Skimmed all the comments here and wanted to throw in my 2c (while also being unlikely to substantively engage further, take that into account if you’re thinking about responding):
It seems to me that people should spend less time litigating this particular fight and more time figuring out the net effects that Duncan and Said have on LW overall. It seems like mods may be dramatically underrating the value of their time and/or being way too procedurally careful here, and I would like to express that I’d support them saying stuff like “idk exactly what went wrong but you are causing many people on our site (including mods) to have an unproductive time, that’s plenty of grounds for a ban”.
It seems to me that many (probably most) people who engage with Said will end up having an unproductive and unpleasant time. So then my brain started generating solutions like “what if you added a flair to his comments saying ‘often unproductive to engage’” and then I was like “wait this is clearly a missing stair situation (in terms of the structural features not the severity of the misbehavior) and people are in general way too slow to act on those; at the point where this seems like a plausibly-net-positive intervention he should clearly just be banned”.
It seems to me that Duncan has very strong emotional reactions about which norms are used, and how they’re used, and that his preferred norms seem pretty bizarre to many people (I relate to several of Alicorn’s reactions to him, including “marvel at how high a ratio of “incredibly suspicious and hackle-raising” to “not often literally facially wrong in any identifiable ways”″) and again the solution my brain generated was to have some kind of flair like ‘often dies on the hill of unusual discourse norms’ (this is a low-effort phrasing that’s directionally correct but there’s probably a much better one) and then I was like “wait this is another missing stair situation”. But it feels like there’s plausibly an 80⁄20 solution here where Duncan can still post his posts (with some kind of “see my profile for a disclaimer about discourse norms” header) but not comment on other people’s.
I say all this despite agreeing with Said’s pessimism about the quality of most LW content. I just don’t think there’s any realistic world in which commenting pessimistically on lots of stuff in the way that Said does actually helps with that, but it does hurt the few good things. Wei Dai had a comment below about how important it is to know whether there’s any criticism or not, but mostly I don’t care about this either because my prior is just that it’s bad whether or not there’s criticism. In other words, I think the only good approach here is to focus on farming the rare good stuff and ignoring the bad stuff (except for the stuff that ends up way overrated, like (IMO) Babble or Simulators, which I think should be called out directly).
Wei Dai had a comment below about how important it is to know whether there’s any criticism or not, but mostly I don’t care about this either because my prior is just that it’s bad whether or not there’s criticism. In other words, I think the only good approach here is to focus on farming the rare good stuff and ignoring the bad stuff (except for the stuff that ends up way overrated, like (IMO) Babble or Simulators, which I think should be called out directly).
But how do you find the rare good stuff amidst all the bad stuff? I tend to do it with a combination of looking at karma, checking the comments to see whether or not there’s good criticism, and finally reading it myself if it passes the previous two filters. But if a potentially good criticism was banned or disincentivized, then that 1) causes me to waste time (since it distorts both signals I rely on), and 2) potentially causes me to incorrectly judge the post as “good” because I fail to notice the flaw myself. So what do you do such that it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s criticism?
My approach is to read the title, then if I like it read the first paragraph, then if I like that skim the post, then in rare cases read the post in full (all informed by karma).
I can’t usually evaluate the quality of criticism without at least having skimmed the post. And once I’ve done that then I don’t usually gain much from the criticisms (although I do agree they’re sometimes useful).
I’m partly informed here by the fact that I tend to find Said’s criticisms unusually non-useful.
Thanks for weighing in! Fwiw I’ve been skimming but not particularly focused on the litigation of the current dispute, and instead focusing on broader patterns. (I think some amount of litigation of the object level was worth doing but we’re past the point where I expect marginal efforts there to help)
One of the things that’s most cruxy to me is what people who contribute a lot of top content* feel about the broader patterns, so, I appreciate you chiming in here.
*roughly operationalized as “write stuff that ends up in the top 20 or top 50 of the annual review”
One of the things that’s most cruxy to me is what people who contribute a lot of top content* feel about the broader patterns, so, I appreciate you chiming in here.
FYI I personally haven’t had bad experiences with Said (and in fact I remember talking to mods who were at one point surprised by how positively he engaged with some of my posts). My main concern here is the missing stair dynamic of “predictable problem that newcomers will face”.
I say all this despite agreeing with Said’s pessimism about the quality of most LW content. I just don’t think there’s any realistic world in which commenting pessimistically on lots of stuff in the way that Said does actually helps with that, but it does hurt the few good things.
You know, I’ve seen this sort of characterization of my commenting activity quite a few times in these discussions, and I’ve mostly shrugged it off; but (with apologies, as I don’t mean to single you out, and indeed you’re one of the LW members whom I respect significantly more than average) I think at this point I have to take the time to address it.
My objection is simply this:
Is it actually true that I “comment pessimistically on lots of stuff”? Do I do this more than other people?
There are many ways of operationalizing that, of course. Here’s one that seems reasonable to me: let’s find all the posts (not counting “meta”-type posts that are already about me, or referring to me, or having to do with moderation norms that affect me, etc.) on which I’ve commented “pessimistically” in, let’s say, the last six months, and see if my comments are, in their level of “pessimism”, distinguishable from those of other commenters there; and also what the results of those comments turn out to be.
Multiple people commenting in similarly “pessimistic” ways, including me. The most, shall we say, vigorous, discussion that takes place there doesn’t involve me at all.
My overall view is certainly critical, but here I write multiple medium-length comments, which contain substantive analyses of the concept being discussed. (There is, however, a very brief comment from someone else which is just a request—or “demand”?—for clarification; such is given, without protest.)
Probably the most central example of the sort of “short questions that are potentially critical” comments that some people here seem to so dislike. Note that the two comments I posted were (a) both answered (satisfactorily or not, you can judge for yourself, though I found the answers reasonable enough, given the context), and (b) answered by two different people—the OP and someone else. This is exactly the sort of entirely reasonable and praiseworthy outcome which I’ve described!
Notable because here I am responding to someone else (one of the LW/Lightcone team, in fact) posting a fairly harsh criticial comment, with some comments in support of the OP’s thesis.
This is a reply to a comment, not a post, but still “pessimistic” (i.e., mildly, or even just potentially, skeptical). A brief, but quite reasonable, discussion ensues.
Probably the most “pessimistic” comment of the bunch, but noteworthy in that here I’m not even starting a comment thread, but only agreeing with someone else’s existing critical comment.
A couple of critical comments from me, among many others. Nothing particularly stands out. Nothing exciting or terrible results from them.
That’s it, all the way back to around the end of January. (Feel free to go back further and check if I’ve omitted anything, but I think this is a reasonable block of time to examine.)
The bottom line, I think, is that it’s just not true that I stand out from the crowd in terms of how “pessimistically” I comment, or on how much stuff, or how often, or how often relative to other sorts of comments (where, e.g., I give my own thoughts on something in detail), or how often anything meaningfully bad happens as a result, or… anything, really.
From now on, whenever anyone claims otherwise, I’m just going to ask for proof.
Wei Dai had a comment below about how important it is to know whether there’s any criticism or not, but mostly I don’t care about this either because my prior is just that it’s bad whether or not there’s criticism. In other words, I think the only good approach here is to focus on farming the rare good stuff and ignoring the bad stuff (except for the stuff that ends up way overrated, like (IMO) Babble or Simulators, which I think should be called out directly).
So, your view is that that most content here is just bad, and some of it is so bad, while being highly acclaimed (what does that say about Less Wrong’s “epistemic immune system”!), that it needs to be called out directly. I think that’s a more pessimistic view than even my own!
But then what exactly is the concern? Are you suggesting that I’ve misguidedly criticized some of the good stuff? If so—what stuff are we talking about, here?
Not responding to the main claim, cos mods have way more context on this than me, will defer to them.
think that’s a more pessimistic view than even my own!
Very plausibly. But pessimism itself isn’t bad, the question is whether it’s the sort of pessimism that leads to better content or the sort that leads to worse content. Where, again, I’m going to defer to mods since they’ve aggregated much more data on how your commenting patterns affect people’s posting patterns.
Skimmed all the comments here and wanted to throw in my 2c (while also being unlikely to substantively engage further, take that into account if you’re thinking about responding):
It seems to me that people should spend less time litigating this particular fight and more time figuring out the net effects that Duncan and Said have on LW overall. It seems like mods may be dramatically underrating the value of their time and/or being way too procedurally careful here, and I would like to express that I’d support them saying stuff like “idk exactly what went wrong but you are causing many people on our site (including mods) to have an unproductive time, that’s plenty of grounds for a ban”.
It seems to me that many (probably most) people who engage with Said will end up having an unproductive and unpleasant time. So then my brain started generating solutions like “what if you added a flair to his comments saying ‘often unproductive to engage’” and then I was like “wait this is clearly a missing stair situation (in terms of the structural features not the severity of the misbehavior) and people are in general way too slow to act on those; at the point where this seems like a plausibly-net-positive intervention he should clearly just be banned”.
It seems to me that Duncan has very strong emotional reactions about which norms are used, and how they’re used, and that his preferred norms seem pretty bizarre to many people (I relate to several of Alicorn’s reactions to him, including “marvel at how high a ratio of “incredibly suspicious and hackle-raising” to “not often literally facially wrong in any identifiable ways”″) and again the solution my brain generated was to have some kind of flair like ‘often dies on the hill of unusual discourse norms’ (this is a low-effort phrasing that’s directionally correct but there’s probably a much better one) and then I was like “wait this is another missing stair situation”. But it feels like there’s plausibly an 80⁄20 solution here where Duncan can still post his posts (with some kind of “see my profile for a disclaimer about discourse norms” header) but not comment on other people’s.
I say all this despite agreeing with Said’s pessimism about the quality of most LW content. I just don’t think there’s any realistic world in which commenting pessimistically on lots of stuff in the way that Said does actually helps with that, but it does hurt the few good things. Wei Dai had a comment below about how important it is to know whether there’s any criticism or not, but mostly I don’t care about this either because my prior is just that it’s bad whether or not there’s criticism. In other words, I think the only good approach here is to focus on farming the rare good stuff and ignoring the bad stuff (except for the stuff that ends up way overrated, like (IMO) Babble or Simulators, which I think should be called out directly).
But how do you find the rare good stuff amidst all the bad stuff? I tend to do it with a combination of looking at karma, checking the comments to see whether or not there’s good criticism, and finally reading it myself if it passes the previous two filters. But if a potentially good criticism was banned or disincentivized, then that 1) causes me to waste time (since it distorts both signals I rely on), and 2) potentially causes me to incorrectly judge the post as “good” because I fail to notice the flaw myself. So what do you do such that it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s criticism?
My approach is to read the title, then if I like it read the first paragraph, then if I like that skim the post, then in rare cases read the post in full (all informed by karma).
I can’t usually evaluate the quality of criticism without at least having skimmed the post. And once I’ve done that then I don’t usually gain much from the criticisms (although I do agree they’re sometimes useful).
I’m partly informed here by the fact that I tend to find Said’s criticisms unusually non-useful.
Thanks for weighing in! Fwiw I’ve been skimming but not particularly focused on the litigation of the current dispute, and instead focusing on broader patterns. (I think some amount of litigation of the object level was worth doing but we’re past the point where I expect marginal efforts there to help)
One of the things that’s most cruxy to me is what people who contribute a lot of top content* feel about the broader patterns, so, I appreciate you chiming in here.
*roughly operationalized as “write stuff that ends up in the top 20 or top 50 of the annual review”
Makes sense.
FYI I personally haven’t had bad experiences with Said (and in fact I remember talking to mods who were at one point surprised by how positively he engaged with some of my posts). My main concern here is the missing stair dynamic of “predictable problem that newcomers will face”.
You know, I’ve seen this sort of characterization of my commenting activity quite a few times in these discussions, and I’ve mostly shrugged it off; but (with apologies, as I don’t mean to single you out, and indeed you’re one of the LW members whom I respect significantly more than average) I think at this point I have to take the time to address it.
My objection is simply this:
Is it actually true that I “comment pessimistically on lots of stuff”? Do I do this more than other people?
There are many ways of operationalizing that, of course. Here’s one that seems reasonable to me: let’s find all the posts (not counting “meta”-type posts that are already about me, or referring to me, or having to do with moderation norms that affect me, etc.) on which I’ve commented “pessimistically” in, let’s say, the last six months, and see if my comments are, in their level of “pessimism”, distinguishable from those of other commenters there; and also what the results of those comments turn out to be.
#1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hsix7D2rHyumLAAys/run-posts-by-orgs
Multiple people commenting in similarly “pessimistic” ways, including me. The most, shall we say, vigorous, discussion that takes place there doesn’t involve me at all.
#2: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2yWnNxEPuLnujxKiW/tabooing-frame-control
My overall view is certainly critical, but here I write multiple medium-length comments, which contain substantive analyses of the concept being discussed. (There is, however, a very brief comment from someone else which is just a request—or “demand”?—for clarification; such is given, without protest.)
#3: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/67NrgoFKCWmnG3afd/you-ll-never-persuade-people-like-that
Here I post what can be said to be a critical comment, but one that offers my own take. Other comments are substantially more critical than mine.
#4: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y4hN7SkTwnKPNCPx5/why-don-t-more-people-talk-about-ecological-psychology#JcADzrnoJjhFHWE5W
Probably the most central example of the sort of “short questions that are potentially critical” comments that some people here seem to so dislike. Note that the two comments I posted were (a) both answered (satisfactorily or not, you can judge for yourself, though I found the answers reasonable enough, given the context), and (b) answered by two different people—the OP and someone else. This is exactly the sort of entirely reasonable and praiseworthy outcome which I’ve described!
#5: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCuzmCsE86BTu9PfA/there-are-no-coherence-theorems#bGBy9uYdZrGcpvXCG
Notable because here I am responding to someone else (one of the LW/Lightcone team, in fact) posting a fairly harsh criticial comment, with some comments in support of the OP’s thesis.
#6: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C6oNRFt4dvtM25vpw/living-nomadically-my-80-20-guide#Zs9T4CebjkLvsmvDy
This is a reply to a comment, not a post, but still “pessimistic” (i.e., mildly, or even just potentially, skeptical). A brief, but quite reasonable, discussion ensues.
#7: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yepKvM5rsvbpix75G/you-don-t-exist-duncan
Probably the most “pessimistic” comment of the bunch, but noteworthy in that here I’m not even starting a comment thread, but only agreeing with someone else’s existing critical comment.
#8: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rwkkcgSpnAyE8oNo3/alexander-and-yudkowsky-on-agi-goals
A couple of critical comments from me, among many others. Nothing particularly stands out. Nothing exciting or terrible results from them.
That’s it, all the way back to around the end of January. (Feel free to go back further and check if I’ve omitted anything, but I think this is a reasonable block of time to examine.)
The bottom line, I think, is that it’s just not true that I stand out from the crowd in terms of how “pessimistically” I comment, or on how much stuff, or how often, or how often relative to other sorts of comments (where, e.g., I give my own thoughts on something in detail), or how often anything meaningfully bad happens as a result, or… anything, really.
From now on, whenever anyone claims otherwise, I’m just going to ask for proof.
So, your view is that that most content here is just bad, and some of it is so bad, while being highly acclaimed (what does that say about Less Wrong’s “epistemic immune system”!), that it needs to be called out directly. I think that’s a more pessimistic view than even my own!
But then what exactly is the concern? Are you suggesting that I’ve misguidedly criticized some of the good stuff? If so—what stuff are we talking about, here?
Not responding to the main claim, cos mods have way more context on this than me, will defer to them.
Very plausibly. But pessimism itself isn’t bad, the question is whether it’s the sort of pessimism that leads to better content or the sort that leads to worse content. Where, again, I’m going to defer to mods since they’ve aggregated much more data on how your commenting patterns affect people’s posting patterns.