What Would You Like To Read? A Quick Poll

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a post on Less Wrong or another friendly blog.

To state the obvious: People more likely to look at blog posts are going to be more likely to look at this blog post.

Vote this up if this poll format is terrible. An ordered list will have more information, and there are sites that let you post a poll where you can make your order preference known.

"Now, just to be clear," Harry said, "if the professor does levitate you, Dad, when you know you haven't been attached to any wires, that's going to be sufficient evidence. You're not going to turn around and say that it's a magician's trick. That wouldn't be fair play. If you feel that way, you should say so now, and we can figure out a different experiment instead."

Harry's father, Professor Michael Verres-Evans, rolled his eyes. "Yes, Harry."

"And you, Mum, your theory says that the professor should be able to do this, and if that doesn't happen, you'll admit you're mistaken. Nothing about how magic doesn't work when people are sceptical of it, or anything like that."

-- HPMOR, chapter 2

An important aspect of a scientific experiment is that you figure out the design of your experiment and how you are going to interpret the resulting data before you execute it. When you are using an experiment to resolve a disagreement, everyone involved should agree to this procedure in advance (assuming trust in intellectual honesty, which I think holds here).

Polls and surveys have self selection issues. It is good to take some step to counteract the tendency of blog readers to like reading stuff on blogs, but is it sufficient? Should Luke be convinced the bias has been remedied?

Luke was arguing in part that academic papers published in journals helps to reach a small but highly valued class of people. Should a poll that doesn't track his value of reaching the participants influence his policy decision?

I think it would be a better process, if Tom first presented the design of the poll, and allow some time for the community to critique the design. Only after modifications have been made to address criticisms, and Luke and Tom agree that it is a valid test of the question they are interested in, should the poll itself (if that is still the form of the experiment) be conducted.

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read an academic paper, downloadable over the Internet as a PDF.

Typically you make a "sink" post with these sorts of polls.

ETA: BTW, I went for the paper. I tend to skim blogs and then skip to the comments. I think the comments make the information content on blogs much more powerful, however.

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a static HTML page on the Singularity Institute's website.

Is it worth having respondents actually weight the various options? What you are getting with the voting below is a count of the media that various people ranked first overall, but what if among those who prefer blogs (or whatever), they prefer them to pdfs (or whatever) by a small margin and among those who prefer pdfs, they prefer them to blogs by a large margin?

Also, what is the barrier to doing all or most of the items on your list?

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a speech, downloadable as an audio file.

The vote is quite hard to do because it doesn't take in consideration preferences/ranking. So for myself :

1. Blog post is what I would more likely read, if pointed to. If it's on Less Wrong, since I check it regularly, I'll very likely see it, elsewhere... depends. The good thing of blog posts is comment, both writing them and reading them is useful.

2. Mailing list, page/static HTML : I used to read some mailing list, but I ended up just killing without reading the mails I get in them, so... if pointed to the archive I could read like a HTML page, but no more.

3. Academic paper : I could read it, but usually "big pdf" scares me, so I need to overcome this (quite irrational, I've to admit) initial reaction, so it requires the topic to really interest me.

4. Book chapter : I don't like e-books (especially DRM-loaded ones...) but I do read quite a lot of paper books. The problem is that I hardly will buy a book for just a chapter, so it means the other chapters have to interest me too, not just that one.

5. PowerPoint : I almost never open those, only when like to remember things I forgot about a talk I saw in a real-life conference. But I find the format very shallow as stand-alone document, it's ok as a support to make a talk, not by itself.

6. Audio file : requires lots of bandwidth (and my home bandwidth is saddly limited, since I'm far from the DSLAM), much harder to understand for me since English is not my native language, can't as easily stop reading for a while to ponder the idea, or re-read a part I didn't fully get, ... so the worse.

If it comes to my attention, I really don't care, as long as it's discursive written text, i.e. not audio or slides.

What are people's objections to PDF? For me PDF has two advantages. A PDF can include complex mathematics, which most papers I read do. This is generally done badly or not at all in other media. PDFs are also self-contained: I can download a PDF and have the whole thing, which is not always possible with HTML. A downside is that they don't reflow to accommodate the window size, making them awkward to read on a phone, but most HTML is broken in that way as well (including e.g. LessWrong). I've little experience of other e-book formats.

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a book chapter, available both on Kindle and in physical book form.

I like 3 of the above options for different reasons

• I like audiofiles due to a significant commute.
• The advantage of a post is the ensuing discussion.
• book chapter often forces the author to be more clear than usual

Why no karma sink?

A post. If it's in a book chapter, I'd have to have acquired the book. If the book is written by someone at the SI, I'd probably hear about it here. Same thing if it's in an academic paper. I don't spend that much time on the SI's website, or pay too much attention to speeches made by its members.

.

Best use of paper: comic book / graphic novel. Looks better printed, always. Online good, on my tablet good, on paper best. Printable PDF works for this purpose.

Best use of time: blog post, which I can dump into instapaper.

I read this on a mailing list, and unsurprisingly would like to read future developments on a mailing list. :)

Or at least, that's how I'm most likely to find out such a development would exist. In practice I think I would read it on either email or a webpage.

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a mailing list post, made available through a public archive.

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a page on a Singularity Institute or Less Wrong wiki.

Vote up this comment if you would be most likely to read a PowerPoint, or other presentation format.