So as I see it the main phenomenon is that there’s just much more being posted on the forum. I think there’s two factors behind that 1) community growth and 2) strong encouragement to post on the Forum. Eg there’s lots of encouragement to post on the forum from: the undergraduate introductory/onboarding fellowships, the AGI/etc ‘Fundamentals’ courses, the SERI/CERI/etc Summer Fellowships, or this or this (h/t John below).
The main phenomenon is that there is a lot more posted on the forum, mostly from newer/more junior people. It could well be the case that the average quality of posts has gone down. However, I’m not so sure that the quality of the best posts has gone down, and I’m not so sure that there are fewer of the best posts every month. Nevertheless, spotting the signal from the noise has become harder.
But then the forum serves several purposes. To take two of them: One (which is the one commenters here are most focussed on) is “signal”—producing really high-quality content—and its certainly got harder to find that. But another purpose is more instrumental—its for more junior people to demonstrate their writing/reasoning ability to potential employees. Or its to act as an incentive/endgoal for them to do some research—where the benefit is more that they see whether its a fit for them or not, but they wouldn’t actually do the work if it wasn’t structured towards writing something public.
So the main thing that those of us who are looking for “signal” need to do is find better/new ways to do so. The curated posts are a postive step in this direction, as are the weekly summaries and the monthly summaries.
So as I see it the main phenomenon is that there’s just much more being posted on the forum. I think there’s two factors behind that 1) community growth and 2) strong encouragement to post on the Forum. Eg there’s lots of encouragement to post on the forum from: the undergraduate introductory/onboarding fellowships, the AGI/etc ‘Fundamentals’ courses, the SERI/CERI/etc Summer Fellowships, or this or this (h/t John below).
The main phenomenon is that there is a lot more posted on the forum, mostly from newer/more junior people. It could well be the case that the average quality of posts has gone down. However, I’m not so sure that the quality of the best posts has gone down, and I’m not so sure that there are fewer of the best posts every month. Nevertheless, spotting the signal from the noise has become harder.
But then the forum serves several purposes. To take two of them: One (which is the one commenters here are most focussed on) is “signal”—producing really high-quality content—and its certainly got harder to find that. But another purpose is more instrumental—its for more junior people to demonstrate their writing/reasoning ability to potential employees. Or its to act as an incentive/endgoal for them to do some research—where the benefit is more that they see whether its a fit for them or not, but they wouldn’t actually do the work if it wasn’t structured towards writing something public.
So the main thing that those of us who are looking for “signal” need to do is find better/new ways to do so. The curated posts are a postive step in this direction, as are the weekly summaries and the monthly summaries.