This is a special post for quick takes by Thomas Kwa. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Comment Permalink
The LessWrong Review's short review period is a fatal flaw.
I would spend WAY more effort on the LW review if the review period were much longer. It has happened about 10 times in the last year that I was really inspired to write a review for some post, but it wasn’t review season. This happens when I have just thought about a post a lot for work or some other reason, and the review quality is much higher because I can directly observe how the post has shaped my thoughts. Now I’m busy with MATS and just don’t have a lot of time, and don’t even remember what posts I wanted to review.
I could have just saved my work somewhere and paste it in when review season rolls around, but there really should not be that much friction in the process. The 2022 review period should be at least 6 months, including the entire second half of 2023, and posts from the first half of 2022 should maybe even be reviewable in the first half of 2023.
120
Mmm, nod. I think this is the first request I've gotten for the review period being longer. I think doing this would change it into a pretty different product, and I think I'd probably want to explore other ways of getting-the-thing-you-want. Six months of the year makes it basically always Review Season, and at that point there's not really a schelling nature of "we're all doing reviews at the same time and getting some cross-pollination-of-review-y-ness."
But, we've also been discussing generally having other types of review that aren't part of the Annual...
1