This is very well written! It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort went into this, and I like your upshots.
I think that for this to be more useful to the community, you should have more engagement with current literature and writing in the community. Here, I feel almost obliged to add a link to an 80K article on this matter.
I just listened to the last episodes of Global Optimum and it makes me think that maybe what I was actually saying is that in order to get more status in the EA community, one should display an understanding of the “EA Cannon”. (and of course, writing that comment supposedly signals higher status..)
I still think that it is important to engage with previous discussions whenever explaining something new, but also I want to clarify that it can absolutely be a valuable and reasonable choice to do something completely new.
I wouldn’t phrase it as “status”. If someone’s goal is to write a post that will be especially valuable to many people who read it here, that could entail trying to save readers’ time by skimming past concepts they likely know well.
I don’t care how much EA material an author has read; I care how helpful I find their post in accomplishing or understanding something. It just happens to be the case that an understanding of prior material seems to make posts more helpful, on average.
Oh, now I see that what I wrote is a bit off what I intended, sorry. I was mainly explaining that this was my way of showing conformity to (how I interpret) The Way Things Work Here, not that one should do that to achieve higher status or that I think that status in EA is very important to achieve.
As you say, and for the same reasons, I agree that it is very helpful for people to read up on similar EA content. However, I am not sure how much is it important for people to also link to relevant sources and explain the connections, which is more what I was going for.
Makes sense—“The Way Things Work” still feels a little too “official”, but I agree that doing background reading is helpful and recommended (I like the list of recommendations here)
Linking is important when you cite someone’s work and can be a useful way to avoid having to write a lot of stuff yourself, but if it flows better to write up your own explanation of some common concept, I don’t see a problem with that.
hmm I was using “The Way Things Work Here” sarcastically (I think in a similar tone to how I was addressing status in the previous comment). So I’m taking away that in the internet no one know that you are a troll, or something like that 😊
I took your meaning to be somewhat sarcastic, but wanted to clarify for anyone else who might stumble across the conversation. I try to keep my meaning fairly literal on the Forum, in part for the large number of readers for whom English isn’t their first language.
This is very well written! It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort went into this, and I like your upshots. I think that for this to be more useful to the community, you should have more engagement with current literature and writing in the community. Here, I feel almost obliged to add a link to an 80K article on this matter.
Meta
I just listened to the last episodes of Global Optimum and it makes me think that maybe what I was actually saying is that in order to get more status in the EA community, one should display an understanding of the “EA Cannon”. (and of course, writing that comment supposedly signals higher status..)
I still think that it is important to engage with previous discussions whenever explaining something new, but also I want to clarify that it can absolutely be a valuable and reasonable choice to do something completely new.
I wouldn’t phrase it as “status”. If someone’s goal is to write a post that will be especially valuable to many people who read it here, that could entail trying to save readers’ time by skimming past concepts they likely know well.
I don’t care how much EA material an author has read; I care how helpful I find their post in accomplishing or understanding something. It just happens to be the case that an understanding of prior material seems to make posts more helpful, on average.
Oh, now I see that what I wrote is a bit off what I intended, sorry. I was mainly explaining that this was my way of showing conformity to (how I interpret) The Way Things Work Here, not that one should do that to achieve higher status or that I think that status in EA is very important to achieve.
As you say, and for the same reasons, I agree that it is very helpful for people to read up on similar EA content. However, I am not sure how much is it important for people to also link to relevant sources and explain the connections, which is more what I was going for.
Makes sense—“The Way Things Work” still feels a little too “official”, but I agree that doing background reading is helpful and recommended (I like the list of recommendations here)
Linking is important when you cite someone’s work and can be a useful way to avoid having to write a lot of stuff yourself, but if it flows better to write up your own explanation of some common concept, I don’t see a problem with that.
hmm I was using “The Way Things Work Here” sarcastically (I think in a similar tone to how I was addressing status in the previous comment). So I’m taking away that in the internet no one know that you are a troll, or something like that 😊
I appreciate the clarifications.
I took your meaning to be somewhat sarcastic, but wanted to clarify for anyone else who might stumble across the conversation. I try to keep my meaning fairly literal on the Forum, in part for the large number of readers for whom English isn’t their first language.