The Nonlinear Library LW - The LessWrong 2022 Review by habryka
Dec 5, 2023
06:52
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The LessWrong 2022 Review, published by habryka on December 5, 2023 on LessWrong.
The snow is falling, the carols are starting, and we all know it's time for our favorite winter holiday tradition. It's LessWrong review time!
Each year we come together and review posts that are at least one year old. That means for the next two months we are reviewing all posts from 2022.
While our everyday lives are filled with fads and chasing the sweet taste of karma and social approval, the LessWrong review is the time to take a step back and ask ourselves "did this actually help me think better?", "did this actually turn out to be valuable?" and "which things withstood further and extended scrutiny?".
We've done this 4 times so far (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).
The full technical details of how the Annual Review works are in the final section of this post, but it's basically the same as the past few years. There are three phases:
Preliminary Voting Phase (2 weeks, Dec 4 - 17): We identify posts especially worthy of consideration in the review casting preliminary votes. Posts with 2 preliminary votes move into the Discussion Phase.
Discussion Phase (4 weeks, Dec 17 - Jan 14): We review and debate posts. Posts that receive at least one written review move to the final voting phase.
Final Voting (2 weeks, Jan 14 - Jan 28): We do a full voting pass, using quadratic voting. The outcome determines the Annual Review results.
For more of the philosophy of the Annual Review, see the previous announcement posts here, here, here, and here.
Getting Started
At the top of any posts eligible for the review, you will see this:
These will be your preliminary votes for the 2022 review. Posts need to get at least 2 preliminary votes (positive or negative) in order to move to the next phase of the review.
To start perusing posts, I recommend going to the
All 2022 Posts page, or the
View Your Past Upvotes page. Note: only users with accounts registered before January 2022 are eligible to vote.
No books this year, sorry folks
For 2018, 2019, and 2020 we printed books of the results of the review. We have sold many thousands of them, I am very proud of them, and many people told me that these are among the favorite things that they own:
Sadly, there won't be a book this year (and also not of the 2021 review). The effort involved in making them is hard to justify with increasing demands from many of our other projects (as well as reduced funding, since if you take into account the 4-5 staff months these cost to make each year, we net lost money on these).
I am thinking about other ways to create an easy to reference artifact that captures the results of this year's and last year's review. I think the minimum I want to do is to create a good ebook and maybe an audible version using our machine narration (or doing human narration). Additional suggestions are welcome.
We are going to be doing a Christmas sale of all of the previous years' books in the next few days, and hopefully before Christmas we will also have a good ebook (and maybe even an audiobook version) available of last year's review results.
How does the review work?
Phase 1: Preliminary Voting
To nominate a post, cast a preliminary vote for it. Eligible voters will see this UI:
If you think a post was an important intellectual contribution, you can cast a vote indicating roughly how important it was. For some rough guidance:
A vote of 1 means "it was good."
A vote of 4 means "it was quite important".
A vote of 9 means it was "a crucial piece of intellectual progress."
You can vote at the top of a post page, or anywhere the post appears in a list (like the
All Posts page, or the new
View Your Past Upvotes page).
Posts that get at least one positive vote go to the Voting Dashboard, where other users can vote on it. You're encouraged to give at l...
The snow is falling, the carols are starting, and we all know it's time for our favorite winter holiday tradition. It's LessWrong review time!
Each year we come together and review posts that are at least one year old. That means for the next two months we are reviewing all posts from 2022.
While our everyday lives are filled with fads and chasing the sweet taste of karma and social approval, the LessWrong review is the time to take a step back and ask ourselves "did this actually help me think better?", "did this actually turn out to be valuable?" and "which things withstood further and extended scrutiny?".
We've done this 4 times so far (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).
The full technical details of how the Annual Review works are in the final section of this post, but it's basically the same as the past few years. There are three phases:
Preliminary Voting Phase (2 weeks, Dec 4 - 17): We identify posts especially worthy of consideration in the review casting preliminary votes. Posts with 2 preliminary votes move into the Discussion Phase.
Discussion Phase (4 weeks, Dec 17 - Jan 14): We review and debate posts. Posts that receive at least one written review move to the final voting phase.
Final Voting (2 weeks, Jan 14 - Jan 28): We do a full voting pass, using quadratic voting. The outcome determines the Annual Review results.
For more of the philosophy of the Annual Review, see the previous announcement posts here, here, here, and here.
Getting Started
At the top of any posts eligible for the review, you will see this:
These will be your preliminary votes for the 2022 review. Posts need to get at least 2 preliminary votes (positive or negative) in order to move to the next phase of the review.
To start perusing posts, I recommend going to the
All 2022 Posts page, or the
View Your Past Upvotes page. Note: only users with accounts registered before January 2022 are eligible to vote.
No books this year, sorry folks
For 2018, 2019, and 2020 we printed books of the results of the review. We have sold many thousands of them, I am very proud of them, and many people told me that these are among the favorite things that they own:
Sadly, there won't be a book this year (and also not of the 2021 review). The effort involved in making them is hard to justify with increasing demands from many of our other projects (as well as reduced funding, since if you take into account the 4-5 staff months these cost to make each year, we net lost money on these).
I am thinking about other ways to create an easy to reference artifact that captures the results of this year's and last year's review. I think the minimum I want to do is to create a good ebook and maybe an audible version using our machine narration (or doing human narration). Additional suggestions are welcome.
We are going to be doing a Christmas sale of all of the previous years' books in the next few days, and hopefully before Christmas we will also have a good ebook (and maybe even an audiobook version) available of last year's review results.
How does the review work?
Phase 1: Preliminary Voting
To nominate a post, cast a preliminary vote for it. Eligible voters will see this UI:
If you think a post was an important intellectual contribution, you can cast a vote indicating roughly how important it was. For some rough guidance:
A vote of 1 means "it was good."
A vote of 4 means "it was quite important".
A vote of 9 means it was "a crucial piece of intellectual progress."
You can vote at the top of a post page, or anywhere the post appears in a list (like the
All Posts page, or the new
View Your Past Upvotes page).
Posts that get at least one positive vote go to the Voting Dashboard, where other users can vote on it. You're encouraged to give at l...