Curated (with multiple endorsements from the mod team). As noted in my previous comment, this post includes lots of links and references to further resources, but it also motivates the need for lit reviews well. It’s not just a “how to guide”, but also a “why guide” as well. It’s a timely post too.
Go back a few years, and lukeprog was the champion/symbol of scholarship on LessWrong. Unfortunately for us, he’s not able to contribute to LessWrong as much anymore; which it makes great that others are taking up the banner and reminding us of the need to build on existing knowledge (and helping people know how to do so).
I say this post is timely, that’s because making LessWrong more scholarly continues to be a major focus of my work on the LessWrong team. Scholarship/Lit Reviews are actually a major goal of the new Tagging/Wiki system, whose larger goal still is increasing LessWrong’s intellectual output. The hope is to make it much easier for writers on LessWrong to discover and build upon LessWrong’s decade of previous work. “Shoulder of Giants”, etc.
Obviously, the overwhelming supermajority of the world’s knowledge isn’t in LessWrong’s posts (though the very best insights might be), and our thinkers absolutely need to the skills (and virtue) to mine the troves of knowledge outside our shores. Hence the value in this post.
[At the same time, I do think we shouldn’t let a requirement of lit review become too high a barrier to contributing on LessWrong. There’s a lot of value in thinking through things for yourself fresh, and sometimes just getting random uninformed thoughts published stimulates discussion and provides motivation to then go for a thorough survey of the literature.]
All in all, kudos.
(And thanks for the recommendation of Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, that was a good one.)
Curated (with multiple endorsements from the mod team). As noted in my previous comment, this post includes lots of links and references to further resources, but it also motivates the need for lit reviews well. It’s not just a “how to guide”, but also a “why guide” as well. It’s a timely post too.
Go back a few years, and lukeprog was the champion/symbol of scholarship on LessWrong. Unfortunately for us, he’s not able to contribute to LessWrong as much anymore; which it makes great that others are taking up the banner and reminding us of the need to build on existing knowledge (and helping people know how to do so).
I say this post is timely, that’s because making LessWrong more scholarly continues to be a major focus of my work on the LessWrong team. Scholarship/Lit Reviews are actually a major goal of the new Tagging/Wiki system, whose larger goal still is increasing LessWrong’s intellectual output. The hope is to make it much easier for writers on LessWrong to discover and build upon LessWrong’s decade of previous work. “Shoulder of Giants”, etc.
Obviously, the overwhelming supermajority of the world’s knowledge isn’t in LessWrong’s posts (though the very best insights might be), and our thinkers absolutely need to the skills (and virtue) to mine the troves of knowledge outside our shores. Hence the value in this post.
[At the same time, I do think we shouldn’t let a requirement of lit review become too high a barrier to contributing on LessWrong. There’s a lot of value in thinking through things for yourself fresh, and sometimes just getting random uninformed thoughts published stimulates discussion and provides motivation to then go for a thorough survey of the literature.]
All in all, kudos.
(And thanks for the recommendation of Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, that was a good one.)