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I would like to see people write high-effort summaries, analyses and distillations of the posts in The Sequences.
When Eliezer wrote the original posts, he was writing one blog post a day for two years. Surely you could do a better job presenting the content that he produced in one day if you, say, took four months applying principles of pedagogy and iterating on it as a side project. I get the sense that more is possible.
This seems like a particularly good project for people who want to write but don't know what to write about. I've talked with a variety of people who are in that boat.
One issue with such distillation posts is discoverability. Maybe you write the post, it receives some upvotes, some people see it, and then it disappears into the ether. Ideally when someone in the future goes to read the corresponding sequence post they would be aware that your distillation post is available as a sort of sister content to the original content. LessWrong does have the "Mentioned in" section at the bottom of posts, but that doesn't feel like it is sufficient.
My instinct is that it's not the type of thing to hack at with workarounds without buy in from the LW team.
If there was buy in from them I expect that it wouldn't be much effort to add some sort of functionality. At least not for a version one; iterating on it could definitely take time, but you could hold off on spending that time iterating if there isn't enough interest, so the initial investment wouldn't be high effort.
6Biff Wiff
Thanks!
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I think you're right, but I think it's also important to think about dilution. Making things lower-effort and more appealing to the masses brings down the walls of the garden, which "dilutes" things inside the garden.
But I'm just saying that this is a consideration. And there are lots of considerations. I feel confused about how to enumerate through them, weigh them, and figure out which way the arrow points: towards being more appealing to the masses or less appealing. I know I probably indicated that I lean towards the former when I talked about "summaries, analyses and distillations" in my OP, but I want to clarify that I feel very uncertain and if anything probably lean towards the latter.
But even if we did want to focus on having taller walls, I think the "more is possible" point that I was ultimately trying to gesture at in my OP still stands. It's just that the "more" part might mean things like coming up with things like higher quality explanations, more and better examples of what the post is describing, knowledge checks, and exercises.
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There is the Sequence Highlights which has an estimated reading time of eight hours.
Worrying about dilution makes sense, but the default is... not reading any part of the Sequences.
I like the readthesequences.com page, because it has the posts without comments. People complain how the posts are long, but the comments are 10x longer, and it is tempting (at least for me) to look at them while reading the posts.
But yes, I also wish we had something even better.