I think my broader response is “rather than try to resolve this by discouraging certain questions, solve it through filtering.”
Right now, we have a minimum-viable system where all questions show up on frontpage so long as they meet the frontpage criteria. This means questions appear to be weighted about as strongly as a post in terms of importance, and that there isn’t much in the way of filtering of what sort of questions get displayed. I think both of these could be resolved with a more dedicated question management system.
I think it’s fairly important for people to be able to post questions freely – a lot of progress depends on people being able to pursue curiosity wherever it goes.
So I think letting people do that, and then having some requirements like “frontpage questions need to be particularly well formed” and possibly some tighter requirements on topic, and/or have something like subreddits that focus on particular topics, is probably a better overall solution.
(It also so happens I think I roughly disagree with some of the “bad question” examples. The sunscreen example isn’t deeply entwined with things-LW-tends-to-focus-on, but it *is* a question where the answer actually requires some rationality to think about, and I think it’s in fact a good use of LW to be a place you can go to ask questions where you can expect people to have thought clearly/usefully about how to weigh evidence when answering them)
General moderation seems off topic for this particular post. I think the guidelines for either what questions should go on the frontpage, or various ways you might want to filter questions, are fair game.
(Regardless, it will continue to be the case that you can post whatever question you want to your personal blog)
I think my broader response is “rather than try to resolve this by discouraging certain questions, solve it through filtering.”
Right now, we have a minimum-viable system where all questions show up on frontpage so long as they meet the frontpage criteria. This means questions appear to be weighted about as strongly as a post in terms of importance, and that there isn’t much in the way of filtering of what sort of questions get displayed. I think both of these could be resolved with a more dedicated question management system.
I think it’s fairly important for people to be able to post questions freely – a lot of progress depends on people being able to pursue curiosity wherever it goes.
So I think letting people do that, and then having some requirements like “frontpage questions need to be particularly well formed” and possibly some tighter requirements on topic, and/or have something like subreddits that focus on particular topics, is probably a better overall solution.
(It also so happens I think I roughly disagree with some of the “bad question” examples. The sunscreen example isn’t deeply entwined with things-LW-tends-to-focus-on, but it *is* a question where the answer actually requires some rationality to think about, and I think it’s in fact a good use of LW to be a place you can go to ask questions where you can expect people to have thought clearly/usefully about how to weigh evidence when answering them)
I think my broader response to that is “Well, if I could change one thing about LW 2 it would be the moderation policy.”
That seems strictly off topic though, so I’ll let it be what it is.
General moderation seems off topic for this particular post. I think the guidelines for either what questions should go on the frontpage, or various ways you might want to filter questions, are fair game.
(Regardless, it will continue to be the case that you can post whatever question you want to your personal blog)