Students who write essays are trained in a very strange environment—they have someone who will read their work no matter what. Try writing a blog—if it’s bad, I don’t get an F, I get 10 views on something that took me a day to write.
The forum is honestly pretty good training for this. I’ve written several posts that took me ~10 hours each that got like 40 karma. Pretty galling, but that’s the real world.
It’s actually quite remarkable—the way we teach writing to students is anti-useful. You could possibly do a worse job than we’re currently doing but I don’t immediately see how.
Well Nathan, you know that I want to say “why are you paying attention to karma, you know karma is a bad proxy for what you care about”, and believe me I’ve done way worse than 10 hours for 40 points multiple times. But maybe the point is that karma is awarded on writing style more than anything else?
does important EA have a crisis on its hands, that researchers who need engagement to thrive aren’t getting the comments they need? Number of comments and karma are sorta correlated, right.
I think karma is awarded more by generality of subject matter than writing style per se? This post I spent a few hours on (including the hour I spent rereading the book) has x3 the karma of another post I put up around the same time that represents the outcome of about a year of part-time research.
And this is perfectly natural! Everyone on the EA forum has some reason to care about good writing, only some small subset of people on the EA forum have some reason to care about genetic engineering detection.
Students who write essays are trained in a very strange environment—they have someone who will read their work no matter what. Try writing a blog—if it’s bad, I don’t get an F, I get 10 views on something that took me a day to write.
The forum is honestly pretty good training for this. I’ve written several posts that took me ~10 hours each that got like 40 karma. Pretty galling, but that’s the real world.
It’s actually quite remarkable—the way we teach writing to students is anti-useful. You could possibly do a worse job than we’re currently doing but I don’t immediately see how.
Well Nathan, you know that I want to say “why are you paying attention to karma, you know karma is a bad proxy for what you care about”, and believe me I’ve done way worse than 10 hours for 40 points multiple times. But maybe the point is that karma is awarded on writing style more than anything else?
does important EA have a crisis on its hands, that researchers who need engagement to thrive aren’t getting the comments they need? Number of comments and karma are sorta correlated, right.
I think karma is awarded more by generality of subject matter than writing style per se? This post I spent a few hours on (including the hour I spent rereading the book) has x3 the karma of another post I put up around the same time that represents the outcome of about a year of part-time research.
And this is perfectly natural! Everyone on the EA forum has some reason to care about good writing, only some small subset of people on the EA forum have some reason to care about genetic engineering detection.