I agree that a post should only become “canon” if it has been public for a while and no convincing counterargument has materialized.
For my AI alignment contest submission, I emailed a bunch of friends asking for feedback prior to submission. That produced a surprisingly high hit rate—I think above 70%. (Getting a soft in-person commitment for feedback prior to emailing might have played a role in some cases.)
Then my submission won $2000, and the top comment on the prize announcement was me asking people for feedback. That hit rate was vastly lower—so far my Medium post has 3 short comments.
This experience causes me to think that the best way to do peer review for blog posts is to email friends/contacts prior to publication and ask for feedback. Maybe you could integrate a workflow like this into the LW interface—for example, instead of “submitting” my post, I privately share a messy draft with someone from the Sunshine Regiment, they give me some thoughts, etc. Something like this could be especially valuable for folks outside the Bay Area who aren’t as well-connected as I am.
I’d be especially enthusiastic about sharing drafts with the Sunshine Regiment if they could tell me in advance whether my post would be featured. Maybe I would have submitted my alignment contest entry to LW if I knew it would be featured. As things were, my post was sufficiently heterodox that I was worried about reflexive downvoting, and I wanted the contest organizers to judge it on its merits.
More broadly, I wonder if there’s a sense in which downvoting is just a bad fit for blog posts. An author can spend weeks laboring over a post, then have someone downvote it after reading the first paragraph—this feels imbalanced. Even reddit mostly just votes on comments & links. LW is the only group blog I know of where post voting is a big thing. I think I’d rather submit to the considered judgement of one or two respected individuals, who will communicate with me & explain their reasoning, than the whims of the masses. (Maybe this “gatekeeper” person should be an anonymous reviewer who is not the same as my “colleague” from the Sunshine Regiment mentioned above—the same way the professor who helps me write a paper will not decide if it gets accepted to a journal or not.)
I agree that a post should only become “canon” if it has been public for a while and no convincing counterargument has materialized.
For my AI alignment contest submission, I emailed a bunch of friends asking for feedback prior to submission. That produced a surprisingly high hit rate—I think above 70%. (Getting a soft in-person commitment for feedback prior to emailing might have played a role in some cases.)
Then my submission won $2000, and the top comment on the prize announcement was me asking people for feedback. That hit rate was vastly lower—so far my Medium post has 3 short comments.
This experience causes me to think that the best way to do peer review for blog posts is to email friends/contacts prior to publication and ask for feedback. Maybe you could integrate a workflow like this into the LW interface—for example, instead of “submitting” my post, I privately share a messy draft with someone from the Sunshine Regiment, they give me some thoughts, etc. Something like this could be especially valuable for folks outside the Bay Area who aren’t as well-connected as I am.
I’d be especially enthusiastic about sharing drafts with the Sunshine Regiment if they could tell me in advance whether my post would be featured. Maybe I would have submitted my alignment contest entry to LW if I knew it would be featured. As things were, my post was sufficiently heterodox that I was worried about reflexive downvoting, and I wanted the contest organizers to judge it on its merits.
More broadly, I wonder if there’s a sense in which downvoting is just a bad fit for blog posts. An author can spend weeks laboring over a post, then have someone downvote it after reading the first paragraph—this feels imbalanced. Even reddit mostly just votes on comments & links. LW is the only group blog I know of where post voting is a big thing. I think I’d rather submit to the considered judgement of one or two respected individuals, who will communicate with me & explain their reasoning, than the whims of the masses. (Maybe this “gatekeeper” person should be an anonymous reviewer who is not the same as my “colleague” from the Sunshine Regiment mentioned above—the same way the professor who helps me write a paper will not decide if it gets accepted to a journal or not.)