In a recent comment, II expected that my question might have been already answered so I wrote this:
I’m just now seeing this discussion, and don’t have time to read earlier posts.
I knew this was arrogant, so I appreciated the humor of this reply:
Maybe you can hire someone to read them for you and prepare an executive summary :)
I wanted to explain here why I did not read the previous posts.
There are roughly three nested reasons:
first, it was an experiment because I am often tempted to write something like this (in fact, I have in less egregious cases) and I was wondering what kind of norm-violation response I would get. I was “testing”, because this seems like a nice thing to get away with. The fact is I don’t have time, but if i want to participate in a discussion sometimes I take a gamble and ask a question anyway. I don’t provide a disclaimer that I haven’t read all (or any) of the background, but it would be nice to be able to.
it was symmetric that it was suggested that I ‘hire’ someone to write a summary, because when I am more conscientious and research something just-to-be-conscientious, I often self-criticize that Less Wrong is not “paying me by the hour”. (That is, it’s not supposed to be work.)
finally, it’s not just me that needs to do all this ‘work’. How many people have read all the previous posts? I think it would be nice if executive summaries were provided more often (I provided one here at the top, as well as links) but if that’s too much work (sure it can be) then it could be more of a norm that a person can just plead ignorance / request a relevant recap.
(Ironically, has an open thread like this already been posted?)
In a recent comment, II expected that my question might have been already answered so I wrote this:
I knew this was arrogant, so I appreciated the humor of this reply:
I wanted to explain here why I did not read the previous posts.
There are roughly three nested reasons:
first, it was an experiment because I am often tempted to write something like this (in fact, I have in less egregious cases) and I was wondering what kind of norm-violation response I would get. I was “testing”, because this seems like a nice thing to get away with. The fact is I don’t have time, but if i want to participate in a discussion sometimes I take a gamble and ask a question anyway. I don’t provide a disclaimer that I haven’t read all (or any) of the background, but it would be nice to be able to.
it was symmetric that it was suggested that I ‘hire’ someone to write a summary, because when I am more conscientious and research something just-to-be-conscientious, I often self-criticize that Less Wrong is not “paying me by the hour”. (That is, it’s not supposed to be work.)
finally, it’s not just me that needs to do all this ‘work’. How many people have read all the previous posts? I think it would be nice if executive summaries were provided more often (I provided one here at the top, as well as links) but if that’s too much work (sure it can be) then it could be more of a norm that a person can just plead ignorance / request a relevant recap.
(Ironically, has an open thread like this already been posted?)