I suspect (but am not sure) that the cases in which long-running discussion would be valuable aren't ones where a post-plus-comment system is ideal, even at the start before the discussion has petered out. They're ones where A writes something substantial (of post-length), and then B writes something similarly substantial (also of post-length), and then A writes something similarly substantial, and so forth. In that case, B should be writing a post rather than a comment.
Writing top-level posts can be intimidating, and can be a lot of work. (They can be intimidating because they're a lot of work -- one feels daunted at the prospect. They can be a lot of work because they're intimidating -- fear of writing something unsatisfactory motivates research and polishing. This parenthesis is really just for fun.) Perhaps there's space for something intermediate between a comment and a post, somehow, for exactly this situation? But I'm not sure what it would be, how it would work, or whether it would actually end up feeling like something intermediate.
In the absence of such a mechanism, I suggest: (1) If you have something to say in response to a post, and it feels as if it might turn into a ...
There are a few things that are tagged as "the great conversations on LessWrong" in my mind, and those are specifically ones that took the form of posts-as-responses. Two specific examples that I'm thinking of would be
This is partly why I’ve shifted in my posts on scholarship to just building on my own thoughts over a long time. Having a readership, even if shallow, is motivating. I do occasionally get useful comments, sometimes via PM. I think reaching out to others for zoom or other back and forth goes a long way to establishing the trust needed to generate even a 45 minute conversation.
With commenting, I feel at each stage a concern that I won’t be responded to. I imagine others feel the same way. And this frequently turns out to be the case! Many times I’ve taken a fair bit of time writing up comments for posts where comments were explicitly solicited, only to have them ignored.
Other times, as on SSC/AC10, I notice that the OP has a pattern of posting no more than one reply per comment. So this causes me to develop an even stronger prior for them specifically about the depth to expect. And if they’re clearly not interested enough in what I have to say to read my reply, why should I think they care enough about me to have invested much thought into their comment in the first place?
I do think this is an important and solvable problem. I think part of the problem is lack of credibility and ince...
Some frames worth considering:
Pledges for ongoing discussion
As an experiment and because I am interested in a more in depth conversation on this topic, I pledge to respond to every comment on this post for a month. If you want to make a similar pledge, please do so as a response to this comment.
Edit: Some comments don't seem like they're worth responding to, so I won't respond to those. I guess I'm going against my pledge here, but I feel that not responding to literally every comment is still consistent with the spirit of the pledge. If anyone disagrees or would like me to respond to anything in particular, I would be be happy to do so.
The distinction Professor Quirrell makes is a useful one but I think it's a mistake to apply it at the level of people, as if some people were Average Joes who just want to kill time on the internet and some people are Serious Arguers who want to make intellectual progress. Anyone can be both at different times. I suspect most people, even those who are valuable as Serious Arguers, are more often in Average Joe mode, and I am not convinced that that's a problem.
To whatever extent that's right, the way to have more long-running discussions with Serious Argu...
Long running conversations are extremely common on old-style bulletin message boards/fora (see here for an example. This is mostly/solely because of the software design where threads are ordered only by the latest reply. Whether or not this leads to qualitative debate is another matter, often the same points get belaboured ad nauseam and moderators have to close old threads.
I don't think it's completely to blame, but I suspect that the way the LessWrong homepage is set up encourages this cultural norm. LessWrong 2.0 has paid some attention to the need to revisit content, but the homepage is still much closer to Reddit (where discussions die out quickly) than a forum (where they don't).
My reason for thinking the website is not completely to blame is that it seems to reflect the revealed preferences of the users. If there was a strong (and conscious) preference for long running discussions, people would work around it via the n...
If you spend a month composing a contribution, make it a new post, with a link back to the previous. That is how I've seen several longer conversations happen here
I think this already happens sometimes, just in the comments on posts where you don't see it. I've been part of conversations that lasted ~1 month on LW via back and forth on comments on posts. ~1 week is somewhat more common.
Admittedly the audience for this is kinda small, but you can always look at the global stream of comments to jump into it.
As one of the mods, my general recommendation agrees with some of the other commenters: For a long running discussion, make a new top-level post. For every level you go down in the comment tree, my gut says you lose something like half of your readers. And we've had really good long-running conversations of people riffing off of each other, making posts that either directly or indirectly respond to each other.
For a while I've been thinking about explicitly encouraging this by having a "response-post" feature, but I never figured out a good UI for it, and it never quite made the cut.
I think that this might be likely if people who wrote on similar topics were to have conversations and record them as writing an article takes a lot more time than just having a discussion.
It's not that long conversations never happen here. I had a pretty long conversation with valentinslepukhin under I would like to try double crux. The threads got so deep that the boxes started rotating. Neither of us managed to change the other's mind, so I'm not sure if I would call it a success. I think I did slip into soldier mode a few times. valentinslepukhin finally stopped responding. I'm not sure if he simply gave up, or got distracted and forgot to come back, or got banned without me noticing.
Is this kind of thing something you'd like to see more of on LessWrong?
I think one issue is that comment trees are just not the ideal format for conversation. It's pretty common that someone will make a comment with four different claims, and then ten different comments of which two make similar objections to one, and then a couple other objections, and those will be responded to, and it's all very ad-hoc. Structure doesn't spontaneously emerge, and having to scan through a whole disordered tree to understand the current state of the argument makes it hard for bystanders to join.
Having a section for posts-for-the-month (or "O...
I am only speaking for myself, but on LW I'd be afraid of growing a reputation of "always wants the last word". So I just stop commenting when I find it convenient. (I know it's not always the right thing to do, but it's better to be talked to, like, at all.)
(without reading other comments) Academia does have its share of failed-to-ignites and should-have-stopped-alreadies. Maybe we can zoom in on the successful cases instead of looking at the whole.
My wild guess is that, yes, "instant gratification" is important to engage people better. There was a recent discussion on how to do that, but it fizzled. A built-in chat window, a live comment scroll window, a temporary discord channel for select posts where the author commits to being around at announced times... there are many ways to engage the audience better.
The key question of what comments are for and where you might create a new post. The bar to creating new posts on LessWrong is lower then the bar to publishing academic articles.
When the amount of effort to engage in an intellectual conversation reaches a certain level, it's worth creating a new post in LessWrong and have a pingback.
The design of LessWrong is generally more optimized for getting people to write posts then it is for getting people to write comments.
As far as my own commenting experience goes I don't feel like it's central whethe...
DID NO ONE HERE USE RENEGADE OR TELEGARD?!?
Sorry for shouting... I'm an old man. But Renegade and Telegard had this feature called "newscan" (or for the more pedantic "new scan") where you could scan for all new posts or replies to threads you were engaged in since the last time you visited and quickly preview them and respond if desired.
It was one of the ways that a a keystroke-driven text-based menu system was superior to a website, because I've never seen a successful implementation of this on the web. You can have a similar feature, but you...
Here is how things currently work:
For some types of posts, this works. For other types of posts, it doesn't.
For example, Two Definitions of Generalization seems like the type of post where the status quo wouldn't work (edit: What is the most effective way to donate to AGI XRisk Mitigation is another good example). Instead, to make meaningful progress on the question of what generalization really is, I think you'd want something closer to academia, where there are various scientists interested in the same research question, and they have a long running conversation about it. A few days of back and forth just doesn't cut it. You need a lot more back and forth.
In a recent interview I had with Professor Quirrell, I asked him for his take on this. Here is what he had to say:
Mister Zerner... a lesser version of myself would find your naivety amusing. Unfortunately, this current version merely finds it annoying.
The issue with your idea is the premise that John Does on the internet want to engage on the same level as academic researchers. They don't. They are just killing time, looking for instant gratification.
You are going to object that members of LessWrong are not average Joes. Again, I find your naivety annoying. While it is true that LessWrongers, as you fondly refer to them, are a step up from the rest, it is just that: a step. Getting people to engage seriously in long running conversations would require something more akin to a leap. Merely being "less wrong" is not sufficient.
I think that there is a lot of truth to what Professor Quirrell is saying. However, I am also not convinced that it has to be this way.
Here's a thought. Consider the Two Definitions of Generalization post. Imagine that I invested a bunch of time reading up on the topic, thinking about it, and commenting on the post. The likely outcome is that I get a reply or two, and maybe a discussion emerges for a few days. But after that it will fizzle out. And then the topic of the day will move to whatever new posts happen to have made the front page.
That is demotivating. It'd be nice if I knew that if I invest the time on a post, I can depend on there being an eg. month long period of time where people will continue to engage with it.
What would this look like? You could have users precommit to engaging for a certain period of time. Maybe you measure the engagement by number of comments or something, maybe you don't. Maybe you use the honor system, maybe you penalize people who didn't engage enough by taking away karma. Maybe you just award extra karma, utilizing the carrot instead of the stick. Maybe you have people pledge real money (integrate with Beeminder?). Maybe instead of a normal precommittment you structure it more like a kickstarter, where you'd only be committing to engaging with the post if X number of other people engage with it as well.
Perhaps an MVP for this could simply be something like a "posts for the month" space on the front page, where eg. three posts are guaranteed to stay on the front page for a full month. The curated posts that we currently have sorta do this, but it's not quite the same thing. For me at least, when I look at the curated posts, it doesn't evoke too strong a feeling of "this will remain here for a long time".
To be clear, I am not saying that every post should be long running. There is definitely a place for short running posts. However, IMHO, there is also a place for long running posts.