Exactly! I’ve also noticed there are so many ideas and theories out there, relative to the available resources to evaluate them and find the best to work on.
A lot of good ideas which I feel deserve a ton of further investigation, seem to be barely talked about after they’re introduced. E.g. off the top of my head,
My quick impression is that this is a brutal and highly significant limitation of this kind of research. It’s just incredibly expensive for others to read and evaluate, so it’s very common for it to get ignored.
I’d predict that if you improved the arguments by 50%, it would lead to little extra uptake.
I think this is wrong. The introduction of the GD paper takes no more than 10 minutes to read and no significant cognitive effort to grasp, really. I don’t think there is more than 10% potential of making it any clearer or approachable.
The introduction of the GD paper takes no more than 10 minutes to read
Even 10 minutes is a lot, for many people. I might see 100 semi-interesting Tweets and Hacker News posts that link to lengthy articles per day, and that’s already filtered—I definitely can’t spend 10 min each on many of them.
and no significant cognitive effort to grasp, really.
“No significant cognitive effort” to read a nuanced semi-academic article with unique terminology? I tried spending around ~20-30min understanding this paper, and didn’t find it trivial. I think it’s very easy to make mistakes about what papers like this are really trying to say (In many ways, the above post lists out a bunch of common mistakes, for instance). I know the authors and a lot of related work, and even with that, I didn’t find it trivial. I imagine things are severely harder for people much less close to this area.
For people who write ideas/theories, and hope their ideas/theories get traction, the frustration is often directed at critics who reject their idea without taking the time to read it.
Meanwhile, there are many supportive people in the comments, who did take the time to read the idea, and did say “yes, this is a good idea, I never thought of it! Good luck working on it.”
The author only sees these two groups of people, and feels that his/her fight is to push people in the former group to read their idea more clearly, so that they may move to the latter group.
But the author doesn’t realize that even if they did read the idea, and did move to the latter supportive group. The idea will be almost as badly ignored in the end.
It would cure his/her frustration towards “people who never bothered to read,” but his/her idea won’t take off and succeed either. He/she will finally learn that there is something else to be frustrated about: even if everyone reads your idea and agrees with your idea, nobody has time to do anything about it.
A lot of authors never reach this second stage of frustration, because there is indeed a large group of critics going around criticizing ideas without reading them.
But these critics are rarely the real reason your idea is getting ignored.
I’m one of the people who have strongly supported many ideas/theories, only to never talk about them again, because I don’t have the time. I see many others doing this too.
The real problem is still the lack of time.
EDIT: actually I’m a bit confused. Maybe the real problem is the argument cannot just argue why the idea is good or why the theory is plausible, but why a reader (satisfying some criteria) should drop what she is doing and work on the idea/theory for a while. Maybe it should give a cost and benefit analysis? I’m not sure if this will fix the Idea Ignoring Problem.
Exactly! I’ve also noticed there are so many ideas and theories out there, relative to the available resources to evaluate them and find the best to work on.
A lot of good ideas which I feel deserve a ton of further investigation, seem to be barely talked about after they’re introduced. E.g. off the top of my head,
Why Don’t We Just… Shoggoth+Face+Paraphraser?
Applying superintelligence without collusion
Self-Other Overlap
Multi-objective homeostasis
MONA: Managed Myopia with Approval Feedback
My opinion is that there isn’t enough funds and manpower. I have an idea on increasing that, which ironically also got ignored, yay!
I think this is wrong. The introduction of the GD paper takes no more than 10 minutes to read and no significant cognitive effort to grasp, really. I don’t think there is more than 10% potential of making it any clearer or approachable.
Even 10 minutes is a lot, for many people. I might see 100 semi-interesting Tweets and Hacker News posts that link to lengthy articles per day, and that’s already filtered—I definitely can’t spend 10 min each on many of them.
“No significant cognitive effort” to read a nuanced semi-academic article with unique terminology? I tried spending around ~20-30min understanding this paper, and didn’t find it trivial. I think it’s very easy to make mistakes about what papers like this are really trying to say (In many ways, the above post lists out a bunch of common mistakes, for instance). I know the authors and a lot of related work, and even with that, I didn’t find it trivial. I imagine things are severely harder for people much less close to this area.
I think there’s an important crux here.
For people who write ideas/theories, and hope their ideas/theories get traction, the frustration is often directed at critics who reject their idea without taking the time to read it.
Meanwhile, there are many supportive people in the comments, who did take the time to read the idea, and did say “yes, this is a good idea, I never thought of it! Good luck working on it.”
The author only sees these two groups of people, and feels that his/her fight is to push people in the former group to read their idea more clearly, so that they may move to the latter group.
But the author doesn’t realize that even if they did read the idea, and did move to the latter supportive group. The idea will be almost as badly ignored in the end.
It would cure his/her frustration towards “people who never bothered to read,” but his/her idea won’t take off and succeed either. He/she will finally learn that there is something else to be frustrated about: even if everyone reads your idea and agrees with your idea, nobody has time to do anything about it.
A lot of authors never reach this second stage of frustration, because there is indeed a large group of critics going around criticizing ideas without reading them.
But these critics are rarely the real reason your idea is getting ignored.
I’m one of the people who have strongly supported many ideas/theories, only to never talk about them again, because I don’t have the time. I see many others doing this too.
The real problem is still the lack of time.
EDIT: actually I’m a bit confused. Maybe the real problem is the argument cannot just argue why the idea is good or why the theory is plausible, but why a reader (satisfying some criteria) should drop what she is doing and work on the idea/theory for a while. Maybe it should give a cost and benefit analysis? I’m not sure if this will fix the Idea Ignoring Problem.