Collaborative project: New rationality materials page
As you are probably aware, we have a new front page featuring a graphic of a brain. One of the links on the front page, “A source of edited rationality materials,” links to the Less Wrong meetup group resources page. A number of users have suggested that this isn’t the best page to show off to new readers, and lukeprog has requisitioned a new page to replace it.
I’ve volunteered to create this new page, but I’d like it to be a collaborative community project.
I’d like this new page to contain a few introductory paragraphs about Less Wrong followed by an index of some of our best content. At the moment, though, this project is still in the brainstorming phase, so this is just a tentative plan. I’d like to hear your thoughts about what the page should contain, including its content, layout, and organization. You can help out by editing the wiki page or by leaving suggestions and feedback in the comments below. Your input is always welcome, even if it’s just “This is a terrible idea” or “I think this post should be in there.”
My input is that it should link to some guide to the sequences, rather than “edited rationality materials”. The sequences are truly the foundation of LW, and I’m not sure why we need to create something new (besides maybe a better guide to the sequences).
There is a good guide to the sequences here. I think a medium-length list of various “top quality” posts would be a better introduction, followed by a statement along the lines of “these posts are part of longer ‘sequences’, here’s a link”. The reason for doing so is that the sheer length of Sequences is often scaring people off from starting to read them (judging by the opinions of some of my friends I introduced to the website).
If anyone wants to know what some of the highest voted sequence posts are, send me a personal message. (Sorry, I can’t link to the page that computes them without overwhelming the server.)
The older posts seem to have fewer votes. Even posts that I consider mediocre get upwards of 20 votes these days, yet Occam’s Razor has only 24 right now.
Some very nice person created a Sequences dependency tree: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~andwhay/postlist.html
I think it is better as a ‘guide’ to the Sequences than the wiki post, since many Sequence posts have dependencies that you only encounter partway through.
Good points. I agree that the page should contain a guide to the sequences. However, I think we should also incorporate content that isn’t currently in the sequences index, since some of our best posts are stand-alone articles that were written more recently (and by people other than Eliezer). For example, The Least Convenient Possible World is a foundational post that is highly celebrated and frequently quoted, but it isn’t a part of any sequence.
A systematic collection (that recognizes implicit dependencies) of important non-Sequence posts would be a very good resource.
I strongly agree. Looking through the first few pages of the all-time highest-rated posts, it’s surprising how many of them contain implicit dependencies. For example, even Yvain’s standalone post Schelling fences on slippery slopes contains an implicit reference that leads all the way back to CFAI via the Gandhi example. That said, “has a dependency” is not a binary condition that disqualifies a post from being accessible, since one can still enjoy Yvain’s post without knowing the reference. So some good taste will probably be required to determine if a post is accessible to people who don’t know the prerequisites.
I was thinking of a coarser dependence structure: packaging posts into collections, ordering them within collections, and suggesting other collections or original sequences as prerequisites for new collections.
Could be implemented using some kind of “call for post suggestions” threads that specify a topic for a collection to be constructed, or central posts that set the topic. Note that even Yvain’s summer 2011 post sequence isn’t collected into a list accessible from the wiki (IIRC).
Interesting point. I tend to think of the sequences as “all good articles”, most of which happen to be in specific subsequences.
The primary issue with this, I think, is that the sequences are long. I believe even a majority of Less Wrongers currently haven’t read all of them. That seems to me like a pretty strong motive to create something new, which doesn’t take as long to get through.
I think the real challenge here though, is not encapsulating the content of the sequences in a shorter package (that’s easy,) but doing so without making it unfun to read. The sequences are longer than the Lord of the Rings, but I had an easier time getting through the sequences.
Before deciding what should be on the front page one question to ask is, what reaction do you want the new visitors to have when landing on it? If it is “Whoa, cool stuff, gotta read that, click on this, watch that other thing scroll by”, then the current web 0.9 style is out of the question.
For example, select discussion threads might roll along in a twitter/IM style tape, a small window with a youtube video of the best SIAI presentations can be prominently visible, a tempting invitation to solve a cognitive science riddle should beacon, etc.
Don’t know how useful this will be:
http://piratepad.net/VnEydoKI0Q
This is very useful, thank you!
Also interesting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6jz/draft_of_a_suggested_reading_order_for_less_wrong/