To make this work well requires lots of resources: (1) a good camera, (2) a shotgun or lavavlier microphone, (3) a teleprompter, and (4) an experienced and enthusiastic presenter. That’s hard to do!
Also, it helps to have someone with a good voice.
I think it may be useful to look at infrastructure changes that could promote these ends. Would it be worth having a video section (not sure if the karma value per upvote should be less or more than 10)? A basic and advanced section? It would be nice to have the site be useful for both beginning rationalists and people who are interested in Solomonoff induction without having them trip over each other.
The other benefit of having an explicit ‘basic’ section might be that restatements of other posts (ideally linked in the new post) could be encouraged- one basic educational fact is different people approach similar concepts in different ways, and so two posts with nearly identical content but different presentations can be rather valuable, and help things click for a larger group of people. It would be cool (but I don’t know how easy it would be to make) to have a concept index, where I could type in “belief in belief” and get a list of all the basic posts explaining belief in belief, sorted by upvotes. (A less explicit method of doing this is the tag system we have already, but I doubt it should be used for this / would do this as well as it could. Actually, if the tags were specific to the basic section, that might work out well.)
Also, it helps to have someone with a good voice.
I think it may be useful to look at infrastructure changes that could promote these ends. Would it be worth having a video section (not sure if the karma value per upvote should be less or more than 10)? A basic and advanced section? It would be nice to have the site be useful for both beginning rationalists and people who are interested in Solomonoff induction without having them trip over each other.
The other benefit of having an explicit ‘basic’ section might be that restatements of other posts (ideally linked in the new post) could be encouraged- one basic educational fact is different people approach similar concepts in different ways, and so two posts with nearly identical content but different presentations can be rather valuable, and help things click for a larger group of people. It would be cool (but I don’t know how easy it would be to make) to have a concept index, where I could type in “belief in belief” and get a list of all the basic posts explaining belief in belief, sorted by upvotes. (A less explicit method of doing this is the tag system we have already, but I doubt it should be used for this / would do this as well as it could. Actually, if the tags were specific to the basic section, that might work out well.)
Good thoughts. Would you do us a favor, thinking about this in some more detail, and write a discussion post?
Finally finished it.