One thing I would love to see that is missing on a lot of posts is a summary upfront that makes it clear to the reader the context and the main argument or just content. (Zvi’s posts are an excellent example of this.) At least from the newbies. Good writers, like Eliezer and Scott Alexander can produce quality posts without a summary. Most people posting here are not in that category. It is not wrong to post a stream of consciousness or an incomplete draft, but at least spend 5 minutes writing up the gist in a paragraph upfront. If you can’t be bothered, or do not have the skill of summarizing,
By the way, GPT will happily do it for you if you paste your text into the prompt, as a whole or in several parts. GPT-4/Bing can probably also evaluate the quality of the post and give feedback on how well it fits into the LW framework and what might be missing or can be improved. Maybe this part can even be automated.
Scott Garrabrant once proposed being able to add abstracts to posts that would appear if you clicked on posts on the frontpage. Then you could read the summary, and only read the rest of the post if you disagreed with it.
One thing I would love to see that is missing on a lot of posts is a summary upfront that makes it clear to the reader the context and the main argument or just content. (Zvi’s posts are an excellent example of this.) At least from the newbies. Good writers, like Eliezer and Scott Alexander can produce quality posts without a summary. Most people posting here are not in that category. It is not wrong to post a stream of consciousness or an incomplete draft, but at least spend 5 minutes writing up the gist in a paragraph upfront. If you can’t be bothered, or do not have the skill of summarizing,
By the way, GPT will happily do it for you if you paste your text into the prompt, as a whole or in several parts. GPT-4/Bing can probably also evaluate the quality of the post and give feedback on how well it fits into the LW framework and what might be missing or can be improved. Maybe this part can even be automated.
Scott Garrabrant once proposed being able to add abstracts to posts that would appear if you clicked on posts on the frontpage. Then you could read the summary, and only read the rest of the post if you disagreed with it.