Unnamed started Sequence Reruns back in 2011; they finished sometime in 2014, if I remember correctly.
My impression is that people found them useful, but that they didn't really kick off much discussion, and the discussions that they did kick off were now lower value because they were harder to find. (If I know that somebody had an insightful response to a question discussing a particular article, I can't just look in the comments of that article--I also need to check out the rerun page, and now I would also need to check out the book discussion page.
I expect we're better off having a sidebar link to the book reading group article of the day/week/etc., and encouraging people to post on old articles, than we are making new articles and reposting the content.
but that they didn't really kick off much discussion
Any idea why not? Also, could be that the book version will increase interest. It could also be that we'll get an influx of new readers with the book's publication and HPMOR's conclusion, so that might help.
If I know that somebody had an insightful response to a question discussing a particular article, I can't just look in the comments of that article--I also need to check out the rerun page, and now I would also need to check out the book discussion page.
Encouraging people to link / quote insightful previous comments might mitigate this issue, at least somewhat. Also, the focus of the reading group would be mostly towards newer readers, so we wouldn't necessarily be aiming for super-high-value comments. That's not to say that people won't have important things to say, just that it's of secondary importance here.
I expect we're better off having a sidebar link to the book reading group article of the day/week/etc.
From what I've seen about the glacial pace of edits to site mechanics, this is almost certainly not going to happen. Unless you know of an easy way to do it?
and encouraging people to post on old articles
Having a sidebar will make for extremely low visibility, and I'm not sure exactly how to encourage people other than that.
Any idea why not?
My first guess would be that a big part of the target audience is lurkers, who shouldn't be expected to post all that much.
From what I've seen about the glacial pace of edits to site mechanics, this is almost certainly not going to happen. Unless you know of an easy way to do it?
Changing the sidebar is the main thing that I have seen happen; I do think it would be much more likely to happen if a volunteer writes the required code.
I expect we're better off having a sidebar link to the book reading group article of the day/week/etc., and encouraging people to post on old articles
I like this idea, and if others do too I suggest voting for the similar option in ciphergoth's poll
I really like this idea. Mostly because I enjoy discussing things I read with others. Though I am having mixed feelings about the pacing.
It would take about 16 years to cover all articles on a weekly basis. Even with a daily pace, it will take about 3 years.
I would most certainly miss out on a couple of posts, but that does not mean I could not participate the day after.
I think this is a good idea and I anticipate that it would significantly help me, for one, with reading the Sequences. I do however see a potential problem with implementation:
I would recommend one new post per day, going in order of the book. I recommend re-posting the entire article to LW, including any edits or additions that are new in the book.
That would be a lot of posts. If we're talking about making a new post in Discussion everyday, that would likely drown-out most other threads. It would be even worse in Main. (ETA: I think I should have written "dilute" instead of "drown-out." Going by a rough estimate of the current rate of Discussion posts, the proposed series would probably make up only a quarter of Discussion, though that's still a significant change.)
I could, of course, be misunderstanding something, in which case I apologize.
[edited iteratively]
That would be a lot of posts. If we're talking about making a new post in Discussion everyday, that would likely drown-out most other threads. It would be even worse in Main.
One could start a new subreddit for this reading group. Something like reddit.com/r/LWreadinggroup. But that would defeat the purpose of reviving lesswrong.com.
I think I phrased "drown-out most other threads" too strongly.
Just from eyeballing the Newest Submissions page in Discussion, I estimate there are an average of ~3 new threads per day, so a new post everyday probably wouldn't "drown-out" the other threads, but still, a 33% dilution is a 33% dilution. It's quite possible that it's a trade-off worth making, but it's still a trade-off that I think we should be aware of.
Honestly, as someone new, I think it would be a good trade off. I heard about LW after HPMOR, and I know most people who recommended me HPMOR got intimidated by the amount of backlog they needed to do.
That is not a problem for me, but as I said in a different comment, I enjoy discussion about the things I am currently reading.
IMO one/week is more realistic than one/day. One of the stated reasons for doing this is:
It would give some of us the motivation to actually go through the Sequences finally
It seems like the above goal would be better realized with a slower pace; it would be pretty easy to miss a posting or two if they are posted one/day. Also, what is the rationale for this:
I recommend re-posting the entire article to LW, including any edits or additions that are new in the book
It seems unnecessary to post the entire article; why not just have a link to the original article? Are there a lot of edits in the book version? If so, and if copyright is not an issue, why not just edit the original post to match what is in the book (assuming this could be done easily). If copyright issues preclude this, then presumably the same copyright issues would preclude posting the book content as new postings. It seems like it will be confusing to have two potentially different versions of each post available on LW.
So I recommend the following:
One post a week
Each post would contain a link to the original post
If possible, the facilitator would provide a summary of the original post and a list of questions/points as a catalyst for discussion, like in the Superintelligence reading group (albeit this would require a fair bit of effort on the part of the facilitator)
Consider updating the original post to match the print version (if there are no copyright issues or other issues)
I was wrong about the number - the number is approximately 300 articles. I'm basing this on the kickstarter page for the audio version, on the sidebar under where it says "Pledge $50 or more".
Still, 300 articles would take almost a year at 1 per day and almost 6 years at once per week.
One additional thing to note is that most of the articles aren't that long. If you can more or less keep up with Slate Star Codex then I'd guess you should have no problem with once a day Sequences. If you missed a day or two, or even a week or two, it wouldn't take you all that long to catch up.
Maybe we should look at a compromise: Would every other day (so about two years total) maybe work better?
Looks like it's time for yet another poll. My, this thread is getting rather full of those.
What pace would you prefer?
[pollid:828]
If you split up some of the longer articles, you might be able to get it to exactly 365 days of blog posts. :)
The eBook will be organized into 26 sequences, all of similar length; so if you want to start new discussion threads, perhaps you should do one thread per sequence rather than one per blog post.
26 sequences one every other week is precisely 52 weeks = the number of weeks in a year. Not bad.
Assuming there are about 300 articles total, that comes out to about 11 or 12 articles per sequence on average, which at one every other week is a little less than once per day.
I think I'd still prefer an article per day (or every other day, as per earlier poll), but I'll let others weigh in on this. Should I do yet another poll?
Reasons for re-posting the whole thing:
But a link to the original post is obviously a good idea.
The book version of the Sequences is supposed to be published in the next month or two, if I understand correctly. I would really enjoy an online reading group to go through the book together.
Reasons for a reading group: