learner (if that’s even a thing) as opposed to someone who can keep lots of disparate concepts separately in my mind. Jargon and acroynms seem to fall out of my head like a sieve. I’ve confused the terms ‘anosmia’ and ‘aphasia’ for years. I just had to look up ‘word for not being able to remember words’ in order to remember the word aphasia. Ironic, right? Shiri’s Scissor/sort by controversial is an article I already read once in the past, but completely forgot until you linked it, I clicked it, and I read four paragraphs of it.
My experience of finding a post significant, in the “expect to want to link others to it in later conversations” sense, is much like the experience of learning a new word. The posts I find memorable not only explore a concept but also name it, and I happen to have the kind of cognition that handles jargon and acronyms well.
When I’m retrieving a post to link to others, I actually search the whole web based on the name I recall for the concept. Sometimes I’ll recognize and grab a LW post based on that search, and other times I’ll discover that the best concise definition lives elsewhere.
My experience of repeatedly linking a post is that I eventually start associating the winning search term with a concept, when I’ve searched it before.
For two examples of things I recall wanting to link to others, and how I found them:
Scissor statements are in the LW vocabulary. When I want to link them, I recall a prior wild goose chase failing to find a good link with “scissor statement” as the search term, so instead I search “shiri’s scissor” to get https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/. Turns out the source I wanted wasn’t on LW, just LW-adjacent.
I remember that bug hunting in the lifestyle sense is a term I learned from the LW sequences, so I search the web for “lesswrong sequence bug hunt” to get https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rFjhz5Ks685xHbMXW/hammertime-day-1-bug-hunt, which is what I wanted.
This is really interesting and useful.
Particularly, the two things you linked are just interesting on their own, but also although I don’t think my brain works in the same way yours does, I appreciate your perspective and how you tend to work with regards to these things. I think that I need something like a reference or a bookmark because these concepts don’t stick quite as strongly in my mind without lots of repeated exposure. I tend to be a ‘ground-up’ learner (if that’s even a thing) as opposed to someone who can keep lots of disparate concepts separately in my mind. Jargon and acroynms seem to fall out of my head like a sieve. I’ve confused the terms ‘anosmia’ and ‘aphasia’ for years. I just had to look up ‘word for not being able to remember words’ in order to remember the word aphasia. Ironic, right? Shiri’s Scissor/sort by controversial is an article I already read once in the past, but completely forgot until you linked it, I clicked it, and I read four paragraphs of it.