something I persistently struggle with is that it’s near-impossible to know everything that has been said about a topic, and that makes it really hard to know when an additional contribution is adding something or just repeating what’s already been said, or worse, repeating things that have already been refuted
to an extent this seems inevitable and I just have to do my best and sometimes live with having contributed more noise than signal in a particular case, but I feel like I have an internal tuning knob for “say more” vs. “listen more” and I find it really hard to know which direction is overall best
As weird as it sounds, I think the downvote button should make you a bit less concerned with contribution quality. If it’s obviously bad, people will downvote and read it less. If it’s wrong without being obviously bad, then others likely share the same misconception, and hopefully someone steps in to correct it.
In practice, the failure mode for the forum seems to be devoting too much attention to topics that don’t deserve it. If your topic deserves more attention, I wouldn’t worry a ton about accidentally repeating known info? For one thing, it could be valuable spaced repetition. For another, discussions over time can help turn something over and look at it from various angles. So I suppose the main risk is making subject matter experts bored?
In some sense you could consider the signal/noise question separate from the epistemic hygiene question. If you express uncertainty properly, then in theory, you can avoid harming collective epistemics even for a topic you know very little about.
On the current margin, I actually suspect EAs should be deferring less and asking dumb questions more. Specific example: In a world where EA was more willing to entertain dumb questions, perhaps we could’ve discovered AI Pause without Katja Grace having to write a megapost. We don’t want to create “emperor has no clothes” type situations. Right now, “EA is a cult” seems to be a more common outsider critique than “EAs are ignorant and uneducated”.
Using Kialo for debates rather than the Forum would go a long way. It’s hard to get off the ground because it’s attractiveness to use is roughly proportional to the number of EAs using it, and at present, the number of EAs using it is zero.
something I persistently struggle with is that it’s near-impossible to know everything that has been said about a topic, and that makes it really hard to know when an additional contribution is adding something or just repeating what’s already been said, or worse, repeating things that have already been refuted
to an extent this seems inevitable and I just have to do my best and sometimes live with having contributed more noise than signal in a particular case, but I feel like I have an internal tuning knob for “say more” vs. “listen more” and I find it really hard to know which direction is overall best
As weird as it sounds, I think the downvote button should make you a bit less concerned with contribution quality. If it’s obviously bad, people will downvote and read it less. If it’s wrong without being obviously bad, then others likely share the same misconception, and hopefully someone steps in to correct it.
In practice, the failure mode for the forum seems to be devoting too much attention to topics that don’t deserve it. If your topic deserves more attention, I wouldn’t worry a ton about accidentally repeating known info? For one thing, it could be valuable spaced repetition. For another, discussions over time can help turn something over and look at it from various angles. So I suppose the main risk is making subject matter experts bored?
In some sense you could consider the signal/noise question separate from the epistemic hygiene question. If you express uncertainty properly, then in theory, you can avoid harming collective epistemics even for a topic you know very little about.
On the current margin, I actually suspect EAs should be deferring less and asking dumb questions more. Specific example: In a world where EA was more willing to entertain dumb questions, perhaps we could’ve discovered AI Pause without Katja Grace having to write a megapost. We don’t want to create “emperor has no clothes” type situations. Right now, “EA is a cult” seems to be a more common outsider critique than “EAs are ignorant and uneducated”.
Using Kialo for debates rather than the Forum would go a long way. It’s hard to get off the ground because it’s attractiveness to use is roughly proportional to the number of EAs using it, and at present, the number of EAs using it is zero.
https://www.kialo-edu.com/