[Low confidence – I’m hashing out my own opinion in public, not trying to apply admin pressure]
I like the tags you’ve listed there. If you’d asked me to think about concepts in EA and written a (long) list, I’d hope I would have found those. I feel like Political Polarization is maybe more niche than I would do? There’s a key difference between us and LW here, which is that LW is investing a large amount of time into creating a whole ontology out of their tagging system, and organizing thing hierarchically, which allows the highlighting of broader tags, while we can’t match them in hours devoted if Aaron and I both worked on it full time.
What I’ve just done is add a tag for most of the shortform collections I’d made that didn’t have a tag already. (With a few exceptions where the shortform collection was decently covered by an existing tag, or was really a fairly fuzzy or niche category.)
For some of these, including political polarisation, there aren’t many relevant Forum posts I’m aware of. But I felt like maybe that wasn’t a big issue, because more posts on the topics might still be created or found later?
And then there’s also the issue that some topics might be better off subsumed under something else. That might apply to Political Polarisation (though I’m not sure what it’d be subsumed under?) and to Differential Progress (under Existential Risk or Longtermism (philosophy) or something).
For that reason I didn’t (yet?) make Global Catastrophic Risks; that’s clearly a non-niche topic, but is maybe covered by the Existential Risk tag (even if the concepts are meaningfully distinct). And it’s why I haven’t (yet?) made Meta-Ethics (as it could fit under Moral Philosophy).
Could admins hide or delete tags that they deem overly niche? I’d feel positive about that option being on the table, so people can feel more comfortable about creating tags that might not be worthwhile (which in turn seems good, because many of those tags will indeed be worthwhile). If admins plan to be extremely reluctant to do that, then maybe it’d be good to promote a more cautious norm around tag-creation?
I wish there was a community-led way of deciding about tags. I think LW is making the calls about their tag-classification that they’ve introduced. (See image.) So maybe it makes sense for us to be more opinionated.
The History tag is for posts that are strongly focused on historical events or trends which don’t necessarily connect to other tags (e.g., a post on the history of nuclear weapons should go in that tag instead), or that discuss or make heavy use of historical research methods.
Either way seems ok to me. My thinking was that, if overlap was allowed, a large portion of all posts could be seen as “History” posts. But maybe that’s inaccurate or ok. You and other people can feel free to edit any descriptions on tags I made :)
Meta: This discussion makes me realise it’s possible it’d be valuable to have some equivalent of Wikipedia’s “talk” pages for tags. (But maybe that’d take more work than it’s worth.)
ETA: I now think you’re right about the History tag, and have adjusted the description accordingly.
[Low confidence – I’m hashing out my own opinion in public, not trying to apply admin pressure]
I like the tags you’ve listed there. If you’d asked me to think about concepts in EA and written a (long) list, I’d hope I would have found those. I feel like Political Polarization is maybe more niche than I would do? There’s a key difference between us and LW here, which is that LW is investing a large amount of time into creating a whole ontology out of their tagging system, and organizing thing hierarchically, which allows the highlighting of broader tags, while we can’t match them in hours devoted if Aaron and I both worked on it full time.
Thanks for that input.
(Also sort-of thinking aloud)
What I’ve just done is add a tag for most of the shortform collections I’d made that didn’t have a tag already. (With a few exceptions where the shortform collection was decently covered by an existing tag, or was really a fairly fuzzy or niche category.)
For some of these, including political polarisation, there aren’t many relevant Forum posts I’m aware of. But I felt like maybe that wasn’t a big issue, because more posts on the topics might still be created or found later?
And then there’s also the issue that some topics might be better off subsumed under something else. That might apply to Political Polarisation (though I’m not sure what it’d be subsumed under?) and to Differential Progress (under Existential Risk or Longtermism (philosophy) or something).
For that reason I didn’t (yet?) make Global Catastrophic Risks; that’s clearly a non-niche topic, but is maybe covered by the Existential Risk tag (even if the concepts are meaningfully distinct). And it’s why I haven’t (yet?) made Meta-Ethics (as it could fit under Moral Philosophy).
Could admins hide or delete tags that they deem overly niche? I’d feel positive about that option being on the table, so people can feel more comfortable about creating tags that might not be worthwhile (which in turn seems good, because many of those tags will indeed be worthwhile). If admins plan to be extremely reluctant to do that, then maybe it’d be good to promote a more cautious norm around tag-creation?
I wish there was a community-led way of deciding about tags. I think LW is making the calls about their tag-classification that they’ve introduced. (See image.) So maybe it makes sense for us to be more opinionated.
I’ve now created the post Propose and vote on potential tags, which I hope can serve as a place to collect and sift through a bunch of ideas.
I feel like it’s fine for them to overlap.
Either way seems ok to me. My thinking was that, if overlap was allowed, a large portion of all posts could be seen as “History” posts. But maybe that’s inaccurate or ok. You and other people can feel free to edit any descriptions on tags I made :)
Meta: This discussion makes me realise it’s possible it’d be valuable to have some equivalent of Wikipedia’s “talk” pages for tags. (But maybe that’d take more work than it’s worth.)
ETA: I now think you’re right about the History tag, and have adjusted the description accordingly.
I expect that’s on LW’s roadmap.
Narrator: “He was right.”