TrailMemes for Sequences

post by drc500free · 2010-12-17T17:08:02.121Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 10 comments

Contents

10 comments

One of the obstacles I faced when first confronted with the Sequences was figuring out the prerequisites for any given post. At times this is spelled out explicitly, but there are many parallel paths and cross-referencing. Another problem was that posts don't link forward to the posts that reference them.

TrailMeme lets you "blaze a trail" through a mass of blog posts by creating a directed graph, which other users can then "walk." The site is still in Beta, and can be unstable at times.

I tried to more or less follow the posted pre-requisites and link-backs, but culled a lot of the redundant ones to reduce confusion. I found one pre-existing trail, and invite anyone with free time to contribute! Trails so far:

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

A Human's Guide to Words

Reductionism

Map and Territory

Politics is the Mind-Killer

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comment by PeerInfinity · 2010-12-17T20:21:33.982Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Here are some other links that are relevant to this post:

Andrew Hay's dependency graphs of Eliezer's LW posts

A Java applet for browsing through these dependency graphs Warning: This will take a long time to load, and may crash your browser

A Java applet for browsing through the concepts in the LW wiki Warning: This will take a long time to load, and may crash your browser

All of these graphs are out of date now.

Replies from: drc500free
comment by drc500free · 2010-12-18T03:25:04.876Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you. They're still relevant for the topics they cover... good background to see how much of the site is covered by sequences.

comment by Kutta · 2010-12-18T10:44:40.339Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A solution that is simpler in many ways is using the All articles page and advancing chronologically. The occasionally included off-sequence posts might be a drawback, though personally I was not bothered.

Replies from: wedrifid
comment by wedrifid · 2010-12-18T11:20:10.291Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hey! Neat. Links to (most of) Roko's deleted posts! (The neat part being that most deleted posts still exist for those who know the link to them.)

Replies from: XiXiDu
comment by XiXiDu · 2010-12-18T12:21:43.986Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hey! Neat. Links to (most of) Roko's deleted posts!

Careful!

Replies from: wedrifid
comment by wedrifid · 2010-12-18T12:46:18.018Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's where the most part comes in. The wiki doesn't contain censored topics.

comment by PeerInfinity · 2010-12-17T17:54:21.900Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

TrailMeme is awesome, thanks for posting this!

If TrailMeme had a tool to import/export to/from a file, then I might have volunteered to create a script to generate trails for the LW sequences.

Creating these trails manually would be tedious, but probably worthwhile.

But I'm not volunteering to do this myself, at least not any time soon, sorry.

Replies from: drc500free, jsalvatier
comment by drc500free · 2010-12-17T18:08:09.537Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You can import/export from a bookmark file. I'm not sure whether that's less tedious.

comment by jsalvatier · 2010-12-17T18:00:20.375Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Maybe volunteer just for one sequence? I suppose it might be too early to do this anyway, since it sounds like it's not stable yet.

comment by jsalvatier · 2010-12-17T17:46:09.187Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Great find!