the norm of “add explanations to unusual terms when making a public post” can hardly be at fault!
That norm is probably not a major reason why they don’t get written, but I would guess a contributing factor. And since right now very things get written down, the marginal value of increasing that is particularly high.
I think you are missing my point, maybe because my wording was a little bit convoluted. I am saying:
The norm of “add explanations when publishing” cannot possibly affect whether conversations get written down in the first place (regardless of whether or not they then get published).
(As for the marginal value of increasing how many things get published, yes, perhaps it is high, but we are not talking about that, right? We’re talking about not decreasing it, which is not quite the same thing. After all—as evidenced by the OP—the said norm clearly does not exist, as things stand…)
The norm of “add explanations when publishing” cannot possibly affect whether conversations get written down in the first place (regardless of whether or not they then get published).
That seems wrong to me. A lot of the payoff of writing things down comes from publishing the things I’ve written and getting recognition for that. So increasing the cost of publishing reduces the likelihood of me writing things down in the first place, since it reduces the total cost/benefit ratio of writing things down (whose positive term in large parts consists of the benefits of publishing them).
The problem I have with your model is that it doesn’t seem to predict reality. Consider:
Eliezer wrote the Sequences, despite explaining everything (usually multiple times, and at length), linking everything to everything, and generally taking tremendous effort.
People of the Less Wrong (and adjacent) community today (CFAR included, but certainly not exclusively) are (apparently? [1]) for the most part neither writing anything down nor publishing it (despite the norm of “explain and/or link things” clearly not being nearly strong enough to result in “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking” or anything close to it).
I am all for more things being written down and then published! So your general point—that barriers to writing/publishing ought to be minimized—is one which I wholeheartedly endorse. But I question whether it makes sense to object to this particular barrier, because it seems to already be absent, and yet the thing we are worried about not stifling—dissemination of the community’s current ideas and so on—is mostly not there to be stifled in the first place. Clearly, some larger problem obtains, and it’s only in the context of a discussion of that larger problem that we can discuss norms about explaining and/or linking. (One might call it an isolated demand for rigor.)
[1] I say “apparently” because, obviously, I have no real way of knowing how much (ideas, concepts, techniques, whatever) there is to be written down and published; though I do get the vague sense, from things said here and there, that there’s quite a bit of it.
Yep, I think we agree on the broader picture then. I actually think this specific requirement has a pretty decent effect size, and so exploring that specific disagreement about effect size and impact in the larger context seems like a good next thing to do, though probably in meta and not here.
That norm is probably not a major reason why they don’t get written, but I would guess a contributing factor. And since right now very things get written down, the marginal value of increasing that is particularly high.
But the value is dramatically reduced if most of the potential audience doesn’t understand what’s been written down due to unexplained jargon.
I think you are missing my point, maybe because my wording was a little bit convoluted. I am saying:
The norm of “add explanations when publishing” cannot possibly affect whether conversations get written down in the first place (regardless of whether or not they then get published).
(As for the marginal value of increasing how many things get published, yes, perhaps it is high, but we are not talking about that, right? We’re talking about not decreasing it, which is not quite the same thing. After all—as evidenced by the OP—the said norm clearly does not exist, as things stand…)
That seems wrong to me. A lot of the payoff of writing things down comes from publishing the things I’ve written and getting recognition for that. So increasing the cost of publishing reduces the likelihood of me writing things down in the first place, since it reduces the total cost/benefit ratio of writing things down (whose positive term in large parts consists of the benefits of publishing them).
True! This is certainly a good point.
The problem I have with your model is that it doesn’t seem to predict reality. Consider:
Eliezer wrote the Sequences, despite explaining everything (usually multiple times, and at length), linking everything to everything, and generally taking tremendous effort.
People of the Less Wrong (and adjacent) community today (CFAR included, but certainly not exclusively) are (apparently? [1]) for the most part neither writing anything down nor publishing it (despite the norm of “explain and/or link things” clearly not being nearly strong enough to result in “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking” or anything close to it).
I am all for more things being written down and then published! So your general point—that barriers to writing/publishing ought to be minimized—is one which I wholeheartedly endorse. But I question whether it makes sense to object to this particular barrier, because it seems to already be absent, and yet the thing we are worried about not stifling—dissemination of the community’s current ideas and so on—is mostly not there to be stifled in the first place. Clearly, some larger problem obtains, and it’s only in the context of a discussion of that larger problem that we can discuss norms about explaining and/or linking. (One might call it an isolated demand for rigor.)
[1] I say “apparently” because, obviously, I have no real way of knowing how much (ideas, concepts, techniques, whatever) there is to be written down and published; though I do get the vague sense, from things said here and there, that there’s quite a bit of it.
Yep, I think we agree on the broader picture then. I actually think this specific requirement has a pretty decent effect size, and so exploring that specific disagreement about effect size and impact in the larger context seems like a good next thing to do, though probably in meta and not here.