Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?

Regardless of whether we should have more or fewer posts, the problem you noticed is more precisely traced back to the lack of infrastructure aimed at collating the best output and resources produced or aggregated here. I got a lot of benefit from the "best textbooks" thread, the post(s) introducing Beeminder back in the day, the post by cousin_it on mutual screen-monitoring, and perhaps from a few other interventions (standing desks, nicotine) I picked up in the local memespace. I doubt I could find many of these as a newcomer, except by lurking around for long enough. Not proposing a solution so far, but this seems to be a common problem with big blogs that have lots of excellent content but even more chaff.

ETA: N-acetylcysteine is actually FDA-approved but only as an expectorant and as an antidote for APAP overdose.

...and where is the poll?

Here it is:

[pollid:767]

It's unlikely that by pure chance we are currently writing the correct number of LW posts.

So, the number of LW posts is determined by the balance of multiple forces. That suggests to me it isn't well described by 'pure chance,' and we're better off focusing on how to shift those forces than just observing that the current point isn't optimal.

That said, I'm glad this post exists, because it looks like it raises the perceived reward and lowers the perceived cost of posting to LW.

(My current draft is in editing mode; we'll see how long it takes til I'm happy with it, but my hope is not too long.)

the correct number of LW posts

"Correct" by which metric? and how do you estimate this "correctness"?

If you're a commenter and you (a) have at least 100 karma, (b) it's over 80% positive...

That's how you construct echo chambers. I'm more interested in the dissenting voices. What do they think?

Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?

More. But we also need some better filter. To be more precise, I need a better filter. I do care a lot about the lifehacks. I care about some formal math. I don't care at all about the altruistic stuff.

You pose the interesting question of "is there enough LW content?" and I tend to answer "no, most certainly not" as writing a post gives plenty of utility to plenty of people but this is a public good and those are almost certainly undersupplied. Maybe some kind of reward mechanism based on karma and donations can remedy that.

Edit: A sketch of an idea as an inspiration to people better skilled at designing these things: Posters get money out of a yearly/monthly/weekly fund in proportion to the karma they reap relative to all other posters in the same time frame. The fund itself then is filled by users willing to give some money in return for an option to (temporarily) hold a token title. This system is not perfect by far but should lead to more posts in general. Assuming we don't accidentally trigger market based norms and discourage people from writing as they start to see it as an extremely low paying job.

I make it a habit to check LessWrong once a day for just a few minutes, along with a number of other websites.

There are so few new posts that I hardly even have to scroll to find were I left off the day before. Considering that the usual quality of the posts here is far above that on other websites, having more posts would definitely be a good thing. Even if it turned out that all the most important things are already being written about with no exception, the less interesting posts here are still interesting enough compared to other websites. This is especially true considering that one can just scan the forums and look only at posts above some threshold rating if one is in a hurry.

I think that we should have fewer meta posts like this. We spend too much time trying to optimize our use of this website, and not enough time actually just using the website.

It's unlikely that by pure chance we are currently writing the correct number of LW posts.

But it's possible that the number of posts versus benefit curve is fairly flat. If so, while it may be unlikely that we are writing exactly the correct number of LW posts, we could, with high likelihood, be writing a number of LW posts with effects extremely close to the effect of the correct number.

(c) you have a draft post with valuable new ideas you've been sitting on for a while I imagine most of the draft posts being sat upon are being sat upon because the authors are uncertain how valuable and new the ideas are. I'd weaken that condition for the exhortation to be effective.

Having (a), about (b) and long held intention to post instead of (c) I wrote an article. I am undecided whether lack of textual communicaton skills was a good reason to withhold doing it.