If he’s that careless a reader, LW may be better off without him.
I don’t think the problem was careless reading. When you open with a comment about attacking chip fabs without specifying that you mean a government level military and your audience is mainly in a country where everyone has been bathed in the fear of terrorism for years, this is bound to trigger mind kill reactions. You could argue “Good LW’ers should stay rational while thinking about terrorism.” but aside from the fact that everyone has flaws and that’s a pretty common one, more importantly, you seem to overlook the fact that the entire rest of the world can see what you wrote. Humans aren’t known for being rational. They’re known for doing things like burning “witches” and poisoning Socrates. In this time and place, you’re less likely to get us killed by an angry mob, but you could easily provoke the equivalent of that in negative attention. Reddit and The Wall Street Journal have both done articles on Less Wrong recently. Big fish are starting to pay attention to LessWrong. That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke’s older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.
YOU could end up getting that much attention on this site, Gwern, and the attention is not just from us. There are only about 13,000 registered users in the user database, and only 500-1000 of them are active in a given month. That just doesn’t account for all of the traffic to the posts.
Even if it were true that all the people who misread this are schmoes, choosing to leave the site over it may be a perfectly valid application of one’s intelligence. Not associating one’s reputation with a group that is mistakenly thought to be in favor of terrorism is a perfectly sane survival move. I wondered if I should quit, myself before deciding to suggest that you edit the post.
Considering the amount of attention that LessWrong is getting, and the fact that you are a very prominent member here whose words will be taken (or mistaken) as an indication of the group’s mentality, do you not think it’s a good idea to avoid making others look bad?
Mm, maybe. It is difficult for me to see such things; as I pointed out in another comment, before I wrote this, I spent scores of hours reading up on and researching terrorism and indeed posted that to LW as well; to me, terrorism is such an obviously useless approach—for anything but false flag operations—that nothing needs to be said about it.
That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke’s older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO—one will spend much more time on a book than even a long essay. 1344 page views doesn’t impress me. For example, for this October, gwern.net had 51x more or 69,311 total page views. The lifetime total for this essay on my site is already at 7,515, and most of that is from before I deleted the version here so I expect that will boost the numbers a bit in the future.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO
Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author’s new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that—“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.
I’m not trying to say Luke’s article is a “bestseller” (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.
Big fish are starting to pay attention to LessWrong. That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views.
So, much less traffic than gwern.net gets in a month, on an arguably less controversial topic than the usual gwern.net fare.
If you use LessWrong for beta testing, you’re not just getting a critique from a handful of friends, you’re informing the entire world about who LessWrong is.
He’s using the IRC channel, #lesswrong, as his beta testers. #lesswrong is a different thing from LessWrong.
So, much less traffic than gwern.net gets in a month, on an arguably less controversial topic than the usual gwern.net fare.
Then it’s very odd that he doesn’t seem to care that people are mistaking him as being in support of terrorism.
He’s using the IRC channel, #lesswrong, as his beta testers. #lesswrong is a different thing from LessWrong.
Oh dear.
I assumed from the context (the fact that this thing got out onto the site without him appearing to know / care that people would think it was pro terrorism) that he was referring to the website.
Does everyone here have Asperger’s or something?
Note: I removed the part in my post that referred to using LW as beta testers.
It would be incredibly improbable. Not-so-subtly suggesting your interlocutors aren’t neurotypical is such a wonderful debate tactic, though; it’d be a pity to let the base rate get in the way.
I’m genuinely confused at this point and just trying to figure out how this happened. From my point of view, the fact that this got posted without him realizing that it was going to be mistaken as a pro-terrorism piece is, by itself, surprising. That it was beta tested by other LW’ers first and STILL made it out like this is even more surprising.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything, paper-machine. This isn’t a debate. I am just going WTF.
I think you should consider the hypothesis that you are over-reacting before the hypothesis that lots of different beta readers are all under-reacting.
(Which in turn is more likely than the hypothesis that the beta readers have a neurological condition that causes them to under-react.)
I think you should consider the hypothesis that you are over-reacting
Except that I didn’t over-react. I wasn’t upset. I just went “Is this a piece endorsing terrorism?” looked into it further, realized this interpretation is false, and wandered away for a while.
Then I saw mention after mention around the site saying that people were creeped out by this piece.
I came back and saw that someone had left because of it—like, for real, as in they haven’t posted since they said they were leaving due to the piece. And then I went “Wow a lot of people are creeped out by this. This is making LessWrong look bad. Even if it IS a misinterpretation, thinking that this post supports terrorism could be a serious PR problem.”
My position is still that beta testers should ideally catch any potential PR disasters, and I don’t think that’s an over-reaction. At all.
(Which in turn is more likely than the hypothesis that the beta readers have a neurological condition that causes them to under-react.)
For the record, even though it did occur to me for a moment as a possible explanation, I didn’t say that because I really believed it was likely that everyone here has Asperger’s. That would be stupid. I said it as an expression of surprise. I figured it would be obvious that it was an expression of surprise and not a rational assessment.
I really didn’t expect that. As I see it, a post that multiple people took as being in support of terrorism and somebody quit over is definitely sensational enough to generate a buzz. Surely, you have seen reporters take things out of context. Eliezer has already been targeted for a hatchet job by one reporter.
There was once an occasion where a reporter wrote about me, and did a hatchet job. It was my first time being reported on, and I was completely blindsided by it. I’d known that reporters sometimes wrote hatchet jobs, but I’d thought that it would require malice—I hadn’t begun to imagine that someone might write a hatchet job just because it was a cliche, an easy way to generate a few column inches. So I drew upon my own powers of narration, and wrote an autobiographical story on what it felt like to be reported on for the first time—that horrible feeling of violation. I’ve never sent that story off anywhere, though it’s a fine and short piece of writing as I judge it.
For it occurred to me, while I was writing, that journalism is an example of unchecked power—the reporter gets to present only one side of the story, any way they like, and there’s nothing that the reported-on can do about it. (If you’ve never been reported on, then take it from me, that’s how it is.) And here I was writing my own story, potentially for publication as traditional journalism, not in an academic forum. I remember realizing that the standards were tremendously lower than in science. That you could get away with damn near anything, so long as it made a good story—that this was the standard in journalism. (If you, having never been reported on yourself, don’t believe me that this is the case, then you’re as naive as I once was.)
RationalWiki sometimes takes stuff out of context. For instance, the Eliezer facts thread has a “fact” where an LWer edited a picture of him speaking beside a diagram that shows a hierarchy of increasingly more intelligent entities including animals, Einstein and God. The LW’er added Eliezer to the diagram, at a level well beyond God. You can see below this that Eliezer had to add a note for RationalWiki because they had apparently made the mistake of taking this photoshopped diagram out of context.
If some idiot who happens to have a RationalWiki account dropped by or a reporter who was hard up for a scoop discovered this, do you think it isn’t likely for them to take it out of context either to make it more sensational or because of mindkill? I, for one, do not think there was anything special about the original post that would prevent it from becoming the subject of a hatchet job.
People act crazy when they’re worried about being attacked. I have a friend who has dual citizenship. He came to visit (America) and was harassed at the airport simply because he lives in a different country and the security guard was paranoid about terrorism. I don’t see this post getting LW shut down by the government or anything, but it could result in something really disappointing like Eliezer being harassed at airports, or something bad in between.
Considering all this, do you still think the risk of bad publicity is insignificant?
Considering all this, do you still think the risk of bad publicity is insignificant?
Pretty much, yeah. The opinion of RationalWiki is probably worth somewhere in between the opinion of 4chan and the opinion of Conservapedia. And people quit forums all the time, that’s not something to worry about.
I see this as a case of “the original version of the article was unclear, and has been edited to make it clearer”. Not a scandal of any kind.
So do I, to all of the above, so you apparently have more faith in humanity than I do in regards to people taking things out of context and acting stupid about it.
There’s a strong feeling in the culture here that it’s virtuous to be able to discuss weird and scary ideas without feeling weirded out or scared. See: torture and dust specks, AI risk, uploading, and so on.
Personally, I agree with you now about this article, because I can see that you and the fellow above and probably others feel strongly about it. But when I read it originally, it never occurred to me to feel creeped out, because I’ve made myself to just think calmly about ideas, at least until they turn into realities—I think many other readers here are the same. Since I don’t feel it automatically, quantifying “how weird” or “how scary” these things are to other people takes a real conscious effort; I forget to do it and I’m not good at it either.
I like entertaining ideas that others find weird and scary, too, and I don’t mind that they’re “weird”. I have nothing against it. Even though my initial reaction was “Does this guy support terrorism?” I was calm enough to investigate and discover that no, he does not support terrorism.
Since I don’t feel it automatically, quantifying “how weird” or “how scary” these things are to other people takes a real conscious effort; I forget to do it and I’m not good at it either.
Yeah, I relate to this. Not on this particular piece though. I’m having total hindsight bias about it, too. I am like “But I see this, how the heck is it not obvious to everyone else!?”
You know what? I think it might be amount of familiarity with Gwern. I’m new and I’ve read some of Gwern’s stuff but I hadn’t encountered his “Terrorism isn’t effective” piece, so I didn’t have any reason to believe Gwern is against terrorism.
Maybe you guys automatically interpreted Gwern’s writing within the context of knowing him, and I didn’t...
I don’t think the problem was careless reading. When you open with a comment about attacking chip fabs without specifying that you mean a government level military and your audience is mainly in a country where everyone has been bathed in the fear of terrorism for years, this is bound to trigger mind kill reactions. You could argue “Good LW’ers should stay rational while thinking about terrorism.” but aside from the fact that everyone has flaws and that’s a pretty common one, more importantly, you seem to overlook the fact that the entire rest of the world can see what you wrote. Humans aren’t known for being rational. They’re known for doing things like burning “witches” and poisoning Socrates. In this time and place, you’re less likely to get us killed by an angry mob, but you could easily provoke the equivalent of that in negative attention. Reddit and The Wall Street Journal have both done articles on Less Wrong recently. Big fish are starting to pay attention to LessWrong. That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke’s older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.
YOU could end up getting that much attention on this site, Gwern, and the attention is not just from us. There are only about 13,000 registered users in the user database, and only 500-1000 of them are active in a given month. That just doesn’t account for all of the traffic to the posts.
Even if it were true that all the people who misread this are schmoes, choosing to leave the site over it may be a perfectly valid application of one’s intelligence. Not associating one’s reputation with a group that is mistakenly thought to be in favor of terrorism is a perfectly sane survival move. I wondered if I should quit, myself before deciding to suggest that you edit the post.
Considering the amount of attention that LessWrong is getting, and the fact that you are a very prominent member here whose words will be taken (or mistaken) as an indication of the group’s mentality, do you not think it’s a good idea to avoid making others look bad?
Mm, maybe. It is difficult for me to see such things; as I pointed out in another comment, before I wrote this, I spent scores of hours reading up on and researching terrorism and indeed posted that to LW as well; to me, terrorism is such an obviously useless approach—for anything but false flag operations—that nothing needs to be said about it.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO—one will spend much more time on a book than even a long essay. 1344 page views doesn’t impress me. For example, for this October,
gwern.nethad 51x more or 69,311 total page views. The lifetime total for this essay on my site is already at 7,515, and most of that is from before I deleted the version here so I expect that will boost the numbers a bit in the future.Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author’s new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that—“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.
I’m not trying to say Luke’s article is a “bestseller” (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.
So, much less traffic than gwern.net gets in a month, on an arguably less controversial topic than the usual gwern.net fare.
He’s using the IRC channel, #lesswrong, as his beta testers. #lesswrong is a different thing from LessWrong.
Then it’s very odd that he doesn’t seem to care that people are mistaking him as being in support of terrorism.
Oh dear.
I assumed from the context (the fact that this thing got out onto the site without him appearing to know / care that people would think it was pro terrorism) that he was referring to the website.
Does everyone here have Asperger’s or something?
Note: I removed the part in my post that referred to using LW as beta testers.
No, almost certainly less than 90% of the people here have Asperger’s!
I’m confused about how this happened. Edit: I think I figured it out.
It would be incredibly improbable. Not-so-subtly suggesting your interlocutors aren’t neurotypical is such a wonderful debate tactic, though; it’d be a pity to let the base rate get in the way.
I’m genuinely confused at this point and just trying to figure out how this happened. From my point of view, the fact that this got posted without him realizing that it was going to be mistaken as a pro-terrorism piece is, by itself, surprising. That it was beta tested by other LW’ers first and STILL made it out like this is even more surprising.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything, paper-machine. This isn’t a debate. I am just going WTF.
I think you should consider the hypothesis that you are over-reacting before the hypothesis that lots of different beta readers are all under-reacting.
(Which in turn is more likely than the hypothesis that the beta readers have a neurological condition that causes them to under-react.)
Except that I didn’t over-react. I wasn’t upset. I just went “Is this a piece endorsing terrorism?” looked into it further, realized this interpretation is false, and wandered away for a while.
Then I saw mention after mention around the site saying that people were creeped out by this piece.
I came back and saw that someone had left because of it—like, for real, as in they haven’t posted since they said they were leaving due to the piece. And then I went “Wow a lot of people are creeped out by this. This is making LessWrong look bad. Even if it IS a misinterpretation, thinking that this post supports terrorism could be a serious PR problem.”
My position is still that beta testers should ideally catch any potential PR disasters, and I don’t think that’s an over-reaction. At all.
For the record, even though it did occur to me for a moment as a possible explanation, I didn’t say that because I really believed it was likely that everyone here has Asperger’s. That would be stupid. I said it as an expression of surprise. I figured it would be obvious that it was an expression of surprise and not a rational assessment.
I think my surprise was due to hindsight bias.
To be specific, the hypothesis I am suggesting is that you are now, currently, over-reacting by calling this a “potential PR disaster”.
I really didn’t expect that. As I see it, a post that multiple people took as being in support of terrorism and somebody quit over is definitely sensational enough to generate a buzz. Surely, you have seen reporters take things out of context. Eliezer has already been targeted for a hatchet job by one reporter.
RationalWiki sometimes takes stuff out of context. For instance, the Eliezer facts thread has a “fact” where an LWer edited a picture of him speaking beside a diagram that shows a hierarchy of increasingly more intelligent entities including animals, Einstein and God. The LW’er added Eliezer to the diagram, at a level well beyond God. You can see below this that Eliezer had to add a note for RationalWiki because they had apparently made the mistake of taking this photoshopped diagram out of context.
If some idiot who happens to have a RationalWiki account dropped by or a reporter who was hard up for a scoop discovered this, do you think it isn’t likely for them to take it out of context either to make it more sensational or because of mindkill? I, for one, do not think there was anything special about the original post that would prevent it from becoming the subject of a hatchet job.
People act crazy when they’re worried about being attacked. I have a friend who has dual citizenship. He came to visit (America) and was harassed at the airport simply because he lives in a different country and the security guard was paranoid about terrorism. I don’t see this post getting LW shut down by the government or anything, but it could result in something really disappointing like Eliezer being harassed at airports, or something bad in between.
Considering all this, do you still think the risk of bad publicity is insignificant?
Pretty much, yeah. The opinion of RationalWiki is probably worth somewhere in between the opinion of 4chan and the opinion of Conservapedia. And people quit forums all the time, that’s not something to worry about.
I see this as a case of “the original version of the article was unclear, and has been edited to make it clearer”. Not a scandal of any kind.
So do I, to all of the above, so you apparently have more faith in humanity than I do in regards to people taking things out of context and acting stupid about it.
There’s a strong feeling in the culture here that it’s virtuous to be able to discuss weird and scary ideas without feeling weirded out or scared. See: torture and dust specks, AI risk, uploading, and so on.
Personally, I agree with you now about this article, because I can see that you and the fellow above and probably others feel strongly about it. But when I read it originally, it never occurred to me to feel creeped out, because I’ve made myself to just think calmly about ideas, at least until they turn into realities—I think many other readers here are the same. Since I don’t feel it automatically, quantifying “how weird” or “how scary” these things are to other people takes a real conscious effort; I forget to do it and I’m not good at it either.
So that’s how it happens.
I like entertaining ideas that others find weird and scary, too, and I don’t mind that they’re “weird”. I have nothing against it. Even though my initial reaction was “Does this guy support terrorism?” I was calm enough to investigate and discover that no, he does not support terrorism.
Yeah, I relate to this. Not on this particular piece though. I’m having total hindsight bias about it, too. I am like “But I see this, how the heck is it not obvious to everyone else!?”
You know what? I think it might be amount of familiarity with Gwern. I’m new and I’ve read some of Gwern’s stuff but I hadn’t encountered his “Terrorism isn’t effective” piece, so I didn’t have any reason to believe Gwern is against terrorism.
Maybe you guys automatically interpreted Gwern’s writing within the context of knowing him, and I didn’t...