Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
The average comment isn’t too great on LW either.
We have recieved substantial feedback via that mechanism already.
And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia—wait, is that example so excellent that you don’t even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this ‘trivial inconvenience’ was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.
For example, I’ve told you on IRC how I think the tribalism post is bullshit, but I have zero interest in writing up an email and sending it off and the email either never being seen or at best quoted.
The letters to the editor system is superior to moderated comments when it comes to optimizing for high signal to noise ratio
And you’ve based this on careful experimentation, of course.
And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia—wait, is that example so excellent that you don’t even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this ‘trivial inconvenience’ was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.
Apparently these editors have decided that rather than getting as much activity as possible, they’re willing to settle for smaller amounts of activity if it means they don’t have to deal with all the shit you get by moderating after the fact. I can’t fucking blame them the tiniest bit.
I’ve told you on IRC how I think the tribalism post is bullshit, but I have zero interest in writing up an email and sending it off and the email either never being seen or at best quoted.
Could you give a quick summary here? I’d be interested in seeing it, since at a glance the post seemed reasonable to me.
I don’t especially want to defend my criticism, but my basic point was that quoting reams of material on tribal warfare does nothing at all towards addressing the LW ‘tribalism’ view of personal identity & group solidarity as fundamentally motivated cognition and is a giant non sequitur, and his attempt to contextualize the Byzantine isn’t much better because pointing out that factions latched onto the mobs is like saying there is no such thing as xenophobia or nationalism because in China the xenophobic nationalist mobs protesting Korea or Japan are manipulated by the government and shut down when necessary—if people really are easily manipulated and propagandized as part of group conflict, you would expect various factions to exploit this.
More concisely, the article presents a long and elaborate rebuttal to the name “tribalism” without actually discussing the concept of tribalism at all. It also points out the fancy in Eliezer’s fanciful example at great length.
I will take your word that OB (the old OB before the creation of LW) published everything sent to it, but there was no way for a regular reader of OB to have become confident of that.
Trivial inconvenience is a feature not a bug. I mentioned it explicitly when arguing for this system to be adopted for the early days of the blog. I may be wrong, but I think it acts as a filter for those who can’t be bothered to expend the small amount of effort in reply. This correlates with a less useful reply.
The average comment isn’t too great on LW either.
And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia—wait, is that example so excellent that you don’t even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this ‘trivial inconvenience’ was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.
For example, I’ve told you on IRC how I think the tribalism post is bullshit, but I have zero interest in writing up an email and sending it off and the email either never being seen or at best quoted.
And you’ve based this on careful experimentation, of course.
There’s a large difference between “mostly awful” and “not too great”.
Apparently these editors have decided that rather than getting as much activity as possible, they’re willing to settle for smaller amounts of activity if it means they don’t have to deal with all the shit you get by moderating after the fact. I can’t fucking blame them the tiniest bit.
This is the iron law of blogs and web forums: the quality of the average comment is always well below that of the average post.
This so-called iron law does not hold (and has never held) for Hacker News (which is 6.2 years old).
Could you give a quick summary here? I’d be interested in seeing it, since at a glance the post seemed reasonable to me.
I don’t especially want to defend my criticism, but my basic point was that quoting reams of material on tribal warfare does nothing at all towards addressing the LW ‘tribalism’ view of personal identity & group solidarity as fundamentally motivated cognition and is a giant non sequitur, and his attempt to contextualize the Byzantine isn’t much better because pointing out that factions latched onto the mobs is like saying there is no such thing as xenophobia or nationalism because in China the xenophobic nationalist mobs protesting Korea or Japan are manipulated by the government and shut down when necessary—if people really are easily manipulated and propagandized as part of group conflict, you would expect various factions to exploit this.
More concisely, the article presents a long and elaborate rebuttal to the name “tribalism” without actually discussing the concept of tribalism at all. It also points out the fancy in Eliezer’s fanciful example at great length.
Thanks. That’s a succinct and strong set of criticisms.
I so love your sarcasm when it is directed at someone else.
The one post I sent to OB was rejected. (Which it deserved to be, since in retrospect it was pretty poor.)
I will take your word that OB (the old OB before the creation of LW) published everything sent to it, but there was no way for a regular reader of OB to have become confident of that.
Still a helluva lot better than the average comment on (say) Youtube or Facebook.
Trivial inconvenience is a feature not a bug. I mentioned it explicitly when arguing for this system to be adopted for the early days of the blog. I may be wrong, but I think it acts as a filter for those who can’t be bothered to expend the small amount of effort in reply. This correlates with a less useful reply.
This is not an encyclopedia gwern.
Yet, it is a group blog. Why, that sounds like my other example...