LessWrong posts have staying power; google docs do not.
Great LessWrong posts often stick in people’s minds and continue to be reread and shared for years after they are published. It’s very rare for great google docs to do so, even if they’re initially shared with everyone you care about. And even right after they’re written they seem worse at winning hearts and minds. I could speculate about why but here I just want to observe that this seems true. One upshot is that you should often aim for the final output of a project to be a LessWrong post rather than a google doc.
(Also, even if you think you’ve shared your google doc with everyone who should read it, you probably haven’t, in part because some other people should read it in the future.)
(Obviously google docs are better for eliciting input, if you have a good group that will read your docs.)
(Presumably there are some things you can do to make your google docs stick more, including indexing them.)
(h/t @Linch, who said something like this to me.)
Relatedly, researchers/writers/bloggers/”the class of people whose theory of change comes from other people reading their writing” should orient significantly towards having their work be read as an important element of their jobs, rather than treat public output as purely “proof of work”/annoying bureaucratic hurdle that distracts them from where the real work is.
Quoting myself, this article is mainly about US’s federal funding cut for science may cause universities to create more legible research because other funders value clear communication (such that I don’t actually recommend reading the whole thing is helpful for this conversation topic). But there are some relevance:
The choice is not, and has never been, between purity and PR. It is between treating legibility as part of the shared infrastructure that keeps basic and long-term research alive, and leaving it to whoever already has the resources to define how the rest of the system looks from the outside.
True, but to give a quantitative counterexample: I’ve read a semi-private memo by a well-known LW’er 2 years ago, and it stuck in my mind with the level of stuckness-in-my-mind comparable to maybe 30 top-on-this-metric LW posts.
Great LessWrong posts often stick in people’s minds and continue to be reread and shared for years after they are published
I suspect that this is true not because Lesswrong is better than any other publishing platform, but rather because of a broader ‘rich get richer’ effect applied to good articles, and a survivorship bias.
Illustrative counterpoint: How many early-days-lesswrong articles were lost to time?
Illustrative contrapoint: Rich Dad Poor Dad was not a lesswrong article and is still incredibly well known.
ergo I’d amend your ‘you should often aim for the final output of a project to be a LessWrong post’ to ‘to be a good lesswrong post’.
Illustrative contrapoint: Rich Dad Poor Dad was not a lesswrong article and is still incredibly well known.
Not speaking for Zach but I definitely don’t think LessWrong is unique here. I think the public-facing nature and relative timelessness is key, whether it’s a LessWrong post, a blog post, a microsite, a paper on Arxiv, or a book[1].
Social media like Twitter and Reddit are somewhere in between.
Indeed books have many of the advantages I think of as centrally LW’s advantage over GDocs in that they’re more public, more legible, can reach more people, etc. They also have major disadvantages as well, of course.
LessWrong posts are often designed to be timeless, which is why great LessWrong posts can be reread for years.
I suspect that this is true not because Lesswrong is better than any other publishing platform, but rather because of a broader ‘rich get richer’ effect applied to good articles, and a survivorship bias.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. fwiw great writings outside LessWrong don’t automatically get reread.
Rich Dad Poor Dad was a book, whose author worked for years to build it up into a brand. That’s very different from a Google doc, which is what Zach was contrasting with.
LessWrong posts have staying power; google docs do not.
Great LessWrong posts often stick in people’s minds and continue to be reread and shared for years after they are published. It’s very rare for great google docs to do so, even if they’re initially shared with everyone you care about. And even right after they’re written they seem worse at winning hearts and minds. I could speculate about why but here I just want to observe that this seems true. One upshot is that you should often aim for the final output of a project to be a LessWrong post rather than a google doc.
(Also, even if you think you’ve shared your google doc with everyone who should read it, you probably haven’t, in part because some other people should read it in the future.)
(Obviously google docs are better for eliciting input, if you have a good group that will read your docs.)
(Presumably there are some things you can do to make your google docs stick more, including indexing them.)
(h/t @Linch, who said something like this to me.)
Relatedly, researchers/writers/bloggers/”the class of people whose theory of change comes from other people reading their writing” should orient significantly towards having their work be read as an important element of their jobs, rather than treat public output as purely “proof of work”/annoying bureaucratic hurdle that distracts them from where the real work is.
Somewhat Related: The Fight For Slow And Boring Research
Quoting myself, this article is mainly about US’s federal funding cut for science may cause universities to create more legible research because other funders value clear communication (such that I don’t actually recommend reading the whole thing is helpful for this conversation topic). But there are some relevance:
True, but to give a quantitative counterexample: I’ve read a semi-private memo by a well-known LW’er 2 years ago, and it stuck in my mind with the level of stuckness-in-my-mind comparable to maybe 30 top-on-this-metric LW posts.
I suspect that this is true not because Lesswrong is better than any other publishing platform, but rather because of a broader ‘rich get richer’ effect applied to good articles, and a survivorship bias.
Illustrative counterpoint: How many early-days-lesswrong articles were lost to time?
Illustrative contrapoint: Rich Dad Poor Dad was not a lesswrong article and is still incredibly well known.
ergo I’d amend your ‘you should often aim for the final output of a project to be a LessWrong post’ to ‘to be a good lesswrong post’.
Definitely share stuff on lesswrong though. :)
Not speaking for Zach but I definitely don’t think LessWrong is unique here. I think the public-facing nature and relative timelessness is key, whether it’s a LessWrong post, a blog post, a microsite, a paper on Arxiv, or a book[1].
Social media like Twitter and Reddit are somewhere in between.
Indeed books have many of the advantages I think of as centrally LW’s advantage over GDocs in that they’re more public, more legible, can reach more people, etc. They also have major disadvantages as well, of course.
LessWrong posts are often designed to be timeless, which is why great LessWrong posts can be reread for years.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. fwiw great writings outside LessWrong don’t automatically get reread.
Rich Dad Poor Dad was a book, whose author worked for years to build it up into a brand. That’s very different from a Google doc, which is what Zach was contrasting with.