This is actually a major motivation for the wiki/tagging system we are building. Also, you might have noticed all the edited transcripts we’ve been publishing, and the debates we’ve started organizing, which is also part of this. I‘be experimented a lot over the last year with UI for potentially directly distilling comment threads, but all of them ended up too clunky and messy to ever make me excited about them, though I still have some things I might want to give a shot, but overall I am currently thinking of tackling this problem in a slightly more indirect way.
Hm, I percieved Raemon to be referring more specifically to turning forum discussions into posts, or otherwise tidying them up. I think that’s importantly different to transcribing a talk (since a talk isn’t a discussion), or a debate (since you only have a short period of time to think about your response to the other person). I guess it’s possible that the tagging system helps with this, but it’s not obvious to me how it would. That being said, I do agree that more broadly LW has moved towards more synthesis and intertemporal discussions.
I’d add “The LessWrong 2018 Review” to the list of things that are “sort of exploring the same direction”. I agree my particular prediction about mechanical tools for distilling comments didn’t materialize, but we did definitely allocate tons of effort towards distillation as a whole.
Yeah, and I experimented a bunch with that (directly turning forum discussions into posts) and mostly felt like it didn’t really work that well. I mostly updated that there needs to be a larger synthesis step, though I still have some guesses for more direct things that could work. Ben spent some hours distilling the discussion and comments on a bunch of posts, which we should get around to posting (I just realized we never published them).
Re tagging: In general the tagging system that we are building has a lot in common with being a wiki (collaboratively editable descriptions, providing canonical definitions and references, and providing good summaries of existing content), and I expect it to grow into being more of a wiki over time (the tagging use-case was a specific narrow use-case that seemed easy to get traction on, but the mid-term goal is to do a lot more wiki-like stuff). And I think from that perspective it’s more clear how it helps with distillation.
Just got a calendar reminder to check if this happened—my impression is that any such efforts haven’t really materialised on the site.
This is actually a major motivation for the wiki/tagging system we are building. Also, you might have noticed all the edited transcripts we’ve been publishing, and the debates we’ve started organizing, which is also part of this. I‘be experimented a lot over the last year with UI for potentially directly distilling comment threads, but all of them ended up too clunky and messy to ever make me excited about them, though I still have some things I might want to give a shot, but overall I am currently thinking of tackling this problem in a slightly more indirect way.
Hm, I percieved Raemon to be referring more specifically to turning forum discussions into posts, or otherwise tidying them up. I think that’s importantly different to transcribing a talk (since a talk isn’t a discussion), or a debate (since you only have a short period of time to think about your response to the other person). I guess it’s possible that the tagging system helps with this, but it’s not obvious to me how it would. That being said, I do agree that more broadly LW has moved towards more synthesis and intertemporal discussions.
I’d add “The LessWrong 2018 Review” to the list of things that are “sort of exploring the same direction”. I agree my particular prediction about mechanical tools for distilling comments didn’t materialize, but we did definitely allocate tons of effort towards distillation as a whole.
Yeah, and I experimented a bunch with that (directly turning forum discussions into posts) and mostly felt like it didn’t really work that well. I mostly updated that there needs to be a larger synthesis step, though I still have some guesses for more direct things that could work. Ben spent some hours distilling the discussion and comments on a bunch of posts, which we should get around to posting (I just realized we never published them).
Re tagging: In general the tagging system that we are building has a lot in common with being a wiki (collaboratively editable descriptions, providing canonical definitions and references, and providing good summaries of existing content), and I expect it to grow into being more of a wiki over time (the tagging use-case was a specific narrow use-case that seemed easy to get traction on, but the mid-term goal is to do a lot more wiki-like stuff). And I think from that perspective it’s more clear how it helps with distillation.
I went and published such a distillation (which attempts to summarise the post What Failure Looks Like and distill its comments).