I’d prefer unedited mind dumps not to be downvoted, mainly for the reason my articles tend to be ones. I believe if a forum title says Discussion, we can have more equality of effort. I.e. in normal articles the authors should put a lot of effort in making it easy to read and the reader should not need to put in much effort. But in something called Discussion just dumping loosely related ideas, insight-beginnings, and asking the readers to put in some effort into processing it, fishing out useful sounding bits, and engaging with them, should not be too much IMHO. If you don’t feel like doing so, fine, just ignore it altogether, but hitting a downvote sounds like sending everybody the message that they should not either, and sending the author the message to not do this at all. Which is IMHO wrong, these things have positive utility, in the sense of a chance of having some bits that could be developed into something insightful.
It might be worthwhile for you to edit your mind dumps given that the payoff will be multiplicative across your readership. Let’s say you spend 20 minutes editing your mind dump and compress it to 50% of its original size. Maybe originally it took 10 minutes to read and now it takes 5. If your post has 100 readers over its lifetime (quite plausible to me given the number of lurkers on Less Wrong, the way people will stop voting once a post reaches its “just” score, and the high number of comments many posts get), then we are 480 minutes ahead of where we were. (Incentivizing people to do things like this seems like a positive side effect of voting.)
I’d prefer unedited mind dumps not to be downvoted, mainly for the reason my articles tend to be ones. I believe if a forum title says Discussion, we can have more equality of effort. I.e. in normal articles the authors should put a lot of effort in making it easy to read and the reader should not need to put in much effort. But in something called Discussion just dumping loosely related ideas, insight-beginnings, and asking the readers to put in some effort into processing it, fishing out useful sounding bits, and engaging with them, should not be too much IMHO. If you don’t feel like doing so, fine, just ignore it altogether, but hitting a downvote sounds like sending everybody the message that they should not either, and sending the author the message to not do this at all. Which is IMHO wrong, these things have positive utility, in the sense of a chance of having some bits that could be developed into something insightful.
It might be worthwhile for you to edit your mind dumps given that the payoff will be multiplicative across your readership. Let’s say you spend 20 minutes editing your mind dump and compress it to 50% of its original size. Maybe originally it took 10 minutes to read and now it takes 5. If your post has 100 readers over its lifetime (quite plausible to me given the number of lurkers on Less Wrong, the way people will stop voting once a post reaches its “just” score, and the high number of comments many posts get), then we are 480 minutes ahead of where we were. (Incentivizing people to do things like this seems like a positive side effect of voting.)
Thanks, this actually makes sense.