Sometimes I want to post things like:

• [thing i'm wondering about]
  
  [here’s my initial stab at it]
  
  [but i have no idea if this is right or wrong]
  
  [i'm sure people on LW would love to tell me where i can find the answer or how they think about it]
  
• How to properly defer to someone else’s belief instead of their evidence?
  
  If Alice knows much more physics than me, learning that Alice assigns 90% to X is obviously evidence for X.
  
  But blindly averaging toward expert beliefs seems to double-count correlated evidence. It also conflates “probability emanating from a coherently-integrated world-model I can defend the gears-level of” with “probability if I was guessing on a prediction market.”
  
  What are rationalist meta-conceptually über-coherent ways to think about epistemic deference?
  
• How to think about the relative information efficiency of RL vs SFT?
  
  People keep telling me “RL is very informationally inefficient.” It only receives a single bit of information (success/fail) over an entire rollout (tens of thousands of tokens!). Meanwhile, SFT gets a bit or more of information on every token.
  
  But RL can make my warm-started model learn to do what I want in like a dozen steps while I can't get SFT to do like anything useful in a dozen steps.
  
  And RL and SFT on LLMs seem to reduce to the same cross-entropy loss anyway, just with a different coefficient. What is going on??
  

You know... like StackOverflow....

But I notice Q&A doesn’t seem to be the vibe here, nor quite fit with this particular web of knowledge.

So what can one do instead?

Maybe instead of ...

• forum-style “Hallo how do you ask questions?” post (tonally inappropriate, creates spam, doesn't mesh with the web of knowledge)

... one could make a ...

• argument-style “LessWrong should support questions” post (and count on people to quickly tell you you’re wrong and LessWrong already supports this via [X], or no, LessWrong shouldn't have questions, but you can do X)
• how-to-style “So you want to ask a question on LessWrong...” post (include a thought or two, and let the comments fill in the rest — like writing a continuation-style base LLM prompt)
• observation-style “I notice I don't know where to put questions on LW” post (adding an observation to the pile; inviting discussion; maybe noticing a subtle confusion others didn’t realise they were confused about too)