To me it seems unlikely that there’d be enough banning to prevent criticism from surfacing. Skimming through https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation, the amount of bans seems to be pretty small. And if there is an important critique to be made I’d expect it to be something that more than the few banned users would think of and decide to post a comment on.
And if there is an important critique to be made I’d expect it to be something that more than the few banned users would think of and decide to post a comment on.
This may be true in some cases, but not all. My experience here comes from cryptography where it often takes hundreds of person-hours to find a flaw in a new idea (which can sometimes be completely fatal), and UDT, where I found a couple of issues in my own initial idea only after several months/years of thinking (hence going to UDT1.1 and UDT2). I think if you ban a few users who might have the highest motivation to scrutinize your idea/post closely, you could easily reduce the probability (at any given time) of anyone finding an important flaw by a lot.
Another reason for my concern is that the bans directly disincentivize other critics, and people who are willing to ban their critics are often unpleasant for critics to interact with in other ways, further disincentivizing critiques. I have this impression for Duncan myself which may explain why I’ve rarely commented on any of his posts. I seem to remember once trying to talk him out of (what seemed to me like) overreacting to a critique and banning the critic on Facebook, and having an unpleasant experience (but didn’t get banned), then deciding to avoid interacting with him in the future. However I can’t find the actual interaction on FB so I’m not 100% sure this happened. FB has terrible search which probably explains it, but maybe I hallucinated this, or confused him with someone else, or did it with a pseudonym.
I think if you ban a few users who might have the highest motivation to scrutinize your idea/post closely, you could easily reduce the probability (at any given time) of anyone finding an important flaw by a lot.
My impression is that there are some domains for which this is true, but those are the exception rather than the rule. However, this impression is just based off of, err, vaguely querying my brain? I’m not super confident in it. And your claim is one that I think is “important if true”. So then, it does seem worth an investigation. Maybe enumerating through different domains and asking “Is it true here? Is it true here?”.
One thing I’d like to point out is that, being a community, something very similar is happening. Only a certain type of person comes to LessWrong (this is true of all communities to some extent; they attract a subset of people). It’s not that “outsiders” are explicitly banned, they just don’t join and don’t thus don’t comment. So then, effectively, ideas presented here currently aren’t available to “outsiders” for critiques.
I think there is a trade off at play: the more you make ideas available to “outsiders” the lower the chance something gets overlooked, but it also has the downside of some sort of friction.
(Sorry if this doesn’t make sense. I feel like I didn’t articulate it very well but couldn’t easily think of a better way to say it.)
Another reason for my concern is that the bans directly disincentivize other critics, and people who are willing to ban their critics are often unpleasant for critics to interact with in other ways, further disincentivizing critiques.
Good point. I think that’s true and something to factor in.
While the current number of bans is pretty small, I think this is in part because lots of users don’t know about the option to ban people from their posts. (See here, for example.)
That makes sense. Still, even if it were more well known, I wouldn’t expect the number of bans to reach the point where it is causing real problems with respect to criticism surfacing.
To me it seems unlikely that there’d be enough banning to prevent criticism from surfacing. Skimming through https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation, the amount of bans seems to be pretty small. And if there is an important critique to be made I’d expect it to be something that more than the few banned users would think of and decide to post a comment on.
This may be true in some cases, but not all. My experience here comes from cryptography where it often takes hundreds of person-hours to find a flaw in a new idea (which can sometimes be completely fatal), and UDT, where I found a couple of issues in my own initial idea only after several months/years of thinking (hence going to UDT1.1 and UDT2). I think if you ban a few users who might have the highest motivation to scrutinize your idea/post closely, you could easily reduce the probability (at any given time) of anyone finding an important flaw by a lot.
Another reason for my concern is that the bans directly disincentivize other critics, and people who are willing to ban their critics are often unpleasant for critics to interact with in other ways, further disincentivizing critiques. I have this impression for Duncan myself which may explain why I’ve rarely commented on any of his posts. I seem to remember once trying to talk him out of (what seemed to me like) overreacting to a critique and banning the critic on Facebook, and having an unpleasant experience (but didn’t get banned), then deciding to avoid interacting with him in the future. However I can’t find the actual interaction on FB so I’m not 100% sure this happened. FB has terrible search which probably explains it, but maybe I hallucinated this, or confused him with someone else, or did it with a pseudonym.
Hm, interesting points.
My impression is that there are some domains for which this is true, but those are the exception rather than the rule. However, this impression is just based off of, err, vaguely querying my brain? I’m not super confident in it. And your claim is one that I think is “important if true”. So then, it does seem worth an investigation. Maybe enumerating through different domains and asking “Is it true here? Is it true here?”.
One thing I’d like to point out is that, being a community, something very similar is happening. Only a certain type of person comes to LessWrong (this is true of all communities to some extent; they attract a subset of people). It’s not that “outsiders” are explicitly banned, they just don’t join and don’t thus don’t comment. So then, effectively, ideas presented here currently aren’t available to “outsiders” for critiques.
I think there is a trade off at play: the more you make ideas available to “outsiders” the lower the chance something gets overlooked, but it also has the downside of some sort of friction.
(Sorry if this doesn’t make sense. I feel like I didn’t articulate it very well but couldn’t easily think of a better way to say it.)
Good point. I think that’s true and something to factor in.
While the current number of bans is pretty small, I think this is in part because lots of users don’t know about the option to ban people from their posts. (See here, for example.)
That makes sense. Still, even if it were more well known, I wouldn’t expect the number of bans to reach the point where it is causing real problems with respect to criticism surfacing.