You shouldn’t expect Wikipedia pages for Lesswrong jargon. If you enter Hamming question on the search bar of this website it shows you the post Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality that post does a decent job at explaining the term in sufficint depth to understand what I’m saying. It also links to Hamming questions and bottlenecks for further information.
When writing a post like that where the target audience is LWers I use community jargon even when that means that outsiders have a harder time following along. In this case, not understanding the term doesn’t prevent you from getting the main point the paragraph is about.
Having to explain community jargon everytime it’s used means that you lose the advantage of jargon providing you a short way of pointing to a concept.
If Facebook would allow easy linking of posts on the wall I would have linked here to Brienne Yudkowsky’s post towards which I’m responding but unfortunately it’s not easy to link to Facebook.
Well, the problem is that it is not really “Lesswrong jargon”; it is CFAR jargon, which is different. I am no stranger to LW jargon myself (having been reading Less Wrong since long before it was Less Wrong), but this term was unfamiliar to me. (If you’re assuming that everyone associated with Less Wrong is also associated with CFAR, or knows CFAR jargon, etc., that assumption is clearly mistaken and, in my view, rather problematic. The story would be different if there were, say, a CFAR knowledge base / wiki / something; but there is not.)
Two further points:
If I don’t know the term, then I also don’t know that it’s a piece of CFAR jargon, so I cannot anticipate the failure of a Google search for it, nor the reason for that failure. Maybe it’s from CFAR, maybe it’s from some esoteric field in which you are an expert, maybe it’s simply idiosyncratic to you (or perhaps, a reference to your own previous writing)—who can know?
If there is indeed a Less Wrong post that explains the term (as you have just shown that there is), then might I suggest that it’s easy, and helpful, simply to hyperlink the term to it in the first place!
Recall, after all, what Eliezer did, when writing the Sequences; he linked the ever-living heck out of things! He linked things so much that people started speaking of “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking”; and let me tell you, that practice tremendously increased the readability and usefulness of his posts.
I live in Berlin and have never been at CFAR and I don’t have access to the CFAR alumni mailing list. It seems to me like a concept that got around a bit.
I will consider hyperlinking more in future posts.
You shouldn’t expect Wikipedia pages for Lesswrong jargon. If you enter Hamming question on the search bar of this website it shows you the post Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality that post does a decent job at explaining the term in sufficint depth to understand what I’m saying. It also links to Hamming questions and bottlenecks for further information.
When writing a post like that where the target audience is LWers I use community jargon even when that means that outsiders have a harder time following along. In this case, not understanding the term doesn’t prevent you from getting the main point the paragraph is about.
Having to explain community jargon everytime it’s used means that you lose the advantage of jargon providing you a short way of pointing to a concept.
If Facebook would allow easy linking of posts on the wall I would have linked here to Brienne Yudkowsky’s post towards which I’m responding but unfortunately it’s not easy to link to Facebook.
There’s also Kaj’s writeup: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aRNxWnqnrz3FdNpfi/dark-arts-defense-in-reputational-warfare/CQL2WkNB8u8tK6T5r
Well, the problem is that it is not really “Lesswrong jargon”; it is CFAR jargon, which is different. I am no stranger to LW jargon myself (having been reading Less Wrong since long before it was Less Wrong), but this term was unfamiliar to me. (If you’re assuming that everyone associated with Less Wrong is also associated with CFAR, or knows CFAR jargon, etc., that assumption is clearly mistaken and, in my view, rather problematic. The story would be different if there were, say, a CFAR knowledge base / wiki / something; but there is not.)
Two further points:
If I don’t know the term, then I also don’t know that it’s a piece of CFAR jargon, so I cannot anticipate the failure of a Google search for it, nor the reason for that failure. Maybe it’s from CFAR, maybe it’s from some esoteric field in which you are an expert, maybe it’s simply idiosyncratic to you (or perhaps, a reference to your own previous writing)—who can know?
If there is indeed a Less Wrong post that explains the term (as you have just shown that there is), then might I suggest that it’s easy, and helpful, simply to hyperlink the term to it in the first place!
Recall, after all, what Eliezer did, when writing the Sequences; he linked the ever-living heck out of things! He linked things so much that people started speaking of “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking”; and let me tell you, that practice tremendously increased the readability and usefulness of his posts.
Edit: But I forgot to add: thanks for the links!
I live in Berlin and have never been at CFAR and I don’t have access to the CFAR alumni mailing list. It seems to me like a concept that got around a bit.
I will consider hyperlinking more in future posts.