I could imagine an admin feature that literally just lets Said comment a few times on a post, but if he gets significantly downvoted, gives him a wordcount-based rate-limit that forces him to wrap up his current points quickly and then call it a day.
I feel like this incentivizes comments to be short, which doesn’t make them less aggravating to people. For example, IIRC people have complained about him commenting “Examples?”. This is not going to be hit hard by a rate limit.
‘Examples?’ is one of the rationalist skills most lacking on LW2 and if I had the patience for arguments I used to have, I would be writing those comments myself. (Said is being generous in asking for only 1. I would be asking for 3, like Eliezer.) Anyone complaining about that should be ashamed that they either (1) cannot come up with any, or (2) cannot forthrightly admit “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV”.
I join Ray and Gwern in noting that asking for examples is generically good (and that I’ve never felt or argued to the contrary). Since my stance on this was called into question, I elaborated:
If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say “Examples?” would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say “Examples?” would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn’t do their fair share of the labor.
“Do you have examples?” is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of “are we both contributing?” don’t need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I’m the asker/learner and you’re the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
My recent experience has been that saying “this is half-baked” is not met with a subsequent shift in commentary, meeting the “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV” tone.
I think it would be nice if LW could have both tones:
I’m claiming this quite confidently; bring on the challenges, I’m ready to convince
I have a gesture in a direction I’m pretty sure has merit, but am not trying to e.g. claim that if others don’t update to my position they’re wrong; this is a sapling and I’d like help growing it, not help stepping on it.
Trying to do things in the latter tone on LW has felt, to me, extremely anti-rewarding of late, and I’m hoping that will change, because I think a lot of good work happens there. That’s not to say that the former tone is bad; it feels like they are twin pillars of intellectual progress.
Noting that my very first lesswrong post, back in the LW1 days, was an example of #2. I was wrong on some of the key parts of the intuition I was trying to convey, and ChristianKl corrected me. As an introduction to posting on LW, that was pretty good—I’d hate to think that’s no longer acceptable.
At the same time, there is less room for it as the community got much bigger, and I’d probably weak downvote a similar post today, rather than trying to engage with a similar mistake, given how much content there is. Not sure if there is anything that can be done about this, but it’s an issue.
fwiw that seems like a pretty great interaction. ChristanKl seems to be usefully engaging with your frame while noting things about it that don’t seem to work, seems (to me) to have optimized somewhat for being helpful, and also the conversation just wraps up pretty efficiently. (and I think this is all a higher bar than what I mean to be pushing for, i.e. having only one of those properties would have been fine)
I agree—but think that now, if and when similarly initial thoughts on a conceptual model are proposed, there is less ability or willingness to engage, especially with people who are fundamentally confused about some aspect of the issue. This is largely, I believe, due to the volume of new participants, and the reduced engagement for those types of posts.
I want to reiterate that I actually think the part where Said says “examples?” is basically just good (and is only bad insofar as it creates a looming worry of particular kinds of frustrating, unproductive and time-consuming conversations that are likely to follow in some subsets of discussions)
(edit: I actually am pretty frustrated that “examples?” became the go-to example people talked about and reified as a kinda rude thing Said did. I think I basically agree this process is good:
Alice → writes confident posts without examples
Bob → says “examples?”
Alice → either gives (at least one, and yeah ideally 3) examples, or says “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV”, or doesn’t reply but feels a bit chagrined.
I feel like this incentivizes comments to be short, which doesn’t make them less aggravating to people. For example, IIRC people have complained about him commenting “Examples?”. This is not going to be hit hard by a rate limit.
‘Examples?’ is one of the rationalist skills most lacking on LW2 and if I had the patience for arguments I used to have, I would be writing those comments myself. (Said is being generous in asking for only 1. I would be asking for 3, like Eliezer.) Anyone complaining about that should be ashamed that they either (1) cannot come up with any, or (2) cannot forthrightly admit “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV”.
Spending my last remaining comment here.
I join Ray and Gwern in noting that asking for examples is generically good (and that I’ve never felt or argued to the contrary). Since my stance on this was called into question, I elaborated:
My recent experience has been that saying “this is half-baked” is not met with a subsequent shift in commentary, meeting the “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV” tone.
I think it would be nice if LW could have both tones:
I’m claiming this quite confidently; bring on the challenges, I’m ready to convince
I have a gesture in a direction I’m pretty sure has merit, but am not trying to e.g. claim that if others don’t update to my position they’re wrong; this is a sapling and I’d like help growing it, not help stepping on it.
Trying to do things in the latter tone on LW has felt, to me, extremely anti-rewarding of late, and I’m hoping that will change, because I think a lot of good work happens there. That’s not to say that the former tone is bad; it feels like they are twin pillars of intellectual progress.
Noting that my very first lesswrong post, back in the LW1 days, was an example of #2. I was wrong on some of the key parts of the intuition I was trying to convey, and ChristianKl corrected me. As an introduction to posting on LW, that was pretty good—I’d hate to think that’s no longer acceptable.
At the same time, there is less room for it as the community got much bigger, and I’d probably weak downvote a similar post today, rather than trying to engage with a similar mistake, given how much content there is. Not sure if there is anything that can be done about this, but it’s an issue.
fwiw that seems like a pretty great interaction. ChristanKl seems to be usefully engaging with your frame while noting things about it that don’t seem to work, seems (to me) to have optimized somewhat for being helpful, and also the conversation just wraps up pretty efficiently. (and I think this is all a higher bar than what I mean to be pushing for, i.e. having only one of those properties would have been fine)
I agree—but think that now, if and when similarly initial thoughts on a conceptual model are proposed, there is less ability or willingness to engage, especially with people who are fundamentally confused about some aspect of the issue. This is largely, I believe, due to the volume of new participants, and the reduced engagement for those types of posts.
I want to reiterate that I actually think the part where Said says “examples?” is basically just good (and is only bad insofar as it creates a looming worry of particular kinds of frustrating, unproductive and time-consuming conversations that are likely to follow in some subsets of discussions)
(edit: I actually am pretty frustrated that “examples?” became the go-to example people talked about and reified as a kinda rude thing Said did. I think I basically agree this process is good:
Alice → writes confident posts without examples
Bob → says “examples?”
Alice → either gives (at least one, and yeah ideally 3) examples, or says “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV”, or doesn’t reply but feels a bit chagrined.
)
Oops, sorry for saying something that probabilistically implied a strawman of you.