Why not let people vote it as ‘too advanced’ for themselves? That way, not only would the articles get ordered in ascending difficulty, but we would be able to see what level of understanding the readers have. Just add a new ‘sort by: Ascending Difficulty’.
Ordering by average perceived difficulty won’t solve the problem as different new readers will have very different backgrounds—one might find mathy post A easy and psychology post B impenetrable, while the next guy votes the opposite.
Maybe posters could be encouraged to watch out for illusion of transparency and clearly signpost to the next step back on the inferential distance tree, and commenters to suggest such links where the posters forget. I could always figure out what OB posts were about by following these links (whether to other OB posts or not) as far down as needed until I could understand the top post.
Why not let people vote it as ‘too advanced’ for themselves? That way, not only would the articles get ordered in ascending difficulty, but we would be able to see what level of understanding the readers have. Just add a new ‘sort by: Ascending Difficulty’.
That assumes beginners know what they know, which strikes me as a poor assumption.
Ordering by average perceived difficulty won’t solve the problem as different new readers will have very different backgrounds—one might find mathy post A easy and psychology post B impenetrable, while the next guy votes the opposite.
Maybe posters could be encouraged to watch out for illusion of transparency and clearly signpost to the next step back on the inferential distance tree, and commenters to suggest such links where the posters forget. I could always figure out what OB posts were about by following these links (whether to other OB posts or not) as far down as needed until I could understand the top post.