I think you need to be more frugal with your weirdness points (and more generally your demanding-trust-and-effort-from-the-reader points), and more mindful of the inferential distance between yourself and your LW readers.
Also remember that for every one surprisingly insightful post by an unfamiliar author, we all come across hundreds that are misguided, mediocre, or nonsensical. So if you don’t yet have a strong reputation, many readers will be quick to give up on your posts and quick to dismiss you as a crank or dilettante. It’s your job to prove that you’re not, and to do so before you lose their attention!
If there’s serious thought behind The Snuggle/Date/Slap Protocol then you need to share more of it, and work harder to convince the reader it’s worth taking seriously. Conciseness is a virtue but when you’re making a suggestion that is easy to dismiss as a half-baked thought bubble or weird joke, you’ve got to take your time and guide the reader along a path that begins at or near their actual starting point.
Ethicophysics II: Politics is the Mind-Savior opens with language that will trigger the average LWer’s bullshit detector, and appears to demand a lot of effort from the reader before giving them reason to think it will be worthwhile. LW linkposts often contain the text of the linked article in the body of the LW post, and at first glance this looks like one of those. In any case, we’re probably going to scan the body text before clicking the link. So before we’ve read the actual article we are hit with a long list of high-effort, unclear-reward, and frankly pretentious-looking exercises. When we do follow the link to Substack we face the trivial inconvenience of clicking two more links and then, if we’re not logged in to academia.edu, are met with an annoying ‘To Continue Reading, Register for Free’ popup. Not a big deal if we’re truly motivated to read the paper! But at this point we probably don’t have much confidence that it will be worth the hassle.
This is solid advice, I suppose. A friend of mine has compared my rhetorical style to that of Dr. Bronner—I say a bunch of crazy shit, then slap it around a bar of the finest soap ever made by the hand of man.
I started posting my pdfs to academia.edu because I wanted them to look more respectable, not less. Earlier drafts of them used to be on github with no paywall. I’m going to post my latest draft of Ethicophysics I and Ethicophysics II to github later tonight; hopefully this decreases the number of hoops that interested readers have to jump through.
Sorry, I was probably editing that answer while you were reading/replying to it—but I don’t think I changed anything significant.
Definitely worth posting the papers to github or somewhere else convenient, IMO, and preferably linking directly to them. (I know there’s a tradeoff here with driving traffic to your Substack, but my instinct is you’ll gain more by maximising your chance of retaining and impressing readers than by getting them to temporarily land on your Substack before they’ve decided whether you’re worth reading.)
LWers are definitely not immune to status considerations, but anything that looks like prioritising status over clear, efficient communication will tend to play badly.
And yeah, I think leading with ‘crazy shit’ can sometimes work, but IME this is almost always when it’s either: used as a catchy hook and quickly followed by a rewind to a more normal starting point; part of a piece so entertaining and compellingly-written that the reader can’t resist going along with it; or done by a writer who already has high status and a devoted readership.
I think you need to be more frugal with your weirdness points (and more generally your demanding-trust-and-effort-from-the-reader points), and more mindful of the inferential distance between yourself and your LW readers.
Also remember that for every one surprisingly insightful post by an unfamiliar author, we all come across hundreds that are misguided, mediocre, or nonsensical. So if you don’t yet have a strong reputation, many readers will be quick to give up on your posts and quick to dismiss you as a crank or dilettante. It’s your job to prove that you’re not, and to do so before you lose their attention!
If there’s serious thought behind The Snuggle/Date/Slap Protocol then you need to share more of it, and work harder to convince the reader it’s worth taking seriously. Conciseness is a virtue but when you’re making a suggestion that is easy to dismiss as a half-baked thought bubble or weird joke, you’ve got to take your time and guide the reader along a path that begins at or near their actual starting point.
Ethicophysics II: Politics is the Mind-Savior opens with language that will trigger the average LWer’s bullshit detector, and appears to demand a lot of effort from the reader before giving them reason to think it will be worthwhile. LW linkposts often contain the text of the linked article in the body of the LW post, and at first glance this looks like one of those. In any case, we’re probably going to scan the body text before clicking the link. So before we’ve read the actual article we are hit with a long list of high-effort, unclear-reward, and frankly pretentious-looking exercises. When we do follow the link to Substack we face the trivial inconvenience of clicking two more links and then, if we’re not logged in to academia.edu, are met with an annoying ‘To Continue Reading, Register for Free’ popup. Not a big deal if we’re truly motivated to read the paper! But at this point we probably don’t have much confidence that it will be worth the hassle.
This is solid advice, I suppose. A friend of mine has compared my rhetorical style to that of Dr. Bronner—I say a bunch of crazy shit, then slap it around a bar of the finest soap ever made by the hand of man.
I started posting my pdfs to academia.edu because I wanted them to look more respectable, not less. Earlier drafts of them used to be on github with no paywall. I’m going to post my latest draft of Ethicophysics I and Ethicophysics II to github later tonight; hopefully this decreases the number of hoops that interested readers have to jump through.
Sorry, I was probably editing that answer while you were reading/replying to it—but I don’t think I changed anything significant.
Definitely worth posting the papers to github or somewhere else convenient, IMO, and preferably linking directly to them. (I know there’s a tradeoff here with driving traffic to your Substack, but my instinct is you’ll gain more by maximising your chance of retaining and impressing readers than by getting them to temporarily land on your Substack before they’ve decided whether you’re worth reading.)
LWers are definitely not immune to status considerations, but anything that looks like prioritising status over clear, efficient communication will tend to play badly.
And yeah, I think leading with ‘crazy shit’ can sometimes work, but IME this is almost always when it’s either: used as a catchy hook and quickly followed by a rewind to a more normal starting point; part of a piece so entertaining and compellingly-written that the reader can’t resist going along with it; or done by a writer who already has high status and a devoted readership.
Why not post the contents of the papers directly on Substack? They would only be one click away from here, and would not compete against Substack.
From my perspective, adacemia.edu and Substack are equally respectable (that is, not at all).
Just post it directly to less wrong please