If someone posts something on a public forum and doesn’t make any effort to make it understandable, then there’s no reasonable expectation that anyone will engage with it, yes?
This sort of thing, it seems to me, can be treated as a sort of “rough draft”; anyone who feels like commenting on it may do so, but anyone who’s not interested in doing that sort of work basically ignores it.
And then there are posts which, by the forum norms, are expected to be “final”—not in the sense of finality of ideas, but of this particular presentation of this particular iteration of the idea—which is to say, it’s written to be readable, comprehensible, etc.
It seems plausible that this distinction could match up to the personal post / frontpage post distinction, but that’s not the current way personal/frontpage are used, as I understand it. But in that case, some technical/feature support for this sort of norm is needed.
So if we had such a norm, this post might say “high-context / rough draft / not attempting to be coherent / whatever”; and Wei Dai would see that label/category, decide not to read it, and save the time/effort spent on trying to understand a post which isn’t really meant for “public consumption”.
Relatedly, posts on Less Wrong are currently treated as blog posts—posted once, and not subsequently returned to. What if, instead, a post were more like a wiki page? (Or a Google Doc!) That is, if the norm is that posts may be rewritten, perhaps substantially or entirely, in response to commentary, or simply due to developing the idea, then on the one hand, there’s not as much pressure to get it right the first time, and on the other hand, a mature, high-quality product evolves more naturally. (Technical characteristics that would aid such a norm include: annotations and/or the ability to link comments [which may still be threaded and behave in the same way as now] to marked parts or ranges of the post; the ability for third parties to propose or make edits [perhaps to a copy of the post, rather than directly to the post itself]; a non-chronological [perhaps category or tag based, or organized manually] view by which content may be browsed.)
(Aside: one objection I have heard is that approaching posts as such wiki-esque “eternal works in progress” is at odds with the sort of didactic or narrative writing which characterizes a lot of Less Wrong content is. Not so! Look at gwern.net for a clear counterexample.)
Edit: Briefly pointing at a related topic: quality / professionalism of presentation (and benefits thereof) vs. effort thresholds and resulting incentives for authors is a problem largely solved by WikiGnomes.
I agree with this, and want to move in this direction in terms of feature sets (though I don’t know whether I would classify this current post as a draft).
Yes, there is currently no UI/feature support for this, nor norms that delineate such things. I am suggesting the implementation and adoption, respectively, of precisely these things.
If someone posts something on a public forum and doesn’t make any effort to make it understandable, then there’s no reasonable expectation that anyone will engage with it, yes?
This sort of thing, it seems to me, can be treated as a sort of “rough draft”; anyone who feels like commenting on it may do so, but anyone who’s not interested in doing that sort of work basically ignores it.
And then there are posts which, by the forum norms, are expected to be “final”—not in the sense of finality of ideas, but of this particular presentation of this particular iteration of the idea—which is to say, it’s written to be readable, comprehensible, etc.
It seems plausible that this distinction could match up to the personal post / frontpage post distinction, but that’s not the current way personal/frontpage are used, as I understand it. But in that case, some technical/feature support for this sort of norm is needed.
So if we had such a norm, this post might say “high-context / rough draft / not attempting to be coherent / whatever”; and Wei Dai would see that label/category, decide not to read it, and save the time/effort spent on trying to understand a post which isn’t really meant for “public consumption”.
Relatedly, posts on Less Wrong are currently treated as blog posts—posted once, and not subsequently returned to. What if, instead, a post were more like a wiki page? (Or a Google Doc!) That is, if the norm is that posts may be rewritten, perhaps substantially or entirely, in response to commentary, or simply due to developing the idea, then on the one hand, there’s not as much pressure to get it right the first time, and on the other hand, a mature, high-quality product evolves more naturally. (Technical characteristics that would aid such a norm include: annotations and/or the ability to link comments [which may still be threaded and behave in the same way as now] to marked parts or ranges of the post; the ability for third parties to propose or make edits [perhaps to a copy of the post, rather than directly to the post itself]; a non-chronological [perhaps category or tag based, or organized manually] view by which content may be browsed.)
(Aside: one objection I have heard is that approaching posts as such wiki-esque “eternal works in progress” is at odds with the sort of didactic or narrative writing which characterizes a lot of Less Wrong content is. Not so! Look at gwern.net for a clear counterexample.)
Edit: Briefly pointing at a related topic: quality / professionalism of presentation (and benefits thereof) vs. effort thresholds and resulting incentives for authors is a problem largely solved by WikiGnomes.
Yes, also see my 2017 post Guided Mental Change Requires High Trust.
I agree with this, and want to move in this direction in terms of feature sets (though I don’t know whether I would classify this current post as a draft).
The trick is, it isn’t clear how to write a “draft” type post and have it be recognized as such, instead of being massively downvoted.
Yes, there is currently no UI/feature support for this, nor norms that delineate such things. I am suggesting the implementation and adoption, respectively, of precisely these things.