Has it occurred to you that the reason I am talking about making website changes is because I have volunteered to do some work for free? I could just stop discussing it in the discussions, but then you may get random changes. Or I could just not volunteer. But then you get no free work. Which do you prefer?
It’s unlikely that this would occur to someone, so this should be a statement and not a rhetorical question (since it’s a question, I’m still not certain if it’s a statement, and if so what it means more specifically). The choice you describe is a false trichotomy. For example, you could be discussing the changes, but in a less verbose manner (this takes care of shminux’s complaint), or you could only summarize after you’ve finished designing them and were preparing to move to implementation (this takes care of suddenness of changes, allows revision).
Ok, just because he commented about the threads doesn’t mean he read any of them to find out I’m volunteering. You’re right.
I don’t see being less verbose as a good way to convey all relevant information. I guess this is too complicated for people to want to be involved in it. Maybe they don’t care that much or just want someone to figure it out for them or something. I never seem to assume that, though. I always seem to assume they’ll want to know. Maybe that’s an odd habit.
Still, I have a hard time understanding why they’d seek to censor somebody talking about something that was relevant, and could be important, that other people do want to talk about.
If I’m right that this place is at risk, we’re talking about the end of LessWrong. I could wait until I wasn’t a new user to discuss it, but I don’t know how long that takes or how much time is left. It makes very little sense to wait when something is both important and could happen at any time. So, being discouraged by others on this feels like senseless chaos.
Especially the guy who was like “You wrote too many posts I don’t want!”—that is just ironic!
Your writing does tend to be verbose—the amount of interesting surprise per amount of text is low.
Part of the problem seems to be repetition among articles as well as within them.
Judging the amount of redundancy needed and then supplying good quality redundancy is a hard problem, and I think most people just have a habitual redundancy level. (Mine may be too low.) I haven’t seen an overt discussion of how to do redundancy well anywhere.
Many parts of this comment pattern-match to the poorly informed ranter type we get here that I was talking about earlier. (You don’t match overall, but sometimes people don’t seem to, at first...)
Well thanks for not insta-judging me. I hate it when that happens. I don’t think of myself as poorly informed (though most don’t think of themselves that way) but I know I am intense and can get really verbose. It seems like the component causing the problem right now is being verbose. I’m not sure what you want me to learn from your comment, but that’s what I’m taking away from it.
Here’s a point by point on what patterns you’re matching if that’ll help, but after that I want to end the thread because I find you kind of frustrating to talk to.
I don’t see being less verbose as a good way to convey all relevant information.
Response to feedback about how to talk to us: denying that that’s how to talk to us.
I guess this is too complicated for people to want to be involved in it. Maybe they don’t care that much or just want someone to figure it out for them or something.
Subtly derisive remarks about others’ virtue (tolerance for complexity, commitment to site, interest level, initiative, etc.)
I never seem to assume that, though. I always seem to assume they’ll want to know. Maybe that’s an odd habit.
Passive-aggressive assertion about self-exceptionalism and your rare, yet unfailing tendency to see the best in others even when constantly disappointed—budding martyr complex.
Still, I have a hard time understanding why they’d seek to censor somebody talking about something that was relevant, and could be important, that other people do want to talk about.
Ignorance claim that happens to oblige other people to justify wanting you to stop doing something. Trigger-happy use of the word “censor”. Declaration of relevance, unsupported. Declaration of support from unspecified others.
If I’m right that this place is at risk, we’re talking about the end of LessWrong.
Doomsaying. Also, you’re conveniently the only one who has noticed this Terrible Danger.
I could wait until I wasn’t a new user to discuss it, but I don’t know how long that takes or how much time is left. It makes very little sense to wait when something is both important and could happen at any time.
It’s an emergency! So, exceptionalism!
senseless chaos.
Nope, no rhyme or reason to what others are up to, just people who you’ve mysteriously chosen to hang out with acting at random.
Especially the guy who was like “You wrote too many posts I don’t want!”—that is just ironic!
This seems to me like a misunderstanding or a hearing-past of the point you’re responding to.
And then you end with a cookie for the person who engaged with you.
I know it can be tiring to explain to frustrating people why they are frustrating. Thanks for taking the time to type this up. Hopefully I’m good enough at taking criticism that I won’t stay frustrating long.
Doomsaying. Also, you’re conveniently the only one who has noticed this Terrible Danger.
This seems rather harsh, given what Eliezer has been saying. If the person with ultimate power over the forum has been talking about the site “going to hell” it has to be expected that the language of doom will rub off on new users. This isn’t to say Epiphany matches patterns any less but we could perhaps avoid conveying isolation.
If there’s a volunteer interested in working on growth, and it looks like lots of growth is possible, but a bunch of people are concerned about a decline in culture and it’s a known risk of growing internet forums, and Eliezer is talking about the proliferation of undiscriminating skeptics, and I saw a forum collapse from it myself, doesn’t it make sense to talk about whether growth would destroy LessWrong before speeding up growth?
People were quick to up vote my growth post like there’s no tomorrow. It was the most popular post in almost a month. Then I write a post about the downsides of growth, and it’s down voted to the point of being hidden. Might this be optimism bias, normalcy bias, or denial at work? I don’t think that the rejections stated are the true rejection.
I see my name being taken kinda-in-vain here. I wasn’t saying “LW is about to be consumed by an Eternal September” but something nearer to “If we take the course Epiphany is proposing, we may inflict an Eternal September upon ourselves”. I think the same may be true for some of the other people you mention, but I haven’t gone back to check exactly what they said.
Yes, with two minor caveats—probably too minor to merit half the number of words I’m about to spend on one of them :-).
1 As I already mentioned, the same concerns may apply to some of the other people you listed; I haven’t checked.
2 I’m still there bulking up your list of people worried about “this eternal September business”, even though what I was expressing concern about was something more specific. Your edit means that you aren’t misrepresenting me any more, but it’s still a little odd. Imagine, to take an melodramatically exaggerated example, that a creationist website puts up a list of “people who think Darwin was wrong”, and one of the people on the list is, say, Richard Dawkins. Even with a note explaining “Specifically, thinks that science has moved on since the 1850s and we now know lots of details Darwin didn’t” his name would be out of place on that list.
The reason why #2 is not a big deal is that, actually, I do think there is a real possibility that (even without deliberate attempts to grow) LW—or any other community—will suffer from “dilution” over time. But that isn’t what I said in the discussion you linked to :-). (And I certainly wouldn’t say that it’s likely to destroy LW, or anything like that.)
People were quick to vote up my growth post like there’s no tomorrow. It was the most popular post for a month. Then I write a post about the downsides of growth, and it’s downvoted to the point of being hidden. Might this be optimism bias / denial talking?
Sometimes popularity does not correlate with good ideas; especially when unpopular things need to be done. Forum moderation triggers our hierarchy instincts. We don’t want trolling here, but any specific action against trolling feels dangerous; our instincts scream at us that the moderator is taking too much power and will certainly abuse it. We imagine a hypothetical scenario where the rules could be used against us, and we get a paranoid feeling that this is exactly what will happen.
For instance, now we have the new rule that replying to low-karma votes costs you some karma. Suddenly everyone imagines a situation where it would be reasonable to reply to a negative-karma post, and ignores that the prior probability of that is much lower than the prior probability of a negative-karma post not worth replying (but receiving many replies anyway).
It’s the “better be safe than sorry” bias talking, which means ignoring the costs of being “safe”. We want to be certain that no negative-karma comment worth replying goes unnoticed, ever. The costs in our time and attention be damned.
Perhaps your article was not about this, but… it just came at the wrong time, when it’s popular to oppose website moderation.
I think it’s especially telling that their main objections to this post are “It’s long.” and “It’s a meta thread.” while this popular post on growth definitely qualifies as a meta thread and the most popular post I’ve ever seen here is over three times longer than this thread. If they didn’t like meta topics, they’d have voted my growth post into oblivion. If they didn’t like long posts, they’d never have been interested in the sequences. If they didn’t like newbies posting meta threads, they would not have up voted my popular growth post to the point where it was the most popular post in almost a month.
None of these are the true rejection. On an individual level, maybe. On a group level, no.
“It’s long.” and “It’s a meta thread.” are both simplified versions of the actual objections. The full versions are “It took too long to come to a point so I gave up reading” and “It’s the umpteenth meta thread in the last week and I’m tired of them”, respectively.
You’ll note that the three-times-longer post you link to goes to great lengths to summarize its key points in the first few paragraphs. The structure of the post is also clear, and there are even three separate objections that people can read and address individually. Also, part of the “length” argument might be that you have page-long paragraphs with no breaks in them, which is harder to read.
Likewise, the growth post is a different kind of meta thread. It starts a new discussion and has data to back it up; although I disagree with pretty much everything in it, I saw no reason to downvote it. On the other hand, the current post is just rehashing the endless discussions we’ve had over the past few weeks that doesn’t seem to bring many new points to the table. When people say “we don’t want a new meta thread” they mean “we don’t want a new thread to discuss the same things that the last three meta threads were filled with.”
I should have asked questions but my attitude was wrong. Instead I fell back on thinking habits that work to explain the behaviors of non-intellectuals. Now that I know more about LW’s reasons for having those types of rejections, (which were unexpected for me), I can see why this would be taken as insulting. I think I understand criticisms 1 and 2. I am trying to understand.
I don’t think of myself as poorly informed (though nobody does)
I do! (Think of myself as poorly informed.)
(More seriously, the sense in which you use “poorly informed” is unclear, obviously on most topics one is poorly informed, but perhaps in the context where a person thinks themselves to be well-informed, they don’t simultaneously think themselves poorly informed. Belief in belief type situations might enable that though, where you believe that you believe to be well-informed, but you know that you aren’t.)
I always seem to assume they’ll want to know. Maybe that’s an odd habit.
You are referring to beliefs, which should be judged by their truth, not their oddness or the time spent holding them (“habit”).
I don’t see being less verbose as a good way to convey all relevant information.
Most of the information you present doesn’t seem particularly relevant to me, and I expect to others as well. The topics you discuss are important, but it seems possible to summarize central points of your posts in something like 5 times less text, which might result in people actually reading them.
all the warning signs Alicorn said lower down are accurate, and I would also like to say that if you had made a post saying concisely and clearly that you were offering to make website changes yourself to help, I would’ve been upvoting you instead. I start reading one of your posts and pattern matches in my head to something that’s not worth getting to the bottom of.
Just to be clear, this free work you talk about implies submitting Python / Javascript code on Github, right? And not “telling the programmers what they should do”, something which seems much less in demand?
I am capable of doing the programming myself, correct. I haven’t offered LessWrong a blank check, but I feel strongly about eternal September protection, so I’m willing to code it myself. If they want something else, they can ask, although motivation level is a key factor.
Has it occurred to you that the reason I am talking about making website changes is because I have volunteered to do some work for free? I could just stop discussing it in the discussions, but then you may get random changes. Or I could just not volunteer. But then you get no free work. Which do you prefer?
It’s unlikely that this would occur to someone, so this should be a statement and not a rhetorical question (since it’s a question, I’m still not certain if it’s a statement, and if so what it means more specifically). The choice you describe is a false trichotomy. For example, you could be discussing the changes, but in a less verbose manner (this takes care of shminux’s complaint), or you could only summarize after you’ve finished designing them and were preparing to move to implementation (this takes care of suddenness of changes, allows revision).
Ok, just because he commented about the threads doesn’t mean he read any of them to find out I’m volunteering. You’re right.
I don’t see being less verbose as a good way to convey all relevant information. I guess this is too complicated for people to want to be involved in it. Maybe they don’t care that much or just want someone to figure it out for them or something. I never seem to assume that, though. I always seem to assume they’ll want to know. Maybe that’s an odd habit.
Still, I have a hard time understanding why they’d seek to censor somebody talking about something that was relevant, and could be important, that other people do want to talk about.
If I’m right that this place is at risk, we’re talking about the end of LessWrong. I could wait until I wasn’t a new user to discuss it, but I don’t know how long that takes or how much time is left. It makes very little sense to wait when something is both important and could happen at any time. So, being discouraged by others on this feels like senseless chaos.
Especially the guy who was like “You wrote too many posts I don’t want!”—that is just ironic!
Thanks for talking to me about this, Vladimir. (:
It is helping. (:
Your writing does tend to be verbose—the amount of interesting surprise per amount of text is low.
Part of the problem seems to be repetition among articles as well as within them.
Judging the amount of redundancy needed and then supplying good quality redundancy is a hard problem, and I think most people just have a habitual redundancy level. (Mine may be too low.) I haven’t seen an overt discussion of how to do redundancy well anywhere.
Many parts of this comment pattern-match to the poorly informed ranter type we get here that I was talking about earlier. (You don’t match overall, but sometimes people don’t seem to, at first...)
Well thanks for not insta-judging me. I hate it when that happens. I don’t think of myself as poorly informed (though most don’t think of themselves that way) but I know I am intense and can get really verbose. It seems like the component causing the problem right now is being verbose. I’m not sure what you want me to learn from your comment, but that’s what I’m taking away from it.
Here’s a point by point on what patterns you’re matching if that’ll help, but after that I want to end the thread because I find you kind of frustrating to talk to.
Response to feedback about how to talk to us: denying that that’s how to talk to us.
Subtly derisive remarks about others’ virtue (tolerance for complexity, commitment to site, interest level, initiative, etc.)
Passive-aggressive assertion about self-exceptionalism and your rare, yet unfailing tendency to see the best in others even when constantly disappointed—budding martyr complex.
Ignorance claim that happens to oblige other people to justify wanting you to stop doing something. Trigger-happy use of the word “censor”. Declaration of relevance, unsupported. Declaration of support from unspecified others.
Doomsaying. Also, you’re conveniently the only one who has noticed this Terrible Danger.
It’s an emergency! So, exceptionalism!
Nope, no rhyme or reason to what others are up to, just people who you’ve mysteriously chosen to hang out with acting at random.
This seems to me like a misunderstanding or a hearing-past of the point you’re responding to.
And then you end with a cookie for the person who engaged with you.
I know it can be tiring to explain to frustrating people why they are frustrating. Thanks for taking the time to type this up. Hopefully I’m good enough at taking criticism that I won’t stay frustrating long.
This seems rather harsh, given what Eliezer has been saying. If the person with ultimate power over the forum has been talking about the site “going to hell” it has to be expected that the language of doom will rub off on new users. This isn’t to say Epiphany matches patterns any less but we could perhaps avoid conveying isolation.
Actually, this eternal September business was preceded by the concerns of other people in my LessWrong could grow a lot but we’re doing it wrong thread:
Vladimir_M
CronoDAS
gjm (Specifically concerned about intentional growth that I proposed causing eternal September.)
beoShaffer
Risto_Saarelma
More people expressed concern when I talked about preventing it:
cousin_it
Xachariah
People are still expressing concern in this very thread:
Konkvistador
Armok_GoB
If there’s a volunteer interested in working on growth, and it looks like lots of growth is possible, but a bunch of people are concerned about a decline in culture and it’s a known risk of growing internet forums, and Eliezer is talking about the proliferation of undiscriminating skeptics, and I saw a forum collapse from it myself, doesn’t it make sense to talk about whether growth would destroy LessWrong before speeding up growth?
People were quick to up vote my growth post like there’s no tomorrow. It was the most popular post in almost a month. Then I write a post about the downsides of growth, and it’s down voted to the point of being hidden. Might this be optimism bias, normalcy bias, or denial at work? I don’t think that the rejections stated are the true rejection.
I see my name being taken kinda-in-vain here. I wasn’t saying “LW is about to be consumed by an Eternal September” but something nearer to “If we take the course Epiphany is proposing, we may inflict an Eternal September upon ourselves”. I think the same may be true for some of the other people you mention, but I haven’t gone back to check exactly what they said.
Did my edit solve this, Gjm?
Yes, with two minor caveats—probably too minor to merit half the number of words I’m about to spend on one of them :-).
1 As I already mentioned, the same concerns may apply to some of the other people you listed; I haven’t checked.
2 I’m still there bulking up your list of people worried about “this eternal September business”, even though what I was expressing concern about was something more specific. Your edit means that you aren’t misrepresenting me any more, but it’s still a little odd. Imagine, to take an melodramatically exaggerated example, that a creationist website puts up a list of “people who think Darwin was wrong”, and one of the people on the list is, say, Richard Dawkins. Even with a note explaining “Specifically, thinks that science has moved on since the 1850s and we now know lots of details Darwin didn’t” his name would be out of place on that list.
The reason why #2 is not a big deal is that, actually, I do think there is a real possibility that (even without deliberate attempts to grow) LW—or any other community—will suffer from “dilution” over time. But that isn’t what I said in the discussion you linked to :-). (And I certainly wouldn’t say that it’s likely to destroy LW, or anything like that.)
Okay, well it’s up to you, Gjm. I will remove you completely if you request.
Given the presence of this discussion, I don’t think that’s necessary.
Sometimes popularity does not correlate with good ideas; especially when unpopular things need to be done. Forum moderation triggers our hierarchy instincts. We don’t want trolling here, but any specific action against trolling feels dangerous; our instincts scream at us that the moderator is taking too much power and will certainly abuse it. We imagine a hypothetical scenario where the rules could be used against us, and we get a paranoid feeling that this is exactly what will happen.
For instance, now we have the new rule that replying to low-karma votes costs you some karma. Suddenly everyone imagines a situation where it would be reasonable to reply to a negative-karma post, and ignores that the prior probability of that is much lower than the prior probability of a negative-karma post not worth replying (but receiving many replies anyway).
It’s the “better be safe than sorry” bias talking, which means ignoring the costs of being “safe”. We want to be certain that no negative-karma comment worth replying goes unnoticed, ever. The costs in our time and attention be damned.
Perhaps your article was not about this, but… it just came at the wrong time, when it’s popular to oppose website moderation.
I think it’s especially telling that their main objections to this post are “It’s long.” and “It’s a meta thread.” while this popular post on growth definitely qualifies as a meta thread and the most popular post I’ve ever seen here is over three times longer than this thread. If they didn’t like meta topics, they’d have voted my growth post into oblivion. If they didn’t like long posts, they’d never have been interested in the sequences. If they didn’t like newbies posting meta threads, they would not have up voted my popular growth post to the point where it was the most popular post in almost a month.
None of these are the true rejection. On an individual level, maybe. On a group level, no.
“It’s long.” and “It’s a meta thread.” are both simplified versions of the actual objections. The full versions are “It took too long to come to a point so I gave up reading” and “It’s the umpteenth meta thread in the last week and I’m tired of them”, respectively.
You’ll note that the three-times-longer post you link to goes to great lengths to summarize its key points in the first few paragraphs. The structure of the post is also clear, and there are even three separate objections that people can read and address individually. Also, part of the “length” argument might be that you have page-long paragraphs with no breaks in them, which is harder to read.
Likewise, the growth post is a different kind of meta thread. It starts a new discussion and has data to back it up; although I disagree with pretty much everything in it, I saw no reason to downvote it. On the other hand, the current post is just rehashing the endless discussions we’ve had over the past few weeks that doesn’t seem to bring many new points to the table. When people say “we don’t want a new meta thread” they mean “we don’t want a new thread to discuss the same things that the last three meta threads were filled with.”
Thank you for this theory, Viliam. (:
I should have asked questions but my attitude was wrong. Instead I fell back on thinking habits that work to explain the behaviors of non-intellectuals. Now that I know more about LW’s reasons for having those types of rejections, (which were unexpected for me), I can see why this would be taken as insulting. I think I understand criticisms 1 and 2. I am trying to understand.
I noticed the Terrible Danger years ago, I’m just not as eloquent and don’t have the guts to back up my beliefs with volunteer labour.
I do! (Think of myself as poorly informed.)
(More seriously, the sense in which you use “poorly informed” is unclear, obviously on most topics one is poorly informed, but perhaps in the context where a person thinks themselves to be well-informed, they don’t simultaneously think themselves poorly informed. Belief in belief type situations might enable that though, where you believe that you believe to be well-informed, but you know that you aren’t.)
You are referring to beliefs, which should be judged by their truth, not their oddness or the time spent holding them (“habit”).
Most of the information you present doesn’t seem particularly relevant to me, and I expect to others as well. The topics you discuss are important, but it seems possible to summarize central points of your posts in something like 5 times less text, which might result in people actually reading them.
all the warning signs Alicorn said lower down are accurate, and I would also like to say that if you had made a post saying concisely and clearly that you were offering to make website changes yourself to help, I would’ve been upvoting you instead. I start reading one of your posts and pattern matches in my head to something that’s not worth getting to the bottom of.
I’m not the only one who has noticed the danger. At least seven other people are concerned about this, and so is Eliezer.
Just to be clear, this free work you talk about implies submitting Python / Javascript code on Github, right? And not “telling the programmers what they should do”, something which seems much less in demand?
I am capable of doing the programming myself, correct. I haven’t offered LessWrong a blank check, but I feel strongly about eternal September protection, so I’m willing to code it myself. If they want something else, they can ask, although motivation level is a key factor.
Thank you.