Comment Permalink

This is a great idea. I'm a slow writer, so this solves most of my reluctance to the summary idea. I think will do this for the time being and then leave a note in each post in case someone wants to write a summary - that is if you don't mind me stealing your idea :)

LW4EA: Privileging the Question

by Jeremy

Mar 7 20221 min read 5

13

Cause prioritizationLessWrong for EAImportance

Frontpage

This is a linkpost for https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6vcxuRHzeM99jYcYd/privileging-the-question

Written by LW user Qiaochu_Yuan.

This link post is part of LessWrong for EA, a LessWrong repost & low-commitment discussion group (inspired by this comment). Each week I will revive an EA-relevant post from the LessWrong Archives, more or less at random, from a list I started from the comments here (additional suggestions welcome via PM or in the comments).

Please feel free to,

Discuss in the comments
Subscribe to the LessWrong for EA tag to be notified of future posts
Tag other LessWrong reposts with LessWrong for EA.

Initially, I talked about hosting Zoom discussion for those that were interested, but I think it’s a bit more than I can take on right now (not so low-commitment). If anyone wants to organize one, comment or PM me and I will be happy to coordinate for future posts.

13 Reactions

Comments5

Sorted by

New & upvoted

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 10:23 AM

Miranda_ZhangMar 11 20225

I like this post a lot, especially in today's media environment, but I find it somewhat hard to apply. The main reason I think this is because I think "question" is pretty similar to "bid for attention," and it feels overwhelming to me to critically evaluate every bid for my attention. I also don't know if it's worth trying to apply this in my everyday life - I can imagine that would take up too many cognitive resources.

However, I think the final recommendation of asking "what do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?" is really good. This seems useful for robustly good habits like respecting the value of your time (which I guess is equivalent to 'attention' here) and productive communication (e.g., a 1:1 where you are double-cruxing).

JeremyMar 8 20225

I've gotten feedback that a "summary of the post and/or why...it's interesting to an EA audience" would improve these reposts. I agree, but this has to be a pretty low effort thing for me to be able to keep it up.

If anyone is able to do this once a week, I could get you the links a week ahead of time (or a few at a time if that's easier).

Miranda_ZhangMar 11 20221

I don't think I'd be able to write summaries once a week, but I'd be happy to copy+paste the single most relevant/summative line from a piece.

e.g., for this one I might put

Privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. [...] The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions.

JeremyMar 11 20221

Miranda_ZhangMar 11 20221

Of course - less work for me! : )