I… don’t get your overall judgement. Didn’t you just say that within the last few weeks the curated feed included:
interesting – 3
AI stuff – 4
very interesting – 1
mildly interesting – 1
who knows – 1
good post no complaints – 1
good – 1
good on net – 1
assume is very good – 1
seems useful though not for me – 1
contentless vibes – 1
insight porn – 1
glorified shower thought – 1
worthless garbage – 1
worst pieces of pernicious bullshit – 1
If we include the AI stuff you didn’t comment on in good, which I think it generally is and makes sense by your lights for the judgement of LessWrong, then that’s like 5⁄15 being bad by your lights, and like 8⁄15 actively good by your lights.
That… seems like a pretty solid hit rate? In your own words, if you are bothered by the bad ones, why not just move on and ignore them? You don’t have to engage with them, and this hit rate by your own judgement seems hardly indicative of something terrible going on.
IDK, maybe you meant to convey some different vibe with your list of judgements, but I was very confused by the contrast of your list seeming pretty positive, and then somehow, because you don’t like 1⁄3 of posts, you ending up at the conclusion of “The good:crap ratio in the rest of it is deeply unimpressive”.
Well, first of all, you’ve miscounted somehow… I don’t want to get too far into the weeds about each individual example, but here’s how I’d characterize my list:
shouldn’t be on LW at all (but since that’s not really how LW is run now, let’s call this one “shouldn’t be anywhere but the author’s personal blog section”): 5
fine for LW, but definitely not “curated”-quality (and says something very sad about LW if it is included in “curated”): 6
worthy of “curated”: 3
~technical AI stuff: 6
Remember, this is just the “curated” posts. If I were listing from the “All Posts” feed, or probably even from the “Frontpage Posts” feed, then of course you would be right to say “don’t like? don’t read!”. But my point isn’t “sometimes people post bad or mediocre posts on Less Wrong dot com—the horror!”. Recall that I wrote this in response to Ben’s claim about how much good stuff there is:
I do think there are a lot more bad takes on LW than before, but obviously just way more frequent good content than there was on LW 1.0. If you just read the curated posts, you’ll just find post after post of insightful + thoughtful content 2-3x per week, which I expect is probably way faster than the old Featured/Main updates were in like 2011-15 (i.e. most of the period after which Eliezer ceased his daily posting).
And I am saying: no, actually, this is false. If you just read the curated posts, you will not, in fact, find “post after post of insightful + thoughtful content 2-3x per week”. Not even close.
This is important, because the “but look how much good stuff there is!” argument gets brought out whenever we have this “look how much bad stuff there is!” argument. In other words, the claim that gets made is “yes we have lower standards than you might like, but that’s the price of attracting all of this good stuff that we’ve got”. If it is not in fact true that there is a lot of good stuff, then that reply loses all of its force.
I… don’t get your overall judgement. Didn’t you just say that within the last few weeks the curated feed included:
interesting – 3
AI stuff – 4
very interesting – 1
mildly interesting – 1
who knows – 1
good post no complaints – 1
good – 1
good on net – 1
assume is very good – 1
seems useful though not for me – 1
contentless vibes – 1
insight porn – 1
glorified shower thought – 1
worthless garbage – 1
worst pieces of pernicious bullshit – 1
If we include the AI stuff you didn’t comment on in good, which I think it generally is and makes sense by your lights for the judgement of LessWrong, then that’s like 5⁄15 being bad by your lights, and like 8⁄15 actively good by your lights.
That… seems like a pretty solid hit rate? In your own words, if you are bothered by the bad ones, why not just move on and ignore them? You don’t have to engage with them, and this hit rate by your own judgement seems hardly indicative of something terrible going on.
IDK, maybe you meant to convey some different vibe with your list of judgements, but I was very confused by the contrast of your list seeming pretty positive, and then somehow, because you don’t like 1⁄3 of posts, you ending up at the conclusion of “The good:crap ratio in the rest of it is deeply unimpressive”.
Well, first of all, you’ve miscounted somehow… I don’t want to get too far into the weeds about each individual example, but here’s how I’d characterize my list:
shouldn’t be on LW at all (but since that’s not really how LW is run now, let’s call this one “shouldn’t be anywhere but the author’s personal blog section”): 5
fine for LW, but definitely not “curated”-quality (and says something very sad about LW if it is included in “curated”): 6
worthy of “curated”: 3
~technical AI stuff: 6
Remember, this is just the “curated” posts. If I were listing from the “All Posts” feed, or probably even from the “Frontpage Posts” feed, then of course you would be right to say “don’t like? don’t read!”. But my point isn’t “sometimes people post bad or mediocre posts on Less Wrong dot com—the horror!”. Recall that I wrote this in response to Ben’s claim about how much good stuff there is:
And I am saying: no, actually, this is false. If you just read the curated posts, you will not, in fact, find “post after post of insightful + thoughtful content 2-3x per week”. Not even close.
This is important, because the “but look how much good stuff there is!” argument gets brought out whenever we have this “look how much bad stuff there is!” argument. In other words, the claim that gets made is “yes we have lower standards than you might like, but that’s the price of attracting all of this good stuff that we’ve got”. If it is not in fact true that there is a lot of good stuff, then that reply loses all of its force.