Do you have any proposal for how to solve the problems of people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what’s going on and no way for the error to get corrected?
Yes I’ve found it’s a major problem in practice, everywhere. I think most discussion interactions at LW end either at key moments or earlier. Hardly any make significant progress. The reasons they end early are rarely explained. Would examples help? There are multiple examples in this topic, e.g. remizidae dropped the discussion, as did G Gordon Worley III and Dagon.
note: i don’t want to particularly blame or criticize them compared to the people who didn’t write anything at all and would have done similarly well or worse. but discussion interactions like these are problematic – not taken far enough to actually really get anywhere – and typical. discussions where people try to actually resolve disagreements are uncommon, and when those begin they are usually dropped at some point too without much in the way of transparency, post-mortem, conclusion, etc.
regarding your article: I think a 2 more reply warning would be a large improvement over what people typically do.
people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what’s going on and no way for the error to get corrected?
This is a problem you plausibly have a solution for. I mean, I still haven’t read this article and I probably won’t, but I could believe that there are social engineering ways to avoid this problem, and I could believe you’ve identified one. “Tapping out in two” plausibly also suggests a way.
But I’m not convinced we actually have this problem. No one in this thread has obviously done the problematic behaviour. We don’t know why people stopped replying when they did, but there are surely explanations other than “trying to evade arguments and dodge questions”.
(To be precise, Gordon and remizidae haven’t replied yet. I can’t rule out that they intend to later, but it doesn’t really matter.)
It seems to me that you’re answering as if I’d asked about a different problem, the problem of “most discussions end without making any progress”.
I agree LW has that problem. (Less than most comparable places.) But I don’t think you or I or anyone else has a plausible solution to it, though I do think there are marginal improvements to be made. I don’t think simply taking these discussions further is particularly likely to help, at least not enough to justify the cost.
I note that in Dagon’s thread, he currently has the last word—he announced that he intended to stop, but he also said other things in that comment, and you didn’t reply to them. And I note that in this thread, remizidae asked “why is being busy not an adequate excuse?” and you haven’t replied to that, either. (Or you replied with a question whichMy sense is that you’re trying to hold people to standards you fall short of.
Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.
When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it’s not very provable. Your response is: they didn’t explain that they left for bad reasons, so you (curi) can’t really prove anything! Indeed. It’s ambiguous. That’s a large part of the problem.
I could go into detail about some of the specifics that I didn’t reply to, explain why I think some of the things people wrote were low quality, argue my case, answer every question, etc. but I don’t have a reasonable expectation that they would be responsive to the discussion. Different discussion norms or explicit request could change that.
My sense is that you’re trying to hold people to standards you fall short of.
I proposed that if both people want a serious discussion that tries to make progress and doesn’t end arbitrarily, then here’s some stuff you can do. I also proposed that the general norms here could be improved.
Me responding more energetically and thoroughly to people with different preferred discussion norms than me will not solve the problem. And yes I’ve already tried it (thousands of times).
I could also reply to people and say why I think their messages (as a whole or specific parts) are low quality so I don’t want to reply, but please correct me if my analysis is wrong. I have tried this too but people mostly rather dislike it. I am open to doing it by request.
I could also reply to people asking if they want a substantive discussion. I have tried that too. Yes answers are rare and doing it a lot here would annoy people.
So I’ve put in my bio here a note that people can make a request if they want a substantive discussion with me, and I’ve talked some about the general issue. I also have more detailed policies posted on my websites, including public promises re how anyone can get my attention and get responses, and I have established different discussion norms at my own forums.
When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it’s not very provable.
Right, so my very first comment in this thread pointed out a way you could collect evidence on this question. You can look for patterns. If a particular user has a habit of dropping out of threads when they seem to be “losing”, then that’s evidence that they’re doing so to evade arguments and dodge questions. If LW users as a group have a habit of doing that, it’s also evidence that that’s a common reason people do it.
But as far as I can tell you haven’t looked for evidence like that, either for individual users or for LW as a whole. When I asked if we have this problem, you didn’t point to patterns. You just pointed to individual instances of people stopping replying for unclear reasons. But there are plenty of reasons someone might stop replying.
And so I still have to wonder: do we in practice have this problem on LW? Is it in fact common here for people to leave discussions to evade arguments and dodge questions? You’ve given me no reason to think it is.
(Of course it would be super duper surprising if no one had ever done that. So perhaps we should be asking questions like “how often does it happen here, how bad is it when it happens, what does it trade off against, how much would it be worth to make a marginal improvement”. Maybe your full post is more nuanced about things like that, but your description of the problem so far has seemed fairly… black-and-white? When remizidae pointed out that there were tradeoffs, you asked them if they could propose solutions. Whether they can propose solutions or not doesn’t change the fact that there are tradeoffs. So far in this thread I haven’t seen you acknowledge the tradeoffs.)
Something I notice is that… so far, this subthread seems to have been entirely useless, and it’s taking a lot more energy than most of the comments I write on LW. I’ll still give one more response, but...
This feels mean, and I don’t like that, but it also feels like an important part of what’s going on for me right now and relevant to the conversation and I don’t want to dance around it, so, uh, here goes I guess: to be frank, I don’t blame people for stopping replying to you.
Do you have any proposal for how to solve the problems of people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what’s going on and no way for the error to get corrected?
Noticing patterns. If someone seems to be doing that a lot, we can point it out.
This relies on the population being able to sustain reputations, but that feels like a prerequisite for intellectual discussion anyway, I think.
Do you think this is a problem in practice on LW, and/or other places you visit?
To the main article: I only skimmed, but my previous tapping out in two is relevant. I wouldn’t want to impose it as a requirement on people though.
Yes I’ve found it’s a major problem in practice, everywhere. I think most discussion interactions at LW end either at key moments or earlier. Hardly any make significant progress. The reasons they end early are rarely explained. Would examples help? There are multiple examples in this topic, e.g. remizidae dropped the discussion, as did G Gordon Worley III and Dagon.
note: i don’t want to particularly blame or criticize them compared to the people who didn’t write anything at all and would have done similarly well or worse. but discussion interactions like these are problematic – not taken far enough to actually really get anywhere – and typical. discussions where people try to actually resolve disagreements are uncommon, and when those begin they are usually dropped at some point too without much in the way of transparency, post-mortem, conclusion, etc.
regarding your article: I think a 2 more reply warning would be a large improvement over what people typically do.
The problem in question was
This is a problem you plausibly have a solution for. I mean, I still haven’t read this article and I probably won’t, but I could believe that there are social engineering ways to avoid this problem, and I could believe you’ve identified one. “Tapping out in two” plausibly also suggests a way.
But I’m not convinced we actually have this problem. No one in this thread has obviously done the problematic behaviour. We don’t know why people stopped replying when they did, but there are surely explanations other than “trying to evade arguments and dodge questions”.
(To be precise, Gordon and remizidae haven’t replied yet. I can’t rule out that they intend to later, but it doesn’t really matter.)
It seems to me that you’re answering as if I’d asked about a different problem, the problem of “most discussions end without making any progress”.
I agree LW has that problem. (Less than most comparable places.) But I don’t think you or I or anyone else has a plausible solution to it, though I do think there are marginal improvements to be made. I don’t think simply taking these discussions further is particularly likely to help, at least not enough to justify the cost.
I note that in Dagon’s thread, he currently has the last word—he announced that he intended to stop, but he also said other things in that comment, and you didn’t reply to them. And I note that in this thread, remizidae asked “why is being busy not an adequate excuse?” and you haven’t replied to that, either. (Or you replied with a question whichMy sense is that you’re trying to hold people to standards you fall short of.
Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.
When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it’s not very provable. Your response is: they didn’t explain that they left for bad reasons, so you (curi) can’t really prove anything! Indeed. It’s ambiguous. That’s a large part of the problem.
I could go into detail about some of the specifics that I didn’t reply to, explain why I think some of the things people wrote were low quality, argue my case, answer every question, etc. but I don’t have a reasonable expectation that they would be responsive to the discussion. Different discussion norms or explicit request could change that.
I proposed that if both people want a serious discussion that tries to make progress and doesn’t end arbitrarily, then here’s some stuff you can do. I also proposed that the general norms here could be improved.
Me responding more energetically and thoroughly to people with different preferred discussion norms than me will not solve the problem. And yes I’ve already tried it (thousands of times).
I could also reply to people and say why I think their messages (as a whole or specific parts) are low quality so I don’t want to reply, but please correct me if my analysis is wrong. I have tried this too but people mostly rather dislike it. I am open to doing it by request.
I could also reply to people asking if they want a substantive discussion. I have tried that too. Yes answers are rare and doing it a lot here would annoy people.
So I’ve put in my bio here a note that people can make a request if they want a substantive discussion with me, and I’ve talked some about the general issue. I also have more detailed policies posted on my websites, including public promises re how anyone can get my attention and get responses, and I have established different discussion norms at my own forums.
Right, so my very first comment in this thread pointed out a way you could collect evidence on this question. You can look for patterns. If a particular user has a habit of dropping out of threads when they seem to be “losing”, then that’s evidence that they’re doing so to evade arguments and dodge questions. If LW users as a group have a habit of doing that, it’s also evidence that that’s a common reason people do it.
But as far as I can tell you haven’t looked for evidence like that, either for individual users or for LW as a whole. When I asked if we have this problem, you didn’t point to patterns. You just pointed to individual instances of people stopping replying for unclear reasons. But there are plenty of reasons someone might stop replying.
And so I still have to wonder: do we in practice have this problem on LW? Is it in fact common here for people to leave discussions to evade arguments and dodge questions? You’ve given me no reason to think it is.
(Of course it would be super duper surprising if no one had ever done that. So perhaps we should be asking questions like “how often does it happen here, how bad is it when it happens, what does it trade off against, how much would it be worth to make a marginal improvement”. Maybe your full post is more nuanced about things like that, but your description of the problem so far has seemed fairly… black-and-white? When remizidae pointed out that there were tradeoffs, you asked them if they could propose solutions. Whether they can propose solutions or not doesn’t change the fact that there are tradeoffs. So far in this thread I haven’t seen you acknowledge the tradeoffs.)
Something I notice is that… so far, this subthread seems to have been entirely useless, and it’s taking a lot more energy than most of the comments I write on LW. I’ll still give one more response, but...
This feels mean, and I don’t like that, but it also feels like an important part of what’s going on for me right now and relevant to the conversation and I don’t want to dance around it, so, uh, here goes I guess: to be frank, I don’t blame people for stopping replying to you.