I’m a bit confused. What’s the difference between “knowing everything that the best go bot knows” and “being able to play an even game against a go bot.”? I think they’re basically the same. It seems to me that you can’t know everything the go bot knows without being able to beat any professional go player.
Or am I missing something?
weathersystems
By “network effect” do you mean this? I take the network effect to be a problem here only if the wiki requires a large amount of people to be useful.
My hope is that the wiki should be useful even for a very small number of people. For example, I get use out of it myself just as a place to put some notes that I want to show to people and as a way of organizing my own questions.
Ah ya I see what you’re saying. Ya that’s definitely right. Certainly the most common kind of question asker online just wants to ask the highest number of the most qualified people their question and that’s it. Unless/until the site has a large user base that won’t really be possible on the wiki.
Still, I think as long as the thing is useful to some people it may be able to grow. But it may be useful to organize my thoughts better on exactly what the value is for single users.
One example that comes to mind is the polymath project. They found it useful to start a wiki to organize their projects. If anyone else wants to come along and do a similar thing, they can just use this wiki instead of making their own.
Sure. But the question is can you know everything it knows and not be as good as it? That is, does understanding the go bot in your sense imply that you could play an even game against it?
I’m not sure I’m getting your question.
I think mediawiki (the software that runs both wikipedia and this question wiki) only allows text by default. But there’s no reason why the pages can’t just link to relevant sources. And in fact probably some questions should be answered with just one link to the relevant wikipedia page.
Ideally pages should synthesize relevant sources but I think just listing sources is better than nothing.
Ya I think you’re basically right here. Which is why I’m not really hoping to “grow large enough to be comparable to Stack Exchange and still remain good.” In fact even growing large enough and being sucky seems very hard.
My goal is just to make something that’s useful to individuals. I figure if I get use out of the thing when working alone, maybe other people would too.
StackExchange only flags duplicates, that’s true, but the reason is so that search is more efficient, not less. The duplicate serves as a signpost pointing to the canonical question.
Ya I get that. But why keep all the answers and stuff from the duplicates? My idea with the question wiki was to keep the duplicate question page (because maybe it’s worded a bit differently and would show up differently in searches), have a pointer to the canonical question, and remove the rest of the content on that page, combining it with the canonical question page.Also, StackExchange does indeed allow edits to answers by people other than the original poster. Those with less than a certain amount of reputation can only propose an edit and someone else has to approve it, and those who have a higher level of reputation can edit any answer and have the edit immediately go into effect.
Huh. That’s new to me. Thanks for the info. That may affect my view on the need for the question wiki. I’ll have to think about it. Maybe I gotta take a closer look at stackexchange.
I agree. My two questions with regards to that are:
Would they accept this as a sister project? The last time they took on a sister project was something like 10 years ago (iirc)
Would it be better placed as it’s own Wikimedia project or could it be merged with Wikiversity?
Thx. I’ll check it out.
“I wrote first wrote”
Thanks for the post!
Thanks. I’d heard of wikispore, but not wikifunctions. That looks cool.
I’m a bit worried that my question will be picked and then I’ll be the only one working on it. So to give this thing a better chance of at least two people collaborating, I’m not submitting a question.
Thanks for being the first person to submit a question!
It turns people who have “no drawing talent” into people who can easily draw anything they see, not by strenuous exercise, but by a conceptual shift that can be achieved in a few hours.
Did that work for you, or do you know of any evidence that that’s the case? I’m skeptical that a few hours can allow anyone to “draw anything they see” but would be happy to change my mind on that. I guess you didn’t say how well they’d be able to draw after just a few hours of “conceptual shift.” But I read you as saying anyone can draw very well after just a little effort.
I guess I’m not really understanding the question. Is the question something like:
”What are some small shifts people can make in their mental model of some skill that would have a very large impact in the skill level of the person making that mental shift?”
Ya I thought it was worth a try. Looks like exactly one person is putting forward a question so far. Do you have any questions you’d be interested in working on?
I think some question in this area would work well for this collaboration I’m proposing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oqSMn6WEXPdDEvyyt/what-question-would-you-like-to-collaborate-on
If you add a question there and it gets picked I’d be happy to work on this with you.
Thanks for writing up your thoughts here. I hope you wont mind a little push-back.
There’s a premise underlying much of your thought that I don’t think is true.But as the world of Social Studies consists of the interactions of persons, places, and things, they are subject to the Laws of Physics, and so the tenants of Physics must apply.
I don’t really see how the laws of physics apply to social interactions. To me it sounds like you’re mixing up different levels of description without any reason.
Yes, at bottom we’re all made up of physical stuff that physics describes. But that doesn’t really mean that the laws of physics are particularly useful when trying to explain human scale phenomena like why people get hungry, or angry, or why people have a hard time coordinating, or (more to your point), why people sometimes believe the wrong things. The fields of psychology, evolutionary biology, sociology among others seem like they’d be more relevant than physics. The different fields of knowledge exist for a good reason.
Thanks. The “drawing what you see” vs “drawing what you think” distinction combined with the images helped me understand the idea better.
This seems somewhat related to what Scott Alexander called “concept shaped holes.” So you’re saying that some people have a “concept of how to draw what you see” shaped hole, and that Edwards has some techniques of helping you fill that gap.
Are you specifically looking for conceptual shifts that would allow you to do something better? Or is just being able to understand something you previously didn’t understand enough? Like if someone didn’t “get” jazz and there were some way to help them appreciate it, would that count?
Thanks for writing this. As someone who went through something very similar, I largely agree with what you wrote here.
To make the “accept the panic” bit a more concrete: following someone’s advice, when I’d start to panic, I’d sit down and imagine I was strapped to the chair. I’d imagine my feelings were a giant wave washing over me, but that I couldn’t avoid them, because I was strapped to the chair. The wave wouldn’t kill me though, just feel uncomfortable. I’d repeat that in my head “this is uncomfortable but not dangerous. this is uncomfortable but not dangerous...” Turns out that if you don’t try to avoid the bad feelings, they don’t last as long. My understanding is that by just sitting and taking it without flinching, you’re teaching your brain that panic is not something to be feared which reduces their intensity and frequency.
Before doing that I felt terrible for about an hour. With that technique it was reduced to about 15 minutes, then I quickly (in a week or two) stopped having panic attacks.
I’m not sure I understand how “Three, distract yourself.” fits with accepting panic though. I know for me, distracting myself was a way of not accepting. Of trying not to feel bad.
Ah. Ya that makes sense. It sounds like it’s not so much about what to do in the moment of panic as what to focus on throughout your day-to-day life. Let yourself be interested in and pay attention to things other than that you feel bad all the time. Don’t let your pain be your main/only focus.
Hi y’all.
Recently I’ve become very interested in open research. A friend of mine gave me the tip to check out lesswrong.
I found that lesswrong has been interested in trying to support collaborative open research (one, two, three) for a few years at least. That was the original idea behind lesswrong.com/questions. Recently Ruby explained some of their problems getting this sort of thing going with the previous approach and sketched a feature he’s calling “Research Agendas.” I think something like his Research Agendas seems quite useful.
So that’s what brought me here. But I’ve had a lot of fun reading through old top rated posts.
I just made my first post about a question centered wiki I’ve been working on. I guess it’s a sort of self promotion, so I hope that’s ok. I felt that it’s the sort of thing that people here may be interested in. I’m also very interested to hear critiques of the argument I put forward in that post.