But, crucially, I do not think I am capable of describing a model where it is both the case (a) that moderators (i.e., people who have the formally, socially, and technically granted power to enforce rules and norms) exist, and (b) that non-moderators have any enforcement power that isn’t granted by the moderators, or sanctioned by the moderators, or otherwise is an expression of the moderators’ power.
That too, I think 95% of the LessWrong user-base is capable of, so I will leave it to them.
One last reply:
(I mean, really? A college class, of all things, as an example of a social space which supposedly doesn’t have any kind of official moderator? Forgive me for saying so, but this reply seems poorly thought through…)
Indeed, college classes (and classes in-general) seem like an important study since in my experience it is very clear that only a fraction of the norms in those classes get set by the professor/teacher, and that clearly there are many other sources of norms and the associated enforcement of norms.
Experiencing those bottom-up norms is a shared experience since almost everyone went through high-school and college, so seems like a good reference.
Indeed, college classes (and classes in-general) seem like an important study since in my experience it is very clear that only a fraction of the norms in those classes get set by the professor/teacher, and that clearly there are many other sources of norms and the associated enforcement of norms.
Of course this is true; it is not just the instructor, but also the college administration, etc., that function as the setter and enforcer of norms.
But it sure isn’t the students!
(And this is even more true in high school. The students have no power to set any norms, except that which is given them by the instructor/administration/etc.—and even that rarely happens.)
The plot point of many high school movies is often about what is and isn’t acceptable to do, socially. For example, Regina in Mean Girls enforced a number of rules on her clique, and attempted with significant but not complete success to enforce it on others.
That too, I think 95% of the LessWrong user-base is capable of, so I will leave it to them.
I do think it would be useful for you to say how much time should elapse without a satisfactory reply by some representative members of this 95% before we can reasonably evaluate whether this prediction has been proven true.
Oh, the central latent variable in my uncertainty here is “is anyone willing to do this?” not “is anyone capable of this?”. My honest guess is the answer to that is “no” because this kind of conversation really doesn’t seem fun, and we are 7 levels deep into a 400 comment post.
My guess is if you actively reach out and put effort into trying to get someone to explain it to you, by e.g. putting out a bounty, or making a top-level post, or somehow send a costly signal that you are genuinely interested in understanding, then I do think there is a much higher chance of that, but I don’t currently expect that to happen.
You do understand, I hope, how this stance boils down to “we want you to stop doing a thing, but we won’t explain what that thing is; figure it out yourself”?
No, it boils down to “we will enforce consistent rules and spend like 100+ hours trying to explain them if an established user is confused, and if that’s not enough, then I guess that’s life and we’ll move on”.
Describing the collective effort of the Lightcone team as “unwilling to explain what the thing is” seems really quite inaccurate, given the really quite extraordinary amount of time we have spent over the years trying to get our models across. You can of course complain about the ineffectuality of our efforts to explain, but I do not think you can deny the effort, and I do not currently know what to do that doesn’t involve many additional hours of effort.
Wait, what? Are you now claiming that there are rules which were allegedly violated here? Which rules are these?
Describing the collective effort of the Lightcone team as “unwilling to explain what the thing is” seems really quite inaccurate
I do not think you can deny the effort
I’ve been told (and only after much effort on my part in trying to get an answer) that the problem being solved here is something called “(implicit) enforcement of norms” on my part. I’ve yet to see any comprehensible (or even, really, seriously attempted) explanation of what that’s supposed to mean, exactly, and how any such thing can be done by a (non-moderator) user of Less Wrong. You’ve said outright that you refuse to attempt an explanation. “Unwilling to explain what the thing is” seems entirely accurate.
Wait, what? Are you now claiming that there are rules which were allegedly violated here? Which rules are these?
The one we’ve spent 100+ hours trying to explain in this thread, trying to point to with various analogies and metaphors, and been talking about for 5 plus years about what the cost of your comments to the site has been.
It does not surprise me that you cannot summarize them or restate them in a way that shows understanding them, which is why more effort on explaining them does not seem worth it. The concepts here are also genuinely kind of tricky, and we seem to be coming from very different perspectives and philosophies, and while I do experience frustration, I can also see why this looks very frustrating for you.
I agree that I personally haven’t put a ton of effort (though like 2-3 hours for my comments with Zack which seem related) at this specific point in time, though I have spent many dozens of hours in past years, trying to point to what seems to me the same disagreements.
Wait, what? Are you now claiming that there are rules which were allegedly violated here? Which rules are these?
The one we’ve spent 100+ hours trying to explain in this thread, trying to point to with various analogies and metaphors, and been talking about for 5 plus years about what the cost of your comments to the site has been.
But which are not, like… stated anywhere? Like, in some sort of “what are the rules of this website” page, which explains these rules?
Don’t you think that’s an odd state of affairs, to put it mildly?
The concept of “ignorance of the law is no excuse” was mentioned earlier in this discussion, and it’s a reasonable one in the real world, where you generally can be aware of what the law is, if you’re at all interested in behaving lawfully[1]. If you get a speeding ticket, and say “I didn’t know I was exceeding the speed limit, officer”, the response you’ll get is “signs are posted; if you didn’t read them, that’s no excuse”. But that’s because the signs are, in fact, posted. If there were no signs, then it would just be a case of the police pulling over whoever they wanted, and giving them speeding tickets arbitrarily, regardless of their actual speed.
You seem to be suggesting that Less Wrong has rules (not “norms”, but rules!), which are defined only in places like “long, branching, deeply nested comment threads about specific moderation decisions” and “scattered over years of discussion with some specific user(s)”, and which are conceptually “genuinely kind of tricky”; but that violating these rules is punishable, like any rules violation might be.
Does this seem to you like a remotely reasonable way to have rules?
These are in a pinned moderator-top-level comment on a moderation post that was pinned for almost a full week, so I don’t think this counts as being defined in “long, branching, deeply nested comment threads about specific moderation decisions”. I think we tried pretty hard here to extract the relevant decision-boundaries and make users aware of how we plan to make decisions going forward.
I don’t know of a better way to have rules than this. As I said in a thread to Zack, case-law seems to me to be the only viable way of creating moderation guidelines and rules on a webforum like this, and this means that yes, a lot of the rules will be defined in reference to a specific litigated instance of something that seemed to us to have negative consequences. This approach also seems to work pretty well for lots of legal systems in the real world, though yeah, it does sure produce a body of law that in order to navigate it successfully you have to study the lines revealed through past litigation.
In particular, if either Said makes a case that he can obey the spirit of “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with his comments”; or, someone suggests a letter-of-the-law that actually accomplishes the thing I’m aiming at in a more clear-cut way, I’d feel fairly good about revoking the rate-limit.
The only thing that looks like a rule here is “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with [your] comments”. Is that the rule you’ve been talking about? (I asked this of Raemon and his answer was basically “yes but not only”, or something like that.)
And the rest pretty clearly suggests that there isn’t a clearly defined rule here.
The mod note from 5 years ago seems to me to be very clearly not defining any rules.
Here’s a question: if you asked ten randomly selected Less Wrong members: “What are the rules of Less Wrong?”—how many of them would give the correct answer? Not as a link to this or that comment, but in their own words (or even just by quoting a list of rules, minus the commentary)?
(What is the correct answer?)
How many of their answers would even match one another?
As I said in a thread to Zack, case-law seems to me to be the only viable way of creating moderation guidelines and rules on a webforum like this, and this means that yes, a lot of the rules will be defined in reference to a specific litigated instance of something that seemed to us to have negative consequences. This approach also seems to work pretty well for lots of legal systems in the real world, though yeah, it does sure produce a body of law that in order to navigate it successfully you have to study the lines revealed through past litigation.
Yes, of course, but the way this works in real-world legal systems is that first there’s a law, and then there’s case law which establishes precedent for its application. (And, as you say, it hardly makes it easy to comply with the law. Perhaps I should retain an attorney to help me figure out what the rules of Less Wrong are? Do I need to have a compliance department…?) Real-world legal systems in well-functioning modern countries generally don’t take the approach of “we don’t have any written down laws; we’ll legislate by judgment calls in each case; even after doing that, we won’t encode those judgments into law; there will only be precedent and judicial opinion, and that will be the whole of the law”.[1]
That too, I think 95% of the LessWrong user-base is capable of, so I will leave it to them.
One last reply:
Indeed, college classes (and classes in-general) seem like an important study since in my experience it is very clear that only a fraction of the norms in those classes get set by the professor/teacher, and that clearly there are many other sources of norms and the associated enforcement of norms.
Experiencing those bottom-up norms is a shared experience since almost everyone went through high-school and college, so seems like a good reference.
Of course this is true; it is not just the instructor, but also the college administration, etc., that function as the setter and enforcer of norms.
But it sure isn’t the students!
(And this is even more true in high school. The students have no power to set any norms, except that which is given them by the instructor/administration/etc.—and even that rarely happens.)
Have you been to an American high school and/or watched at least one movie about American high schools?
I have done both of those things, yes.
EDIT: I have also attended not one but several (EDIT 2: four, in fact) American colleges.
The plot point of many high school movies is often about what is and isn’t acceptable to do, socially. For example, Regina in Mean Girls enforced a number of rules on her clique, and attempted with significant but not complete success to enforce it on others.
I do think it would be useful for you to say how much time should elapse without a satisfactory reply by some representative members of this 95% before we can reasonably evaluate whether this prediction has been proven true.
Oh, the central latent variable in my uncertainty here is “is anyone willing to do this?” not “is anyone capable of this?”. My honest guess is the answer to that is “no” because this kind of conversation really doesn’t seem fun, and we are 7 levels deep into a 400 comment post.
My guess is if you actively reach out and put effort into trying to get someone to explain it to you, by e.g. putting out a bounty, or making a top-level post, or somehow send a costly signal that you are genuinely interested in understanding, then I do think there is a much higher chance of that, but I don’t currently expect that to happen.
You do understand, I hope, how this stance boils down to “we want you to stop doing a thing, but we won’t explain what that thing is; figure it out yourself”?
No, it boils down to “we will enforce consistent rules and spend like 100+ hours trying to explain them if an established user is confused, and if that’s not enough, then I guess that’s life and we’ll move on”.
Describing the collective effort of the Lightcone team as “unwilling to explain what the thing is” seems really quite inaccurate, given the really quite extraordinary amount of time we have spent over the years trying to get our models across. You can of course complain about the ineffectuality of our efforts to explain, but I do not think you can deny the effort, and I do not currently know what to do that doesn’t involve many additional hours of effort.
Wait, what? Are you now claiming that there are rules which were allegedly violated here? Which rules are these?
I’ve been told (and only after much effort on my part in trying to get an answer) that the problem being solved here is something called “(implicit) enforcement of norms” on my part. I’ve yet to see any comprehensible (or even, really, seriously attempted) explanation of what that’s supposed to mean, exactly, and how any such thing can be done by a (non-moderator) user of Less Wrong. You’ve said outright that you refuse to attempt an explanation. “Unwilling to explain what the thing is” seems entirely accurate.
The one we’ve spent 100+ hours trying to explain in this thread, trying to point to with various analogies and metaphors, and been talking about for 5 plus years about what the cost of your comments to the site has been.
It does not surprise me that you cannot summarize them or restate them in a way that shows understanding them, which is why more effort on explaining them does not seem worth it. The concepts here are also genuinely kind of tricky, and we seem to be coming from very different perspectives and philosophies, and while I do experience frustration, I can also see why this looks very frustrating for you.
I agree that I personally haven’t put a ton of effort (though like 2-3 hours for my comments with Zack which seem related) at this specific point in time, though I have spent many dozens of hours in past years, trying to point to what seems to me the same disagreements.
But which are not, like… stated anywhere? Like, in some sort of “what are the rules of this website” page, which explains these rules?
Don’t you think that’s an odd state of affairs, to put it mildly?
The concept of “ignorance of the law is no excuse” was mentioned earlier in this discussion, and it’s a reasonable one in the real world, where you generally can be aware of what the law is, if you’re at all interested in behaving lawfully[1]. If you get a speeding ticket, and say “I didn’t know I was exceeding the speed limit, officer”, the response you’ll get is “signs are posted; if you didn’t read them, that’s no excuse”. But that’s because the signs are, in fact, posted. If there were no signs, then it would just be a case of the police pulling over whoever they wanted, and giving them speeding tickets arbitrarily, regardless of their actual speed.
You seem to be suggesting that Less Wrong has rules (not “norms”, but rules!), which are defined only in places like “long, branching, deeply nested comment threads about specific moderation decisions” and “scattered over years of discussion with some specific user(s)”, and which are conceptually “genuinely kind of tricky”; but that violating these rules is punishable, like any rules violation might be.
Does this seem to you like a remotely reasonable way to have rules?
But note that this, famously, is no longer true in our society today, which does indeed have some profoundly unjust consequences.
I think we’ve tried pretty hard to communicate our target rules in this post and previous ones.
The best operationalization of them is in this comment, as well as the moderation warning I made ~5 years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9DhneE5BRGaCS2Cja/moderation-notes-re-recent-said-duncan-threads?commentId=y6AJFQtuXBAWD3TMT
These are in a pinned moderator-top-level comment on a moderation post that was pinned for almost a full week, so I don’t think this counts as being defined in “long, branching, deeply nested comment threads about specific moderation decisions”. I think we tried pretty hard here to extract the relevant decision-boundaries and make users aware of how we plan to make decisions going forward.
We are also thinking about how to think about having site-wide moderation norms and rules that are more canonical, though I share Ruby’s hesitations about that: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gugkWsfayJZnicAew/should-lw-have-an-official-list-of-norms
I don’t know of a better way to have rules than this. As I said in a thread to Zack, case-law seems to me to be the only viable way of creating moderation guidelines and rules on a webforum like this, and this means that yes, a lot of the rules will be defined in reference to a specific litigated instance of something that seemed to us to have negative consequences. This approach also seems to work pretty well for lots of legal systems in the real world, though yeah, it does sure produce a body of law that in order to navigate it successfully you have to study the lines revealed through past litigation.
EDIT: Why do my comments keep double-posting? Weird.
… that comment is supposed to communicate rules?!
It says:
The only thing that looks like a rule here is “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with [your] comments”. Is that the rule you’ve been talking about? (I asked this of Raemon and his answer was basically “yes but not only”, or something like that.)
And the rest pretty clearly suggests that there isn’t a clearly defined rule here.
The mod note from 5 years ago seems to me to be very clearly not defining any rules.
Here’s a question: if you asked ten randomly selected Less Wrong members: “What are the rules of Less Wrong?”—how many of them would give the correct answer? Not as a link to this or that comment, but in their own words (or even just by quoting a list of rules, minus the commentary)?
(What is the correct answer?)
How many of their answers would even match one another?
Yes, of course, but the way this works in real-world legal systems is that first there’s a law, and then there’s case law which establishes precedent for its application. (And, as you say, it hardly makes it easy to comply with the law. Perhaps I should retain an attorney to help me figure out what the rules of Less Wrong are? Do I need to have a compliance department…?) Real-world legal systems in well-functioning modern countries generally don’t take the approach of “we don’t have any written down laws; we’ll legislate by judgment calls in each case; even after doing that, we won’t encode those judgments into law; there will only be precedent and judicial opinion, and that will be the whole of the law”.[1]
Have there been societies in the past which have worked like this? I don’t know. Maybe we can ask David Friedman?