Be sure to screen shot any comment you make that you want to preserve, or comments by others that should be preserved. LessWrong is now the sort of site where critical comments silently vanish that cannot by any sane stretch be called trolling.
If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing. This is the Internet, where that sort of behaviour ensures preservation. A bot to automatically preserve all comments to LW would be ridiculously simple, for example, if MIRI could no longer be trusted to be honest.
Really, MIRI. Just what the hell do you think you’re achieving with this?
Gentlemen! Welcome to Rationality Club. The first rule of Rationality Club is: you do not talk about basilisks. The second rule of Rationality Club is: you DO NOT even allude to basilisks!
Oh, absolutely :-) Multiple saved copies are a little more trustworthy.
Capturebot2 is reasonably trustworthy for its intended purpose (documenting the sort of site that actually gets into a habit of trying to burn the evidence). Of course, I’m saying that as one of the two people who in fact has the power to edit Capturebot’s saved PNGs …
I keep being told that there are no resources for my ideas for automatically fighting trolls, so after a user admits to being a troll I’ve been going through manually and deleting comments that strike me as trollish—in the sense of intended to provoke. I also suspect we have fake accounts upvoting and hence do not refrain from deleting upvoted comments.
I’m not particularly happy with the way things are, but don’t see an obvious way to make them better without somebody being willing to devote an awful lot of full-time-equivalent work to modifying the LW codebase.
And yes, this forum practices (gasp!) censorship. It always has since the day I started deleting Caledonian’s comments on Overcoming Bias because he was successfully making posting no-longer-fun for me. Before that, the SL4 mailing list was subject to threads frequently being terminated. We have always been up-front about pruning the tree, and nowadays there’s an official Deletion Policy page. Please stop acting like this is some sort of shocking surreptitious secret.
Note that this includes deletion of replies to trolls, although I often just downvote those instead.
It would be helpful if people could see that many deleted comments are (in some cases, not all) from the same small set of trolls, but the basic rule is that we have no resources for developing anything so we can’t show the author of deleted comments.
This is an online forum that practices gardening. There are lots of other online forums where you can speak freely. Oh, but you’d rather speak here, to the people who gather here to listen? Well—maybe they’re gathering here in this garden because they don’t want to be in those other ungardened forums, and so no, you can’t speak freely.
This is an online forum that practices gardening. There are lots of other online forums where you can speak freely. Oh, but you’d rather speak here, to the people who gather here to listen? Well—maybe they’re gathering here in this garden because they don’t want to be in those other ungardened forums, and so no, you can’t speak freely.
My personal guess would be that they are gathering here because many seeds are blown here (from HPMoR, for the usefulness of the sequences and other materials), and the gardening does not have a significant net positive impact. This is mostly based on the fact that I have spent time on ungardened forums and I have never felt that the lack of gardening was a real problem. Where they declined it was because the inflow of members died down, not because members were turned off by trolls.
I’m not sure there’s any evidence out there to settle this one way or the other, and certainly in the end you can do whatever you want, but I think you should at least take note that what seems to be a significant part of the userbase thinks strict moderation does more harm than good.
My experience has been exactly contrary: young communities thrive without gardening, but as they grow they either devolve into low average value (digg as it was, most large subreddits) or are heavily pruned (HN, r/askscience). If there’s an influx of people, heavy moderation is mandatory if you want to avoid regression to the mean.
This reads like a boilerplate reply you would email to a random idiot who complained about their post being deleted, not an actual answer to questions about deleting honest criticism and anything even mentioning the b-word. It’s also not a response to the PR ramifications of these sorts of activities. Please stop acting like your moderation behavior is normal or like people who respond to it are crazy for not agreeing with it.
And as always: Telling people there are plenty of other places they can go is childish and petulant.
If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing.
On the gripping hand, systematically refraining from deleting (or better, shadowbanning) trolls is one of the stupidest things you can do if you want to maintain a community.
I’m relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll. The point of deleting even his reasonable comments would be to get him to stop commenting at all. I’m not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.
Didn’t Will_Newsome say several times that he was trolling and post material designed to get downvoted? Not sure that’s quite a comparison to eridu.
(To give a recent example, we banned a user from #lesswrong for mailbombing with porn sites another user; they did this partially because they were offended and partially to get themselves banned and stop spending time there. The ban is perfectly justified, yet I would not have called them a troll before or after.)
Didn’t Will_Newsome say several times that he was trolling and post material designed to get downvoted? Not sure that’s quite a comparison to eridu.
Yes, he did. No, I wasn’t comparing them to each other, but it is the case that unlike eridu or Dmytry, Will_Newsome did not trigger the “since he posted lots of trollish comments, let’s delete reasonable comments by him as well” reaction in the mods, as far as I can remember.
I’ve had a few comments deleted that I thought weren’t egregiously unreasonable but were “provocative” and minimally substantive. I don’t think the deletions were too unreasonable either—perhaps a tad overzealous. Overall I think the LW mods have been quite just regarding me, though some of the normal users have been a bit crazy, and I’m glad those users aren’t mods.
more generally anyone who’s ever had negative last-30-days karma.
Beware edge cases! By this criterion, E.Y. could go on math-crunch-camp / hiatus and then make a single comment after 30 days that isn’t too well received, and instantly be considered troll.
Not really an objection to the main point, though. Just felt like mentioning.
(Anyway, if there was widespread common knowledge among non-trolls that anyone with negative last-30-days karma will be labelled as Evil and may be punished with a dust speck in the eye every day for 3^^^3 days, then whenever someone came back from a 30-day leave they would make a comment in the latest
Group Rationality Diary thread explaining what they had been up to, and get enough positive karma to prevent ending up net negative for moderately disagreed-with comments.)
This is really concerning to me. Also, what is the rationale behind obfuscating basilisks? From what I understand, it could lead to thoughts of, “There’s no point to all this after all,” but there exists many other avenues to arrive at that same thought; why attempt to bury LW’s avenue? It signals quite disturbingly, “We do not wish to risk disillusionment of our followers.” Would those particularly vulnerable to such thoughts not benefit from being taught how to build mental fortitude without sacrificing open-mindedness?
I don’t specifically know how the above might be accomplished, but surely deleting critiques and other signals considered unsavoury will only increase the probability of a mental breakdown. What is the argument for helping each other tackle basilisks in a safe environment? Hiding the cause does not deal with the underlying susceptibility. I understand deletion of annoying noise, but how can anything reasoned that does not utilise Dark Arts be considered noise when presenting a sound argument?
A separate point: Harry advocates for scientific secrecy in HP:MoR, as an analogue to how powerful wizards keep their most powerful tricks secret. However, the latter is widely known to be an agreed cultural convention of the magical world, as is the rationale for doing so understood. Hiding active secrecy without sharing a reason for same only inspires revulsion to that secrecy. The analogue is intriguing and not without merit, but only insofar as it stays an analogue and not a permutation.
Edit: Perhaps I should clarify that I truly am asking questions—they are not rhetorical by any means. If I am wrong, please tell me how; that is the point of the site, yes?
what is the rationale behind obfuscating basilisks?
To use a metaphor… The original basilisk was suppressed, not just because some people were frightened by the idea of making deals with demons, but because the site admins thought that the methods proposed might lead to people really getting entangled with real demons; and they will hang on to that belief until someone demonstrates, using the logic of a demonological theory that they accept, that the methods don’t work.
Harry advocates for scientific secrecy in HP:MoR [...]
Not to mention the fact that his example (Szilard keeping the effectiveness of graphite as a neutron moderator secret) dates back to before the Internet, and hence before the Streisand effect was much of an issue.
I made a similar post a few days ago, thinking that at any point in Lesswrong there’s at least a few people that think they have basilisks and are just too hesitant to tell others about them. No one came forward, so I guess they aren’t as common as I thought. I didn’t think of calling them basilisks until they were referred to as such in the comments.
None of the comments in this thread is at “100% positive” except the most recent few, which makes me suspect someone is systematically downvoting all of them.
Well, yeah. private_messaging has about 50% approval, many of the deleted comments scoring quite highly; for a “troll”, there appear to be quite a lot of active readers who agree or approve. There’s something systematic going on, with or without moderator approval.
I was tempted to, because I don’t want to see big threads dedicated to community drama over censorship, but decided against it, and merely removed a few of my upvotes.
One example after I posted that comment: Capture, burnt remains. There’s been a pile of others (mostly not in fact Dmytry, before you make that claim), but the current site code no longer leaves a really embarrassingly obvious string of “Comment deleted”.
Really, are you seriously claiming you thought I was just making it up?
Requesting evidence is good behavior. Combining it with a counteraccusation of trolling slides the whole comment into the negative, for me.
Likewise, not only is it an objectionable social move it is also just false. An abuse of language. Following through the reasoning (and also observing that often quoting or linking to copies of deleted comments is also considered trolling) makes the label ‘troll’ a label that can applied rather indiscriminately to anyone who dissents, regardless of how and why they do it.
Anatoly is right. Accusation without proof is trolling, even if the proof exists. Thank you for providing at least a small part. But why so coy about the others?
If the accusation is false than it’s very easy for someone like Eliezer to say:
“This has no basis”. If the accusation is true than it might violate the rules to reprint censored posts.
A lack of public denail is a good way to see whether the accusation has a basis.
I think that’s an overstatement. It’s not ‘marketing before intellectual honesty’ to point out that we should be extra-wary about analyses or materials by ideologues for whom the results are part of their identity (Sailer repeatedly talks about white identity and how it’s a shame there’s no White-with-a-capital-w solidarity in the way there’s Black-with-a-capital-b solidarity) which is just one of the many deductive fallacies with perfectly valid statistical justification for using, or that quoting approvingly such people will ceteris paribus put off other people with extra reason to distrust such people.
I expect that if you put more effort into searching than I did before posting my question, you will find material that satisfies you but which for which I reject your characterization. I would rather have the material than the bald assertion.
So… you’re trying to trap me or something? In that case, let me ask you: what makes you think that Sailer does not think that a White identity would be a good thing?
Trap? WTF? I just want you to say something concrete, rather than your nebulous slander. I don’t think it will resolve our difference, but I think it is more fair to Sailer and to the reader.
Reading Sailer leads me to my beliefs about him. In particular, paying attention to positive and normative claims. I’m sorry that you can’t imagine that. As I said, before my first comment, I did a couple of searches and skimmed 10 or 20 articles. If he only expresses this opinion every three years, maybe it wouldn’t come up in a search like that.
Reading Sailer leads me to my beliefs about him. In particular, paying attention to positive and normative claims.
That’s a very high standard, since not everyone makes a clear and simple thesis statement which can be easily found. But it’s implicit to various degrees in much of what he writes. So if you read Sailer’s review of a book literally titled White Identity (first useful hit for “steve sailer white identity”), does it not look exactly like what I said? Here’s some excerpts:
The next half millennium is likely to go worse for whites relative to the Chinese unless we modernize our mindsets on race. Taylor continues summarizing the current orthodoxy:
“It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States.”
As you can see, today’s PC party line is a farrago of empirical and normative assertions
...What are the prospects for white identity politics emerging as a self-conscious, public force in America? I’d guess: not good. This is not to say that white identity politics won’t continue to manifest itself de facto. We saw that, for example, with the Tea Parties and the emergence of an overwhelmingly white movement to protect Medicare in 2009. But, white people aren’t supposed to say: we’re doing this “to promote the general welfare” of “ourselves and our posterity” (to quote the Constitution’s Preamble). Whites aren’t supposed to say that—and they don’t like to, either.
...In other words, what historian Hugh Davis Graham called attention to in the title of his 2002 book, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, can’t go on forever. The mounting “racial ratio” of nonwhite beneficiaries to white benefactors means the system will inevitably break down under the weight of numbers. At that point, white consciousness could be forced into existence. In the meantime, we can all be thankful that Jared Taylor has been thinking ahead.
Every line is consistent with the claim that a White identity does not exist and its existence would be good, from the complete absence of any criticism of Taylor to the first mention of Chinese competition requiring a coordinated White response to invocation of sacred scripture (the Constitution) to the claim that disaster will reveal the problems of a lack of a White identity, usher it in, and Taylor’s work will have been meritorious for helping usher it in.
First, I would like to correct an ambiguity from the very beginning of this thread. I did not mean to dispute that Sailer says (a rhetoric of) white solidarity does not exist, only to dispute that he would like to bring it into existence. I’m not sure this made a difference to the conversation, though.
I concede that Sailer thinks white solidarity would be an improvement over the status quo.
Of course that was one of the articles I looked at before posting and rejected on skimming. I also find your quotes utterly unconvincing and dispute your summary. (The part about Taylor thinking ahead is striking, though I think not so relevant.) I think this represents a very large disagreement between us. I guess you said that it takes years of reading Sailer to discern his beliefs. If our years of reading him lead to disagreements, it seems hard to address.
What changed my mind was his comparison between his proposal and Taylor’s. It is put entirely in terms of potential as a tool to limit immigration. He does link to a debate he had with Taylor years earlier, where he puts more emphasis on principles and the general running of society.
What changed my mind was his comparison between his proposal and Taylor’s. It is put entirely in terms of potential as a tool to limit immigration. He does link to a debate he had with Taylor years earlier, where he puts more emphasis on principles and the general running of society.
A debate where he says that Taylor is morally right but that citizenism is more practical and more salable; repeatedly he says that citizenism is a pragmatic attack on his foes:
Mr. Taylor contends that “duty does not calculate the odds of success” but I do. And I’m betting on citizenism, not white nationalism, as the principle that could save America.
If Sailer actually accepts ‘citizenism’, then why this talk of ‘odds of success’ or ‘betting’? If he believed it, then the chance of success is merely a good extra thing: “I’m right and I’m more likely to succeed”. His arguments are taking the form of “you’re right, but I’m more likely to succeed”.
Priors: I haven’t heard of either Taylor or Sailor before (except possibly in passing). I dislike “citizenism” (insofar as I understand what that means before reading this) almost as much as (though slightly less than) “white nationalism”. I am also slightly more swayed by gwern’s argument than Douglas’s so far, though I remain quite uncertain.
Upon reading the essay linked and this previous one, but nothing else, my impression is that Sailor’s main focus is on distinguishing “nationalism” and “tribalism” (my terms for interpreting his ideas), more or less. By nationalism he means a system based on laws designed to facilitate and encourage altruism and cooperation with strangers, which he claims emerged in Western Europe, and is carried on mostly by whites. By tribalism he means a system based on supporting and dealing with primarily your extended family, and by extension members of your race. He opposes “white nationalism” insofar as he believes it’s “tribalist” and anti-individualistic and would harness whites to serve the racial group (much as he claims black solidarity, etc., does for other races), which would be harmful. He does seem to believe that whites are broadly superior to black and Latinos, but seems to believe this difference is unimportant compared to the paramount goal of promoting the welfare of current US citizens and ensuring that the “nationalism” (using the definition I mentioned above) remains the dominant force.
So, posteriors: I find that his arguments suck, and my opinion of “citizenism” has not improved and possibly became worse (which is beside the point). However, judging by those two posts alone, it does seem like Sailor genuinely holds “citizenism” to be paramount and is in weak opposition to some forms of white nationalism, insofar as that would encourage whites to put group interests ahead of individual and general cooperation interests; that said, he probably believes that whites are genuinely superior and because of this has significant moral sympathy for white nationalist positions despite believing a focus on racial solidarity may be harmful. Although I’m not sure if he cares about improving the lives of non-white Americans or sees that as merely a neutral or slightly beneficial side-effect of improving the lives of white Americans.
In all fairness, “loyalty” and “identity” are core moral foundations for “conservative” or “right-wing” politics, and Sailer is often cited as a member of the so-called “alt-right”. “Race”, i.e. skin color, is a very salient feature which tends to correlate (at least in the United States; we would see very different results in such places as Brazil) with the kind of cultural distinctiveness that tends to create and sustain ingroup biases. So, it’s not very surprising that the ‘alt-right’ would be biased towards this kind of ingroup solidarity.
“Black solidarity” is indeed harder to explain. It may reflect a morally conservative attitude on the part of some blacks; it may be proof that left-wing folks are anything but immune to ingroup bias, at least in some circumstances; or it may be that what we take to be “black solidarity” does not reflect a true ingroup in the moral and cognitive sense, but rather a mere coalition or bloc based on shared interests, which is a fairly common feature in modern politics.
“Black solidarity” is indeed harder to explain. It may reflect a morally conservative attitude on the part of some blacks; it may be proof that left-wing folks are anything but immune to ingroup bias, at least in some circumstances; or it may be that what we take to be “black solidarity” does not reflect a true ingroup in the moral and cognitive sense, but a mere coalition or bloc based on shared interests, which is a fairly common feature in modern politics.
I don’t think it’s that hard to explain. A sufficient explanation would simply be the salience of skin color leading to stereotypes and action based on it: for example, during slavery, even if all sorts of ethnic groups with dark skin had nothing at all in common with each other it would still be a good idea to form a ‘Black’ identity just to coordinate opposition to slavery; if they were going to be treated as a single homogenous group, then they might as well strive to make themselves a homogenous group as far as fighting the treatment goes. (Alternate example: if there were pending legislation to execute everyone with brown eyes and you have brown eyes, you’d better quickly find all your fellow brown-eyes and hand all your money to a brown-eyed organization to fight this legislation in every way possible.)
Such a ‘reaction’ explanation of group identity also handily explains observed voting patterns of blacks for Democrats in shares upwards of 70 or 80% - it may not so much be that they really find themselves in agreement with the Democratic platform in every respect, it’s just that black-related issues are really important to them. IIRC, blacks tend to strongly disagree with the general Democratic population on some issues like gay marriage.
(Of course, I could be wrong about all of this; maybe it’s already been investigated thoroughly and these explanations debunked. It’s not an area I read much in.)
Yes, that’s essentially what I mean by “shared interests”. In this case, the lack of white “solidarity” (in a political sense) is easily explained by the observation that whites’ political interests are not at all homogenous.
Of course, if policy is allowed to discriminate among races (and this is in fact the case) that might create homogenous interests where none existed before; however, my guess is that some minorities would still coalesce along race-based lines even if such policies weren’t a factor.
Yes, that’s essentially what I mean by “shared interests”.
I thought you meant something more like pre-existing conditions or contexts, for example, the shared interest of everyone who holds fixed debt in keeping inflation low or everyone who owns land on secure property rights.
What I thought was interesting and different about the black example was that this ‘shared interest’ could be forced on groups that previously shared no interests by a sufficiently powerful group which decides to treat the previously different groups as the same group—in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Be sure to screen shot any comment you make that you want to preserve, or comments by others that should be preserved. LessWrong is now the sort of site where critical comments silently vanish that cannot by any sane stretch be called trolling.
If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing. This is the Internet, where that sort of behaviour ensures preservation. A bot to automatically preserve all comments to LW would be ridiculously simple, for example, if MIRI could no longer be trusted to be honest.
Really, MIRI. Just what the hell do you think you’re achieving with this?
Compare http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73m3?context=3 with http://web.archive.org/web/20120802190229/http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73m3?context=3
How ironic.
Mind blown.
That presumably makes close to 20 of us, based on the 19 upvotes at time of this comment.
Gentlemen! Welcome to Rationality Club. The first rule of Rationality Club is: you do not talk about basilisks. The second rule of Rationality Club is: you DO NOT even allude to basilisks!
Well, you are literally paid to put up with this …
I worked on and off for SI as a contractor; currently, I’m not. (Not that that should justify deleting comments.)
That might be a bit drastic, but I too am worried about the deletion of perfectly legitimate (IMO) discussion.
Do keep in mind that screenshots are not always reliable, though.
Oh, absolutely :-) Multiple saved copies are a little more trustworthy.
Capturebot2 is reasonably trustworthy for its intended purpose (documenting the sort of site that actually gets into a habit of trying to burn the evidence). Of course, I’m saying that as one of the two people who in fact has the power to edit Capturebot’s saved PNGs …
This confused me more than it should have.
I keep being told that there are no resources for my ideas for automatically fighting trolls, so after a user admits to being a troll I’ve been going through manually and deleting comments that strike me as trollish—in the sense of intended to provoke. I also suspect we have fake accounts upvoting and hence do not refrain from deleting upvoted comments.
I’m not particularly happy with the way things are, but don’t see an obvious way to make them better without somebody being willing to devote an awful lot of full-time-equivalent work to modifying the LW codebase.
And yes, this forum practices (gasp!) censorship. It always has since the day I started deleting Caledonian’s comments on Overcoming Bias because he was successfully making posting no-longer-fun for me. Before that, the SL4 mailing list was subject to threads frequently being terminated. We have always been up-front about pruning the tree, and nowadays there’s an official Deletion Policy page. Please stop acting like this is some sort of shocking surreptitious secret.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy
Note that this includes deletion of replies to trolls, although I often just downvote those instead.
It would be helpful if people could see that many deleted comments are (in some cases, not all) from the same small set of trolls, but the basic rule is that we have no resources for developing anything so we can’t show the author of deleted comments.
This is an online forum that practices gardening. There are lots of other online forums where you can speak freely. Oh, but you’d rather speak here, to the people who gather here to listen? Well—maybe they’re gathering here in this garden because they don’t want to be in those other ungardened forums, and so no, you can’t speak freely.
EDIT: Attempted solution: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/
My personal guess would be that they are gathering here because many seeds are blown here (from HPMoR, for the usefulness of the sequences and other materials), and the gardening does not have a significant net positive impact. This is mostly based on the fact that I have spent time on ungardened forums and I have never felt that the lack of gardening was a real problem. Where they declined it was because the inflow of members died down, not because members were turned off by trolls.
I’m not sure there’s any evidence out there to settle this one way or the other, and certainly in the end you can do whatever you want, but I think you should at least take note that what seems to be a significant part of the userbase thinks strict moderation does more harm than good.
My experience has been exactly contrary: young communities thrive without gardening, but as they grow they either devolve into low average value (digg as it was, most large subreddits) or are heavily pruned (HN, r/askscience). If there’s an influx of people, heavy moderation is mandatory if you want to avoid regression to the mean.
Criticism =/= trolling
Gardening =/= censorship
This reads like a boilerplate reply you would email to a random idiot who complained about their post being deleted, not an actual answer to questions about deleting honest criticism and anything even mentioning the b-word. It’s also not a response to the PR ramifications of these sorts of activities. Please stop acting like your moderation behavior is normal or like people who respond to it are crazy for not agreeing with it.
And as always: Telling people there are plenty of other places they can go is childish and petulant.
It’s all there in the link?
Have you never posted to Hacker News? To a well-curated subreddit? To 4chan? To Wikipedia?
On the gripping hand, systematically refraining from deleting (or better, shadowbanning) trolls is one of the stupidest things you can do if you want to maintain a community.
Reversed censorship is not a rational discussion.
I’m relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll. The point of deleting even his reasonable comments would be to get him to stop commenting at all. I’m not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.
They’re right to do so.
There are certainly some others, but I’m not sure naming names is really appropriate.
Will_Newsome, eridu, and more generally anyone who’s ever had negative last-30-days karma.
Didn’t Will_Newsome say several times that he was trolling and post material designed to get downvoted? Not sure that’s quite a comparison to eridu.
(To give a recent example, we banned a user from
#lesswrongfor mailbombing with porn sites another user; they did this partially because they were offended and partially to get themselves banned and stop spending time there. The ban is perfectly justified, yet I would not have called them a troll before or after.)Yes, he did. No, I wasn’t comparing them to each other, but it is the case that unlike eridu or Dmytry, Will_Newsome did not trigger the “since he posted lots of trollish comments, let’s delete reasonable comments by him as well” reaction in the mods, as far as I can remember.
I’ve had a few comments deleted that I thought weren’t egregiously unreasonable but were “provocative” and minimally substantive. I don’t think the deletions were too unreasonable either—perhaps a tad overzealous. Overall I think the LW mods have been quite just regarding me, though some of the normal users have been a bit crazy, and I’m glad those users aren’t mods.
Peterdjones, too, if I’m not mistaken.
Beware edge cases! By this criterion, E.Y. could go on math-crunch-camp / hiatus and then make a single comment after 30 days that isn’t too well received, and instantly be considered troll.
Not really an objection to the main point, though. Just felt like mentioning.
I was just reporting the criterion that I had heard EY was using; I wasn’t endorsing it.
Oh, thanks for clarifying.
(Anyway, if there was widespread common knowledge among non-trolls that anyone with negative last-30-days karma will be labelled as Evil and may be punished with a dust speck in the eye every day for 3^^^3 days, then whenever someone came back from a 30-day leave they would make a comment in the latest Group Rationality Diary thread explaining what they had been up to, and get enough positive karma to prevent ending up net negative for moderately disagreed-with comments.)
On a very casual glance, the scythe is all over the place.
If you don’t like participating in threads where things randomly vanish, stop replying to trolls.
I am uninterested in this discussion.
.
Attempted solution:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/
Isn’t this a bit melodramatic?
It is, but I think it’s warranted.
This is really concerning to me. Also, what is the rationale behind obfuscating basilisks? From what I understand, it could lead to thoughts of, “There’s no point to all this after all,” but there exists many other avenues to arrive at that same thought; why attempt to bury LW’s avenue? It signals quite disturbingly, “We do not wish to risk disillusionment of our followers.” Would those particularly vulnerable to such thoughts not benefit from being taught how to build mental fortitude without sacrificing open-mindedness?
I don’t specifically know how the above might be accomplished, but surely deleting critiques and other signals considered unsavoury will only increase the probability of a mental breakdown. What is the argument for helping each other tackle basilisks in a safe environment? Hiding the cause does not deal with the underlying susceptibility. I understand deletion of annoying noise, but how can anything reasoned that does not utilise Dark Arts be considered noise when presenting a sound argument?
A separate point:
Harry advocates for scientific secrecy in HP:MoR, as an analogue to how powerful wizards keep their most powerful tricks secret. However, the latter is widely known to be an agreed cultural convention of the magical world, as is the rationale for doing so understood. Hiding active secrecy without sharing a reason for same only inspires revulsion to that secrecy. The analogue is intriguing and not without merit, but only insofar as it stays an analogue and not a permutation.
Edit: Perhaps I should clarify that I truly am asking questions—they are not rhetorical by any means. If I am wrong, please tell me how; that is the point of the site, yes?
To use a metaphor… The original basilisk was suppressed, not just because some people were frightened by the idea of making deals with demons, but because the site admins thought that the methods proposed might lead to people really getting entangled with real demons; and they will hang on to that belief until someone demonstrates, using the logic of a demonological theory that they accept, that the methods don’t work.
Not to mention the fact that his example (Szilard keeping the effectiveness of graphite as a neutron moderator secret) dates back to before the Internet, and hence before the Streisand effect was much of an issue.
Funnily enough, I made this post not long after you did.
I made a similar post a few days ago, thinking that at any point in Lesswrong there’s at least a few people that think they have basilisks and are just too hesitant to tell others about them. No one came forward, so I guess they aren’t as common as I thought. I didn’t think of calling them basilisks until they were referred to as such in the comments.
None of the comments in this thread is at “100% positive” except the most recent few, which makes me suspect someone is systematically downvoting all of them.
Well, yeah. private_messaging has about 50% approval, many of the deleted comments scoring quite highly; for a “troll”, there appear to be quite a lot of active readers who agree or approve. There’s something systematic going on, with or without moderator approval.
I was tempted to, because I don’t want to see big threads dedicated to community drama over censorship, but decided against it, and merely removed a few of my upvotes.
Throwing out this accusation without links/explanations/examples is, in fact, trolling.
One example after I posted that comment: Capture, burnt remains. There’s been a pile of others (mostly not in fact Dmytry, before you make that claim), but the current site code no longer leaves a really embarrassingly obvious string of “Comment deleted”.
Really, are you seriously claiming you thought I was just making it up?
Requesting evidence is good behavior and should not be discouraged.
Requesting evidence is good behavior. Combining it with a counteraccusation of trolling slides the whole comment into the negative, for me.
Likewise, not only is it an objectionable social move it is also just false. An abuse of language. Following through the reasoning (and also observing that often quoting or linking to copies of deleted comments is also considered trolling) makes the label ‘troll’ a label that can applied rather indiscriminately to anyone who dissents, regardless of how and why they do it.
Anatoly is right. Accusation without proof is trolling, even if the proof exists. Thank you for providing at least a small part. But why so coy about the others?
If the accusation is false than it’s very easy for someone like Eliezer to say: “This has no basis”. If the accusation is true than it might violate the rules to reprint censored posts. A lack of public denail is a good way to see whether the accusation has a basis.
Lukeprog put marketing before intellectual honesty before.
I think that’s an overstatement. It’s not ‘marketing before intellectual honesty’ to point out that we should be extra-wary about analyses or materials by ideologues for whom the results are part of their identity (Sailer repeatedly talks about white identity and how it’s a shame there’s no White-with-a-capital-w solidarity in the way there’s Black-with-a-capital-b solidarity) which is just one of the many deductive fallacies with perfectly valid statistical justification for using, or that quoting approvingly such people will ceteris paribus put off other people with extra reason to distrust such people.
Where?
Is that a genuine question? Because if you read his blog and longer articles for a few years, I don’t see how anyone could differ about that.
I expect that if you put more effort into searching than I did before posting my question, you will find material that satisfies you but which for which I reject your characterization. I would rather have the material than the bald assertion.
So… you’re trying to trap me or something? In that case, let me ask you: what makes you think that Sailer does not think that a White identity would be a good thing?
Trap? WTF? I just want you to say something concrete, rather than your nebulous slander. I don’t think it will resolve our difference, but I think it is more fair to Sailer and to the reader.
Reading Sailer leads me to my beliefs about him. In particular, paying attention to positive and normative claims. I’m sorry that you can’t imagine that. As I said, before my first comment, I did a couple of searches and skimmed 10 or 20 articles. If he only expresses this opinion every three years, maybe it wouldn’t come up in a search like that.
That’s a very high standard, since not everyone makes a clear and simple thesis statement which can be easily found. But it’s implicit to various degrees in much of what he writes. So if you read Sailer’s review of a book literally titled White Identity (first useful hit for “steve sailer white identity”), does it not look exactly like what I said? Here’s some excerpts:
Every line is consistent with the claim that a White identity does not exist and its existence would be good, from the complete absence of any criticism of Taylor to the first mention of Chinese competition requiring a coordinated White response to invocation of sacred scripture (the Constitution) to the claim that disaster will reveal the problems of a lack of a White identity, usher it in, and Taylor’s work will have been meritorious for helping usher it in.
First, I would like to correct an ambiguity from the very beginning of this thread. I did not mean to dispute that Sailer says (a rhetoric of) white solidarity does not exist, only to dispute that he would like to bring it into existence. I’m not sure this made a difference to the conversation, though.
I concede that Sailer thinks white solidarity would be an improvement over the status quo.
Of course that was one of the articles I looked at before posting and rejected on skimming. I also find your quotes utterly unconvincing and dispute your summary. (The part about Taylor thinking ahead is striking, though I think not so relevant.)
I think this represents a very large disagreement between us. I guess you said that it takes years of reading Sailer to discern his beliefs. If our years of reading him lead to disagreements, it seems hard to address.
What changed my mind was his comparison between his proposal and Taylor’s. It is put entirely in terms of potential as a tool to limit immigration. He does link to a debate he had with Taylor years earlier, where he puts more emphasis on principles and the general running of society.
A debate where he says that Taylor is morally right but that citizenism is more practical and more salable; repeatedly he says that citizenism is a pragmatic attack on his foes:
If Sailer actually accepts ‘citizenism’, then why this talk of ‘odds of success’ or ‘betting’? If he believed it, then the chance of success is merely a good extra thing: “I’m right and I’m more likely to succeed”. His arguments are taking the form of “you’re right, but I’m more likely to succeed”.
I invite the reader to actually read the debate and see which of those forms his arguments take.
Priors: I haven’t heard of either Taylor or Sailor before (except possibly in passing). I dislike “citizenism” (insofar as I understand what that means before reading this) almost as much as (though slightly less than) “white nationalism”. I am also slightly more swayed by gwern’s argument than Douglas’s so far, though I remain quite uncertain.
Upon reading the essay linked and this previous one, but nothing else, my impression is that Sailor’s main focus is on distinguishing “nationalism” and “tribalism” (my terms for interpreting his ideas), more or less. By nationalism he means a system based on laws designed to facilitate and encourage altruism and cooperation with strangers, which he claims emerged in Western Europe, and is carried on mostly by whites. By tribalism he means a system based on supporting and dealing with primarily your extended family, and by extension members of your race. He opposes “white nationalism” insofar as he believes it’s “tribalist” and anti-individualistic and would harness whites to serve the racial group (much as he claims black solidarity, etc., does for other races), which would be harmful. He does seem to believe that whites are broadly superior to black and Latinos, but seems to believe this difference is unimportant compared to the paramount goal of promoting the welfare of current US citizens and ensuring that the “nationalism” (using the definition I mentioned above) remains the dominant force.
So, posteriors: I find that his arguments suck, and my opinion of “citizenism” has not improved and possibly became worse (which is beside the point). However, judging by those two posts alone, it does seem like Sailor genuinely holds “citizenism” to be paramount and is in weak opposition to some forms of white nationalism, insofar as that would encourage whites to put group interests ahead of individual and general cooperation interests; that said, he probably believes that whites are genuinely superior and because of this has significant moral sympathy for white nationalist positions despite believing a focus on racial solidarity may be harmful. Although I’m not sure if he cares about improving the lives of non-white Americans or sees that as merely a neutral or slightly beneficial side-effect of improving the lives of white Americans.
I admire your ability to read and review the article in a sane way, in the middle of mindkilling maelstrom.
In all fairness, “loyalty” and “identity” are core moral foundations for “conservative” or “right-wing” politics, and Sailer is often cited as a member of the so-called “alt-right”. “Race”, i.e. skin color, is a very salient feature which tends to correlate (at least in the United States; we would see very different results in such places as Brazil) with the kind of cultural distinctiveness that tends to create and sustain ingroup biases. So, it’s not very surprising that the ‘alt-right’ would be biased towards this kind of ingroup solidarity.
“Black solidarity” is indeed harder to explain. It may reflect a morally conservative attitude on the part of some blacks; it may be proof that left-wing folks are anything but immune to ingroup bias, at least in some circumstances; or it may be that what we take to be “black solidarity” does not reflect a true ingroup in the moral and cognitive sense, but rather a mere coalition or bloc based on shared interests, which is a fairly common feature in modern politics.
I don’t think it’s that hard to explain. A sufficient explanation would simply be the salience of skin color leading to stereotypes and action based on it: for example, during slavery, even if all sorts of ethnic groups with dark skin had nothing at all in common with each other it would still be a good idea to form a ‘Black’ identity just to coordinate opposition to slavery; if they were going to be treated as a single homogenous group, then they might as well strive to make themselves a homogenous group as far as fighting the treatment goes. (Alternate example: if there were pending legislation to execute everyone with brown eyes and you have brown eyes, you’d better quickly find all your fellow brown-eyes and hand all your money to a brown-eyed organization to fight this legislation in every way possible.)
Such a ‘reaction’ explanation of group identity also handily explains observed voting patterns of blacks for Democrats in shares upwards of 70 or 80% - it may not so much be that they really find themselves in agreement with the Democratic platform in every respect, it’s just that black-related issues are really important to them. IIRC, blacks tend to strongly disagree with the general Democratic population on some issues like gay marriage.
(Of course, I could be wrong about all of this; maybe it’s already been investigated thoroughly and these explanations debunked. It’s not an area I read much in.)
Yes, that’s essentially what I mean by “shared interests”. In this case, the lack of white “solidarity” (in a political sense) is easily explained by the observation that whites’ political interests are not at all homogenous.
Of course, if policy is allowed to discriminate among races (and this is in fact the case) that might create homogenous interests where none existed before; however, my guess is that some minorities would still coalesce along race-based lines even if such policies weren’t a factor.
I thought you meant something more like pre-existing conditions or contexts, for example, the shared interest of everyone who holds fixed debt in keeping inflation low or everyone who owns land on secure property rights.
What I thought was interesting and different about the black example was that this ‘shared interest’ could be forced on groups that previously shared no interests by a sufficiently powerful group which decides to treat the previously different groups as the same group—in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s not just that. Colin Powell is considered an African American despite being pale-skinned.