Yeah, this is pretty high on the Todo list. Hopefully we can do that next week.
habryka
Karma: 9,662 (LW), 53 (AF)
After all, three-quarters of the work here is precisely in bringing the old posts in question to the attention of users; relying on users in the first place, to accomplish that, seems to be an ineffective plan—whereas using the automated recommendation engine is perfect. (Still the user-originated system you allude to would, I think, be a good supplement.)
This indicates at least some misunderstanding of what I tried to convey. I agree that the recommendation system can do the job of promoting the visibility of such posts, but then I was additionally suggesting that it would be good to independently allow users to promote epistemic corrections to a higher level of visibility on the post-page itself in a way that does not require moderator interaction.
*nods* I think definitely when we make shortform feeds more of a first-class feature then we should encourage authors to specify their preferences for comments on their feeds.
I mean visibility pretty straightforwardly in that I often want to intentionally limit the number of people who can see my content because I feel worried about being misunderstood/judged/dragged into uncomfortable interactions.
Happy to discuss any of this further since I think shortform feeds and norms around them are important, but would prefer to do so on a separate post. You’re welcome to start a thread about this over on my own shortform feed.
I think agree that we can do some better UI work to show that separation, and I think that’s probably the correct long-term strategy. Just the backlog of additional features like that is long, and difficulty of solving this problem well isn’t trivial (and neither is the cost of messing up), so I was mostly comparing options that don’t require any additional features like that and keep the existing site hierarchy.
This discussion has however made me update that putting in the relevant effort does surface a good amount of additional value, so I will think about that more.
My preference for most of my shortform feed entries is to intentionally have a very limited amount of visibility, with most commenting coming from people who are primarily interested in a collaborative/explorative framing. My model of Spiracular (though they are very welcome to correct me) feels similar.
I think I mentioned in the past that I think it’s good for ideas to start in an early explorative/generative phase and then later move to a more evaluative phrase, and the shortform feeds for me try to fill the niche of making it as low-cost as possible for me to generate things. Some of these ideas (usually the best ones) tend to then later get made into full posts (or in my case, feature proposals for LessWrong) where I tend to be more welcoming of evaluative frames.
I think there is still a loss of ownership that people would feel when we add big moderator note’s to the top of their posts, even if clearly signaled as moderator-added content, that I think would feel quite violating to many authors, though I might be wrong here.
I confess I don’t really know what you mean by this.
Not sure how to explain more. It would be good if there was some system that would allow other users that are not moderators to be able to inform other users about the updated epistemic content of a post. There are many potential ways to achieve that.
One might be to add inline comments that when they reach a certain threshold of votes can be displayed prominently enough to get the attention of others reading the content for the first time (though that also comes with cost), another might be to find some way to reduce or remove the strong first-mover bias in comment sections that prevent new comments from reaching the top of the comment section most of the time (due to voting activity usually being concentrated right after a post is created, which makes it hard fo rnew comments to get a lot of upvotes).
For whatever it’s worth, it definitely had a really big impact on my experience of this post in a way that felt to me like it invalidated most of its intention.
It seems to me that it would be extremely valuable to include posts like this in the recommendations—but annotate them with a note that the research in question hasn’t replicated. This would, I think, have an excellent pedagogic effect! To see how popular, how highly-upvoted, a study could be, while turning out later to have been bunk—think of the usefulness as a series of naturalistic rationality case studies! (Likewise useful would be to examine the comment threads of these old posts; did any of the commentariat suspect anything amiss? If so, what heuristics did they use? Did certain people consistently get it right, and if so, how? etc.) The new recommendation engine could do great good, in this way…
This is an interesting point. I think I would be in favor of this if we had a way to pin comments to the top as moderators. Right now I expect we could leave a comment, but I don’t expect that comment to actually show up high enough in the comment tree to be seen by most users, and we could edit the post but I am particularly hesitant to write retraction notices for other people.
Ideally I would want a way for things like this to happen organically driven by user activity instead of moderator intervention, but I don’t know yet how to best do that. Interested in suggestions, since it feels important for the broader vision of making progress over a long period of time.
Is this adjusted by post date? Posts from before the relaunch are going to have much less karma, on average (and as user karma grows and the karma weight of upvotes grows with it, average karma will increase further). A post from last month with 50 karma, and a post from 2010 with 50 karma, are really not comparable…
Rerunning the whole vote history with the new karma is one of the next things on our to-do list. Right now it will indeed be biased towards the recent year, which I hope to fix soon (that is one of the things that I consider necessary before removing the “[beta]” tag from the feature).
Recommendation Features on LessWrong
Huh, quite weird. Was this just on the edit page, and what browser were you using? Sorry for that happening.
Moves this back to your drafts, since it didn’t have a location and seems to end before it starts.
Promoted to curated: This post makes an important point that I haven’t actually seen made somewhere else, but that I myself had to explain on many past occasions, so having a more canonical referent to it is quite useful.
I also quite like the format and generally think that pointing to important concepts using a bunch of examples seems relatively underutilized given how easy those kinds of post tend to be to write, and how useful they tend to be.
Welcome to LessWrong!
You can use footnotes with the markdown editor. You can read about the syntax here:
Sorry, the syntax is slightly counterintuitive. In the WYSIWYG editor it’s
>!on a new line, rendering like this:This is a spoiler
In markdown it’s
:::spoilerto open and:::to close
Interesting. Do you have any screenshots or more concrete descriptions of how trn works? Or maybe recommendations for other things?
Yay, shortform feeds!
Threading on LW is not great
Is this compared to other sites, or do you just think threading in general has some problems?
I prefer the current setup, mostly because I often discover sequences by just reading posts in the recommendations that then turn to have been part of a sequence I want to read, for which I then want to start at the beginning (and I expect this will be particularly the case with posts from R:A-Z for most users).
Will think about whether there is a way to get the best of both worlds.