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”.
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”.