For causes that are especially complicated and difficult, like “knowledge simplification”, I recommend this technique to avoid getting lost in the weeds:
Find examples of projects in this field that you think were highly effective, and see if you can think of ways to create similar projects that would also be effective. For example, if you think that StackOverflow simplified programming knowledge and helped more people become good programmers, producing a lot of value for every dollar that went into it:
Is there some other field that needs its own StackOverflow, but doesn’t have one? (Nothing immediately comes to mind for me.)
Is there some way in which more people can be made to learn about, and use, StackOverflow-like projects? (It seems like people very frequently find StackOverflow and its ilk when they search for answers, but… maybe?)
How much should we value more people getting access to this kind of project? How would we track whether the thing we thought was valuable (e.g. “more good programmers exist”) was actually happening, and caused by our project?
How many other people have tried something like this? What was their success rate? Can we avoid the most common reasons that these projects fail? (Most StackOverflow and Wikipedia-like projects never get anywhere, especially those focused on hard things like “simplifying knowledge” rather than easy things like “writing summaries of TV episodes for your favorite fandom’s wiki”.)
Unless the above exercise gives you something useful, you should strongly consider the idea that another cause is more worthwhile.
There are exceptions to this (for example, fields like AI safety are novel and focused on future problems, so we wouldn’t expect to see past projects we knew had been highly effective). But in the case of “knowledge simplification”, I see a vast graveyard of doomed projects, with a view bright spots that were successful by chance and/or so successful that they’ve dominated their niche and no further work should be done (as far as I know, we don’t need any more StackOverflows for programming, or any more Wikipedias for general knowledge).
Thanks for your comment. I intend the idea as a principle to be taken into account when designing cognitive frameworks, not as a specific project. Many (not all) ideas are unnecessarily complicated so there are lots of advantages of simplifying them, or tackling problems via an alternative route. But to the best of my knowledge this is not something that anyone has looked at systematically. I don’t know much about stack overflow but will look into it.
For causes that are especially complicated and difficult, like “knowledge simplification”, I recommend this technique to avoid getting lost in the weeds:
Find examples of projects in this field that you think were highly effective, and see if you can think of ways to create similar projects that would also be effective. For example, if you think that StackOverflow simplified programming knowledge and helped more people become good programmers, producing a lot of value for every dollar that went into it:
Is there some other field that needs its own StackOverflow, but doesn’t have one? (Nothing immediately comes to mind for me.)
Is there some way in which more people can be made to learn about, and use, StackOverflow-like projects? (It seems like people very frequently find StackOverflow and its ilk when they search for answers, but… maybe?)
How much should we value more people getting access to this kind of project? How would we track whether the thing we thought was valuable (e.g. “more good programmers exist”) was actually happening, and caused by our project?
How many other people have tried something like this? What was their success rate? Can we avoid the most common reasons that these projects fail? (Most StackOverflow and Wikipedia-like projects never get anywhere, especially those focused on hard things like “simplifying knowledge” rather than easy things like “writing summaries of TV episodes for your favorite fandom’s wiki”.)
Unless the above exercise gives you something useful, you should strongly consider the idea that another cause is more worthwhile.
There are exceptions to this (for example, fields like AI safety are novel and focused on future problems, so we wouldn’t expect to see past projects we knew had been highly effective). But in the case of “knowledge simplification”, I see a vast graveyard of doomed projects, with a view bright spots that were successful by chance and/or so successful that they’ve dominated their niche and no further work should be done (as far as I know, we don’t need any more StackOverflows for programming, or any more Wikipedias for general knowledge).
Thanks for your comment. I intend the idea as a principle to be taken into account when designing cognitive frameworks, not as a specific project. Many (not all) ideas are unnecessarily complicated so there are lots of advantages of simplifying them, or tackling problems via an alternative route. But to the best of my knowledge this is not something that anyone has looked at systematically. I don’t know much about stack overflow but will look into it.