The Best of LessWrong

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The Best of LessWrong
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10Raemon

Partial Self Review: There's an obvious set of followup work to be done here, which is to ask "Okay, this post was vague poetry meant to roughly illustrate a point. But, how many words do you actually precisely have?" What are the in-depth models that let you predict precisely how much nuance you have to work with? Less obvious to me is whether this post should become a longer, more rigorous post, or whether it should stay it's short, poetic self, and have those questions get explored in a different post with different goals. Also less obvious to me is how the LessWrong Review should relate to short, poetic posts. I think it's quite important that this post be clearly labeled as poetry, and also, that we consider the work "unfinished" until there is a some kind of post that delves more deeply into these questions. But, for example, I think Babble last year was more like poetry than like a clear model, and it was nonetheless valuable and good to be part of the Best Of book. So, I'm thinking about this post from two lenses. 1. What are simple net-improvements I can make to this post, without sacrificing it's overall aim of being short/accessible/poetic? 2. Sketch out the research/theory agenda I'd want to see for the more detailed version. I did just look over the post, and notice that the poetry... wasn't especially good. There is mild cleverness in having the sections get shorter as they discuss larger coordination-groups. But I think I probably could write a post that was differently poetic. Or, find ways of making a short/accessible version that doesn't bother being poetic but is is nonetheless clear. I'm worried about every post having to be a rigorous, fully caveated explanation. That might be the right standard for the review, but not obviously. Some points that should be made somewhere, whether editing the OP or in a followup: 1. Yes, you can invest in processes that help you reach more people, more reliably. But those tools are effortful to build

33DanielFilan

I think this post, as promised in the epistemic status, errs on the side of simplistic poetry. I see its core contribution as saying that the more people you want to communicate to, the less you can communicate to them, because the marginal people aren't willing to put in work to understand you, and because it's harder to talk to marginal people who are far away and can't ask clarifying questions or see your facial expressions or hear your tone of voice. The numbers attached (e.g. 'five' and 'thousands of people') seem to not be super precise. That being said: the numbers are the easiest thing to take away from this post. The title includes the words 'about five' but not the words 'simplifed poetry'. And I'm just not sure about the numbers. The best part of the post is the initial part, which does a calculation and links to a paper to support an order-of-magnitude calculation on how many words you can communicate to people. But as the paragraphs go on, the justifications get less airtight, until it's basically an assertion. I think I understand stylistically why this was done, but at the end of the day that's the trade-off that was made. So a reader of this post has to ask themselves: Why is the number about five? Is this 'about' meaning that you have a factor of 2 wiggle-room? 10? 100? How do I know that this kicks in once I hit thousands of people, rather than hundreds or millions? If I want to communicate to billions of people, does that go down much? These questions are left unanswered in the post. That would be fine if they were answered somewhere else that was linked, but they aren't. As such, the discerning reader should only believe the conclusion (to the extent they can make it out) if they trust Ray Arnold, the author. I think plausibly people should trust Ray on this, at least people who know him. But much of the readership of this post doesn't know him and has no reason to trust him on this one. Overall: this post has a true and important core that c

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