This is really sad. I’m sorry to hear things didn’t work out, but I’m still left wondering why not.
I guess I was really hoping for a couple thousand+ word post-mortem, describing the history of the project, and which hypotheses you tested, with a thorough explanation of the results.
If you weren’t getting enough math input, why do you think that throwing more people at the problem wouldn’t generate better content? Just having a bunch of links to the most intuitive and elegant explanations, gathered in one place, would be a huge help to both readers and writers. Students trying to learn are already doing this through blind googling, so the marginal work to drop the links is low.
Pulling all the info together into a good explanation still requires one dedicated person, but perhaps that task can be broken down into chunks too. Like, once one version is written, translating it for non-mathy people should be relatively easy. Same for condensing things for mathy people.
But, why wouldn’t adding more mathematicians mean a few would be good at and interested in writing new articles? Where did you do outreach? What did you do? There are entire communities, scattered across the web, who exist to try and learn and teach math. Have you tried partnering with any of them, or recruiting members?
If not, why do you think it won’t work? Do you see promising alternative approaches, or are good explanations impossible even in principle?
Sorry for the flood of questions. I’ve just been waiting with baited breath for Arbital to stop pushing me away and start pulling people in. I even linked some people, but felt guilty about it for putting a strain on your overloaded servers before you were ready for the general public.
Yes, many students would benefit from a math explanation platform. But it was hard for us to find writers, and we weren’t getting as much traction with them as we wanted. We reached out to some forums and to many individuals. That version of Arbital was also promoted by Eliezer on FB. When we switched away from math, it wasn’t because we thought it was hopeless. We had a lot of ideas left to try out. But when it’s not going well, you have to call it quits at some point, and so we did. There was also the consideration that if we built a platform for (math) explanations, it would be hard to eventually transition to a platform that solved debates (which always seemed like the more important part).
I think if someone wanted to give it a shot with another explanation platform and had a good strategy for getting writers, I’d feel pretty optimistic about their chance of success.
This is really sad. I’m sorry to hear things didn’t work out, but I’m still left wondering why not.
I guess I was really hoping for a couple thousand+ word post-mortem, describing the history of the project, and which hypotheses you tested, with a thorough explanation of the results.
If you weren’t getting enough math input, why do you think that throwing more people at the problem wouldn’t generate better content? Just having a bunch of links to the most intuitive and elegant explanations, gathered in one place, would be a huge help to both readers and writers. Students trying to learn are already doing this through blind googling, so the marginal work to drop the links is low.
Pulling all the info together into a good explanation still requires one dedicated person, but perhaps that task can be broken down into chunks too. Like, once one version is written, translating it for non-mathy people should be relatively easy. Same for condensing things for mathy people.
But, why wouldn’t adding more mathematicians mean a few would be good at and interested in writing new articles? Where did you do outreach? What did you do? There are entire communities, scattered across the web, who exist to try and learn and teach math. Have you tried partnering with any of them, or recruiting members?
If not, why do you think it won’t work? Do you see promising alternative approaches, or are good explanations impossible even in principle?
Sorry for the flood of questions. I’ve just been waiting with baited breath for Arbital to stop pushing me away and start pulling people in. I even linked some people, but felt guilty about it for putting a strain on your overloaded servers before you were ready for the general public.
Yes, many students would benefit from a math explanation platform. But it was hard for us to find writers, and we weren’t getting as much traction with them as we wanted. We reached out to some forums and to many individuals. That version of Arbital was also promoted by Eliezer on FB. When we switched away from math, it wasn’t because we thought it was hopeless. We had a lot of ideas left to try out. But when it’s not going well, you have to call it quits at some point, and so we did. There was also the consideration that if we built a platform for (math) explanations, it would be hard to eventually transition to a platform that solved debates (which always seemed like the more important part).
I think if someone wanted to give it a shot with another explanation platform and had a good strategy for getting writers, I’d feel pretty optimistic about their chance of success.