Joseph Miller's Shortform

Joseph Miller

This is a special post for quick takes by Joseph Miller. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

When I go on LessWrong, I generally just look at the quick takes and then close the tab. Quick takes cause me to spend more time on LessWrong but spend less time reading actual posts.

On the other hand, sometimes quick takes are very high quality and I read them and get value from them when I may not have read the same content as a full post.

I'd love to see the reading time listed on the frontpage. That would make the incentives naturally slide towards shorter posts, as more people would click and it would get more karma. Feels much more decision relevant than when the post was posted.

14Lucius Bushnaq2y

This. The struggle is real. My brain has started treating publishing a LessWrong post almost the way it'd treat publishing a paper. An acquaintance got upset at me once because they thought I hadn't provided sufficient discussion of their related Lesswrong post in mine. Shortforms are the place I still feel safe just writing things. It makes sense to me that this happened. AI Safety doesn't have a journal, and training programs heavily encourage people to post their output on LessWrong. So part of it is slowly becoming a journal, and the felt social norms around posts are morphing to reflect that.

4Garrett Baker2y

In some ways the equilibrium here is worse, journals have page limits.

Joseph Miller's Shortform

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Joseph Miller's Shortform

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