This is actually the explicit purpose of the blog. See my comment here and here. Much like RomeoStevens I don’t think the discussions here on the subjects are very productive. But I do think sane investigation & discussion of them are vital.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
And you are wrong. Not only is there interaction between the authors but:
If you have something noteworthy to say about a particular article, email us at comments[at]moreright.net and we will add it there or even dedicate a separate post to it
We have recieved substantial feedback via that mechanism already. The letters to the editor system is superior to moderated comments when it comes to optimizing for high signal to noise ration while the monthly thread enables interaction between commentators and readers.
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.
Sorry, Gwern is right. I would comment there, and I know that you have indeed been looking forward to my input in particular, and might even fast-track my letters due to having confidence that I make for an interesting opponent… but even with all that, the entry barrier is too damn high!
You’re basically inviting me to write short but reasonably complete essays in which I’d have to cover the inferential distance from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum… explain where exactly I agree or disagree with your criticisms of the dominant liberal worldview… figure out how much I should adjust for Least Convenient Possible World and whether it’d make sense for me to concede some claims outright… provide an introduction to some schools of thought which a right-wing audience might’ve never encountered outside of a strawmanned pop-culture form [1] (and which even the MoreRight authors likely misunderstand in some subtle but crucial ways, as has been my impression whenever I tried to talk feminism with you)… explain why I think such traditions might have an advantage over an epistemic-learned-helplessness defense of conservative liberalism… provide such a defense where I feel I’m not learned enough or don’t have a leg to stand on but still find the right-wing argument awful...
Shit, I’ve got a .txt file open right now with a Frankenstein’s monster of a long comment intended to attack the neo-reactionary ideology with regards to issues of structural power and social dominance… epistemology and the biases/rationalizations caused by privilege (building on a “cheap shot” about your pals all being straight white tech-minded guys, having at least modest economic security, living in modern liberal democracies and communicating freely in a de facto libertarian-socialist network)… the way historical narratives are formed and how they relate to social psychology/self-image/intergroup relations (re: all conservative talk of a Relatively-Golden-Age)...
You might see where I’m going with this—or, rather, where I’d like to go. Been trying to hammer it into something at least comment-worthy, but the ideological challenges I see here are all interconnected and would all benefit from an optimized presentation… so it grows endlessly, and whichever angle I start shoring up, it ties into other perspectives and considerations...
And I would imagine that people who don’t care much about such overarching socio-politico-epistemic ways of thought, and just wish to rebutt your criticisms of Modernity from a normal liberal/socialist/libertarian perspective, would get scared off too. High expectations for quality and tone + large inferential distances + restrictions of the medium + a potentially uncharitable reader base = ???
Frankly, I’m going to be surprised if you get to publish any substantial non-right-wing critical commentary from anyone other than Yvain. And that’s only because he’s already publicly undertaking such a challenge on his blog. Oh, well, and maybe TGGP. Can’t imagine anyone else in the LW-sphere who’d brave all that time and effort.
1] Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx. If you’re feeling puzzled by the suggestion… well, I’m reasonably confident that your cached picture of Marx is an useless straw one. Here, for example, I cleared up just one particularly egregious bit. (A wealth of further reading.)
Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx.
Never mind Marx, that’s pretty obvious if you know anything about the non-straw version of Ayn Rand’s ideas. For all that she liked to frame her arguments in individualist terms, Rand’s deal was basically all about a conflict between creative and exploitative classes as mediated by social and technological changes; her idea of the creative class just included people like entrepreneurs and financiers (though it’s worth noting that her heroes were usually artists or engineers), and didn’t include most ordinary laborers. Once you pick this up, Atlas Shrugged basically—and not without some irony—becomes Class Warfare: The Novel.
She and Marx also had similar ideas about the role of religion in the public sphere, and both liked to express their ideas as deriving from a small set of abstract principles (though Marx’s take on it is basically Hegelian, and Rand’s got some kind of strange quasi-Aristotelian thing going on). I haven’t read as much Chesterton, but from what I gather he’s more of a status-quo paleocon, and of course became famously Catholic.
Duh, you pass. Probably not an involved enough test, indeed. And Chesterton was quite a bit more complicated than that:
“Those who will not even admit the Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution”
“Even anarchy on the right side is better than order on the wrong side.”
“Edmund Burke said it was impossible to draw up an indictment against a whole nation; but Edmund Burke detested the very idea of democracy. If Burke did not want the populace taken up as a criminal, it was simply because he did want it permanently taken care of as a lunatic.”
“It is obvious that a revolution, like a war, is never right except when it is indispensable.”
“An intelligent Conservative is not one who wishes to conserve things just as they are, for they never remain just as they are. An intelligent Conservative is one who believes our society is such that it can safely be left to evolve. An intelligent Revolutionist is not one who wishes to revolve; he is one who wishes to construct—and therefore to destroy.”
Shit, I’ve got a .txt file open right now with a Frankenstein’s monster of a long comment intended to attack the neo-reactionary ideology with regards to issues of structural power and social dominance… epistemology and the biases/rationalizations caused by privilege (building on a “cheap shot” about your pals all being straight white tech-minded guys, having at least modest economic security, living in modern liberal democracies and communicating freely in a de facto libertarian-socialist network)… the way historical narratives are formed and how they relate to social psychology/self-image/intergroup relations (re: all conservative talk of a Relatively-Golden-Age)...
I would be highly interested in reading such a post, either here at LW or somewhere else. You shouldn’t worry too much about it becoming too long or its style being unsatisfactory; these are complicated issues, and getting some editorial commentary from other users would also help.
I do agree that More Right itself won’t help much wrt. non-right-wing political commentary. Really, we need to start embracing friendly, benign factionalization and create a network, ‘planet’ or blogroll of political/rationalist venues inspired by other political ideologies. As you say, even just the inferential distances among differing worldviews and ideologies make a centralized treatment quite hopeless. And that’s before taking all kinds of legitimate controversies into account, which mean that the ‘network’ approach will probably be trusted to a greater extent by potential users.
I am just asking people to use their email client rather than their browser to write comments. And in a regular open thread they can write comments in the way they are used to when they primarily seek interaction with other readers or off topic discussion.
You underestimate how much nonrightwing people would be scared off by an actual right wing comment section. We are not therefore discussing expectations of quality or moderation here but only the trivial inconvenience of emailing them in.
I suspect your and gwerns comments are getting a lot of upvotes because of Far mode considerations and vague feelings of goodness around open discussion. Let me push that into Near mode and explain why unmoderated comments where never an option on the table. I very much expect that sooner or later we would end up at best with Unqualified Reservation’s comment section or at worst with that of Alternative Right’s. First I encourage the reader who is unfamiliar with them to google up both. Now tell me how many non right wing rationalists would comment there no matter how reasonable or interesting a hypotheticl article by an author?
The filter of moderation may keep interesting some comments at bay but eliminates far more of mindless politicking than pf the former. Ultimately that ratio is what I think matters.
This is easily checked, isn’t it? I propose that you keep the current policy for a month, then switch to regular pre-moderated blog comments for a month.
For example—and sorry for descending to object-level current politics- I wanted to reply to Mike’s off-hand mention of Putin as a successful and efficient modern authoritarian ruler with something along the lines of: ”Goddamnit, I actually live here, and I get to see the bureaucracy paralyzed with nepotism and corruption, the unsustainable loot-n-run resource-extracting economy, the barely functional public sector under perpetual directionless reform, the brewing sense of anger and despair due to social inequality, the uncontrollable and semi-criminal repressive apparatus, the growing cultural and ethnic rifts destroying what sense of shared identity us “Russians” had remaining...” Yet such a simple listing of complaints about Mike’s characterization doesn’t feel like enough to fire up an email for, and I don’t feel like going deeper into it. Would you view something like this as even marginally useful input?
Of course I agree that unmoderated comments would be a clusterfuck. Don’t think anyone was suggesting otherwise.
Feel free to explain. I’ve read Unqualified Reservations. I’ve read it for years. The comment section went downhill the moment Moldbug decreed he would no longer read or reply it and stopped even bothering spam filtering. All that shows is zero moderation and no karma system of any kind doesn’t work—which I don’t think anyone here would be terribly surprised by or was arguing for.
I was making the point that no moderation us terrible. With the implicit point that there isn’t much difference between moderated comments and emailed in comments. See Larry Austers blog for an example (warning I don’t agree with his positions).
With the implicit point that there isn’t muv difference between moderated comments and emailed in comments.
Which is stupid, and I refer you to my original comment, and particularly encourage you to re-read all articles and comments mentioning ‘trivial inconveniences’.
With the implicit point that there isn’t muv difference between moderated comments and emailed in comments.
There is, there really is. I don’t mind at all posting a comment and accepting moderation, but I won’t email anything to you. You can choose to be stubborn about accepting such a fact or you may not.
So you are saying there is a great difference? Very well I accept that tho the reason for the difference illudes me. This makes me more interested in the outcome of email only than before.
I haven’t been getting this impression while talking to Konkvistador. You know we’re rather blunt with mutual criticism, so he would’ve cautioned me against it when considering my possible participation.
This is actually the explicit purpose of the blog. See my comment here and here. Much like RomeoStevens I don’t think the discussions here on the subjects are very productive. But I do think sane investigation & discussion of them are vital.
I don’t see how that can possibly happen with commenting disabled.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
And you are wrong. Not only is there interaction between the authors but:
We have recieved substantial feedback via that mechanism already. The letters to the editor system is superior to moderated comments when it comes to optimizing for high signal to noise ration while the monthly thread enables interaction between commentators and readers.
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...
Sorry, Gwern is right. I would comment there, and I know that you have indeed been looking forward to my input in particular, and might even fast-track my letters due to having confidence that I make for an interesting opponent… but even with all that, the entry barrier is too damn high!
You’re basically inviting me to write short but reasonably complete essays in which I’d have to cover the inferential distance from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum… explain where exactly I agree or disagree with your criticisms of the dominant liberal worldview… figure out how much I should adjust for Least Convenient Possible World and whether it’d make sense for me to concede some claims outright… provide an introduction to some schools of thought which a right-wing audience might’ve never encountered outside of a strawmanned pop-culture form [1] (and which even the MoreRight authors likely misunderstand in some subtle but crucial ways, as has been my impression whenever I tried to talk feminism with you)… explain why I think such traditions might have an advantage over an epistemic-learned-helplessness defense of conservative liberalism… provide such a defense where I feel I’m not learned enough or don’t have a leg to stand on but still find the right-wing argument awful...
Shit, I’ve got a .txt file open right now with a Frankenstein’s monster of a long comment intended to attack the neo-reactionary ideology with regards to issues of structural power and social dominance… epistemology and the biases/rationalizations caused by privilege (building on a “cheap shot” about your pals all being straight white tech-minded guys, having at least modest economic security, living in modern liberal democracies and communicating freely in a de facto libertarian-socialist network)… the way historical narratives are formed and how they relate to social psychology/self-image/intergroup relations (re: all conservative talk of a Relatively-Golden-Age)...
You might see where I’m going with this—or, rather, where I’d like to go. Been trying to hammer it into something at least comment-worthy, but the ideological challenges I see here are all interconnected and would all benefit from an optimized presentation… so it grows endlessly, and whichever angle I start shoring up, it ties into other perspectives and considerations...
And I would imagine that people who don’t care much about such overarching socio-politico-epistemic ways of thought, and just wish to rebutt your criticisms of Modernity from a normal liberal/socialist/libertarian perspective, would get scared off too. High expectations for quality and tone + large inferential distances + restrictions of the medium + a potentially uncharitable reader base = ???
Frankly, I’m going to be surprised if you get to publish any substantial non-right-wing critical commentary from anyone other than Yvain. And that’s only because he’s already publicly undertaking such a challenge on his blog. Oh, well, and maybe TGGP. Can’t imagine anyone else in the LW-sphere who’d brave all that time and effort.
1] Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx. If you’re feeling puzzled by the suggestion… well, I’m reasonably confident that your cached picture of Marx is an useless straw one. Here, for example, I cleared up just one particularly egregious bit. (A wealth of further reading.)
Never mind Marx, that’s pretty obvious if you know anything about the non-straw version of Ayn Rand’s ideas. For all that she liked to frame her arguments in individualist terms, Rand’s deal was basically all about a conflict between creative and exploitative classes as mediated by social and technological changes; her idea of the creative class just included people like entrepreneurs and financiers (though it’s worth noting that her heroes were usually artists or engineers), and didn’t include most ordinary laborers. Once you pick this up, Atlas Shrugged basically—and not without some irony—becomes Class Warfare: The Novel.
She and Marx also had similar ideas about the role of religion in the public sphere, and both liked to express their ideas as deriving from a small set of abstract principles (though Marx’s take on it is basically Hegelian, and Rand’s got some kind of strange quasi-Aristotelian thing going on). I haven’t read as much Chesterton, but from what I gather he’s more of a status-quo paleocon, and of course became famously Catholic.
Duh, you pass. Probably not an involved enough test, indeed. And Chesterton was quite a bit more complicated than that:
I would be highly interested in reading such a post, either here at LW or somewhere else. You shouldn’t worry too much about it becoming too long or its style being unsatisfactory; these are complicated issues, and getting some editorial commentary from other users would also help.
I do agree that More Right itself won’t help much wrt. non-right-wing political commentary. Really, we need to start embracing friendly, benign factionalization and create a network, ‘planet’ or blogroll of political/rationalist venues inspired by other political ideologies. As you say, even just the inferential distances among differing worldviews and ideologies make a centralized treatment quite hopeless. And that’s before taking all kinds of legitimate controversies into account, which mean that the ‘network’ approach will probably be trusted to a greater extent by potential users.
I am just asking people to use their email client rather than their browser to write comments. And in a regular open thread they can write comments in the way they are used to when they primarily seek interaction with other readers or off topic discussion.
You underestimate how much nonrightwing people would be scared off by an actual right wing comment section. We are not therefore discussing expectations of quality or moderation here but only the trivial inconvenience of emailing them in.
I suspect your and gwerns comments are getting a lot of upvotes because of Far mode considerations and vague feelings of goodness around open discussion. Let me push that into Near mode and explain why unmoderated comments where never an option on the table. I very much expect that sooner or later we would end up at best with Unqualified Reservation’s comment section or at worst with that of Alternative Right’s. First I encourage the reader who is unfamiliar with them to google up both. Now tell me how many non right wing rationalists would comment there no matter how reasonable or interesting a hypotheticl article by an author?
The filter of moderation may keep interesting some comments at bay but eliminates far more of mindless politicking than pf the former. Ultimately that ratio is what I think matters.
This is easily checked, isn’t it? I propose that you keep the current policy for a month, then switch to regular pre-moderated blog comments for a month.
For example—and sorry for descending to object-level current politics- I wanted to reply to Mike’s off-hand mention of Putin as a successful and efficient modern authoritarian ruler with something along the lines of:
”Goddamnit, I actually live here, and I get to see the bureaucracy paralyzed with nepotism and corruption, the unsustainable loot-n-run resource-extracting economy, the barely functional public sector under perpetual directionless reform, the brewing sense of anger and despair due to social inequality, the uncontrollable and semi-criminal repressive apparatus, the growing cultural and ethnic rifts destroying what sense of shared identity us “Russians” had remaining...”
Yet such a simple listing of complaints about Mike’s characterization doesn’t feel like enough to fire up an email for, and I don’t feel like going deeper into it. Would you view something like this as even marginally useful input?
Of course I agree that unmoderated comments would be a clusterfuck. Don’t think anyone was suggesting otherwise.
Moldbug did that to himself by not bothering to moderate any comments, even to remove Chinese goldfarming and Viagra spam.
“Want to see amateurs in home-made crowns pretend to open kindergartens? barelyregal.com″ - some commenter there.
/checks site, is disappointed does not exist
http://xkcd.com/305/
And of course, http://www.wetriffs.com/ (gallery ~NSFW) - but it’s really stagnated these past few years. Guess it wasn’t as hot as it seemed.
/is amused to note one LWer among the pics
Please reread the comment you replied to.
Feel free to explain. I’ve read Unqualified Reservations. I’ve read it for years. The comment section went downhill the moment Moldbug decreed he would no longer read or reply it and stopped even bothering spam filtering. All that shows is zero moderation and no karma system of any kind doesn’t work—which I don’t think anyone here would be terribly surprised by or was arguing for.
I was making the point that no moderation us terrible. With the implicit point that there isn’t much difference between moderated comments and emailed in comments. See Larry Austers blog for an example (warning I don’t agree with his positions).
Which is stupid, and I refer you to my original comment, and particularly encourage you to re-read all articles and comments mentioning ‘trivial inconveniences’.
There is, there really is. I don’t mind at all posting a comment and accepting moderation, but I won’t email anything to you. You can choose to be stubborn about accepting such a fact or you may not.
So you are saying there is a great difference? Very well I accept that tho the reason for the difference illudes me. This makes me more interested in the outcome of email only than before.
“Not bothering to moderate”
Worse! He has admitted to not even reading them.
I can understand not wanting to write a long, well-thought out comment that might never be seen by most of the intended audience.
I think these long rants are exactly what they want to avoid.
I haven’t been getting this impression while talking to Konkvistador. You know we’re rather blunt with mutual criticism, so he would’ve cautioned me against it when considering my possible participation.
This sentence remains equally true if you remove the phrase “right wing” from it.
With moderated comments over email only it’s more akin to an old-style editor-reviewed column/journal than to a blog. Consider renaming.