Are questions allowed on LessWrong?
Sometimes I want to post things like:
[thing i’m wondering about]
[here’s my initial stab at it]
[but i have no idea if this is right or wrong]
[i’m sure people on LW would love to tell me where i can find the answer or how they think about it]How to properly defer to someone else’s belief instead of their evidence?
If Alice knows much more physics than me, learning that Alice assigns 90% to X is obviously evidence for X.
But blindly averaging toward expert beliefs seems to double-count correlated evidence.
It also conflates “probability emanating from a coherently-integrated world-model I can defend the gears-level of” with “probability if I was guessing on a prediction market.”
What is a cleaner way to think about epistemic deference?How to think about the relative information efficiency of RL vs SFT?
People keep telling me “RL is very informationally inefficient.” It only receives a single bit of information (success/fail) over an entire rollout (tens of thousands of tokens!). Meanwhile, SFT gets a bit or more of information on every token.
But RL can make my warm-started model learn to do what I want in like a dozen steps while I can’t get SFT to do like anything useful in a dozen steps.
And RL and SFT on LLMs seem to reduce to the same cross-entropy loss anyway, just with a different coefficient. What is going on??
You know… like StackOverflow....
But I notice Q&A doesn’t seem to be the vibe here, nor quite fit with this particular web of knowledge.
So what can one do instead?
Maybe instead of …
forum-style “Hallo how do you ask questions?” post (tonally inappropriate, creates spam, doesn’t mesh with the web of knowledge)
… one could make a …
argument-style “LW should have a questions feature” post (and count on people to quickly tell you you’re wrong and LessWrong already supports this via [X], or no, LessWrong shouldn’t have questions, but you can do X)
how-to-style “How to ask questions on LW” post (include a thought or two, and let the comments fill in the rest — like writing a continuation-style base LLM prompt)
observation-style “I notice I don’t know where to put questions on LW” post (adding an observation to the pile; inviting discussion; maybe noticing a subtle confusion others didn’t realise they were confused about too)
Edit: I’m glad I made this post, because the comments have fully answered my original question, and given me a concrete way to direct this urge in the future:
Is this a thing? Was there ever an era where people did this?
Yes! There was a questions feature as recently as July of this year (deprecated for UI complexity).”
Have you wanted to do ask questions? What did you do instead?
Notice question arise.
Spend 5–20 minutes with Fable/Sol.
Intellectually digest it, noticing what feels answered and what doesn’t, and how you’d explain it to someone else.
Put THAT in a post maybe!
“Are questions allowed?” was a somewhat mistaken framing, but was useful anyway.
https://www.lesswrong.com/questions
There’s support for it as a distinct type of post, which also creates a distinction between “answers” and “comments” as two separate types of reply.
Or at least… there used to be. I cannot, now that I go looking, figure out how one submits a question post.
The FAQ shows it as a separate option on the dropdown menu, which I no longer see there. Maybe the feature has been deprecated?
Oh, interesting, that is exactly what I was looking for, and I think I would be very interested in them. But yes, seems most recent activity is from 4 years ago.
It’s was possible quite recently:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/index?view=questions
But I seems that now it has been completely turned off, I don’t see the “New Question” button here any more: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tpZciMYCXN49FYWnS/nicholaskross-s-shortform?commentId=e3svSTYHjDbTJ8Mzs
Hm, I see—last question asked July 7 of this year! The reason makes sense:
Like a lot of “what’s allowed on LW” questions, the answer is a bit subtle. Questions are supported as a post type, and are very much appreciated when they elicit information that’s not otherwise easily available. But some topics/questions will get more engagement than others, and a lot depends on whether you’re asking something fairly straightforward/basic, which 20 minutes with a Claude Fable or ChatGPT Sol model could have fully answered.
Best advice is to lurk for a bit, search for old questions to see what gets the kind of responses you’re looking for, then try maybe a shortform post with the puzzle or question you’re exploring. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t get much, try a few times over a couple of weeks to see if anything resonates (and especially if anything gets negative attention, then make a post or question. Go slow, especially if you’re seeing downvotes. most questions take a few days or a week for the active members to see them and decide whether or not to engage.
Edit: oh, wait! you’ve been around for awhile, and already made some posts. can you ask more specifically about what information you’re seeking?
I don’t feel like I’ve really been around, or made a proper meaty, non-meta post (although I’m drafting one right now!). My original question was something like..
Is this a thing? Was there ever an era where people did this?
Have you wanted to do this? What did you do instead?
The answer to the first question is “yes! there was a questions feature (now deprecated).”
A good answer to the second question, I’m surmising, is something like what you say:
Notice question arise.
Spend up to 20 minutes with Fable/Sol.
Intellectually digest it, noticing what feels answered and what doesn’t, and how you’d explain it to someone else.
Put THAT in a post maybe!
This is like StackOverflow’s post-Google, pre-LLM ask of question askers to have done their homework by Googling their questions with a few obvious keywords.
Yeah, it’s interesting, “is X allowed?” is a question that newbies to a community often ask, and the answer is always sorta “uh, sorta? no one is the hall monitor here. but you may wanna reply a bunch first and pick up on what the vibe is and you will have a more instinctive understanding that makes the question as posed in its abstraction seem wrong to you too.”