I’ve changed the post title to “How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious” and promoted.
Reasons for change: More specific description of actual content; worry about titles that countersignal at the expense of such specificity (original was “Why Less Wrong hasn’t changed my life (yet)”.)
I know this was from good motives (and I agree that the new title is better), but I think that changing somebody else’s post as you promote it sends off bad signaling, compared to saying “Really want to promote this, but the title looks wrong for the post. How about...?”
You know, you’re right. I felt bad for not having promoted the post already and felt the title needed to be changed before it was promoted, and worried that Swimmer wouldn’t have seen the request for a while; but in retrospect I should’ve posted the proposed change first and then waited 4 hours to see if there was a reply.
If you’re making changes before receiving permission, regardless of waiting period, I’d suggest that a quick editor’s note at the TOP of the article would be appropriate. In the case of minor grammar fixes and other touch-ups, a footnote or a comment letting the author know about the changes seems sufficient, but an actual content change (such as rewriting the title) seems like it needs a clearer disclaimer.
Looking at the current post, there is no such indicator of editing, which is my primary discomfort with the activity.
I’m also curious how you decided on “4 hours”, since it seems like an unusual value. I would normally expect “24 hours” / 1 day, and I’m curious what lead to this instead. I think that clear signalling is the more important aspect of this, though (but I do appreciate your willingness to compromise and wait in the future!)
Seconded. I don’t go as far as Mitchell Porter because I’m not into protests. To take another example, Barkley Rosser told me he’s boycotting the comments at EconLog to protest censorship, but I just assume I’d stray too far and get banned again if I had my privileges reinstated.
I was just about to comment and ask why the title changed...after I figured out it wasn’t some other “copycat” post that someone else had made on the same theme. Thanks, though… I spent quite a while switching titles and trying to find a good one, and yours is better.
Oh, having not read the post under either title I had assumed Swimmer had written two. The titles seem so completely unrelated!
The new title does make me more inclined to read it. My thought when reading the original title was “Pffft. Why would it be expected to? Humans changing their lives based on supplied information is relative rarity!”
All right. I think I did overreact. And it’s not right to try to defensively turn it into a point about something bigger, even if that bigger thing is much more important.
However, since no-one has talked very much about why an intervention like this looks so bad, let me try to do so. But first, let’s bear in mind the sort of intervention which normally leads to criticism of editors and moderators: negative interventions, like deletions and blocks. This was actually a promotion, so it’s a different sort of faux pas (as wedrifid aptly termed it).
Basically, Eliezer took someone’s essay, give it a new title that is a psychological self-assessment written in the first person (that is, written as if it was produced by the article’s author, rather than by the editor), and then promoted the essay on the front page. The new title went immediately into Google, into the RSS feed (from where it also ended up on Twitter), and who knows how many other places. Then he asked the author if she liked her new look.
The old title was somewhat forward-looking: “Why Less Wrong hasn’t changed my life (yet)”. The new title is not: it’s just “How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious”. The new title corresponds more directly to the content of the essay, but presumably the old title reflected authorial intent as well. Maybe there is a push and pull going on inside Swimmer963 between a will to realism, some LW social pressure to attempt great things, authentic personal ambition versus a desire for a comfortable life and a desire to avoid fiascos, who knows what else.
The reason this situation even arises is because of LW’s ambiguous status halfway between “group blog” and “rationality broadsheet”. If LW was a magazine with columnists, we wouldn’t be so surprised at such editorial interventions. But if someone hacked into your personal blog and changed the titles of all the posts according to their private understanding of what the posts were really about, that would feel very invasive.
In practice, people do try to shape their posts so that they meet an imagined LW standard—I don’t just mean quality of reasoning or clarity of expression; I also mean a tone whereby the author says “There is this issue that you run across in life, how can we deal with it? Here’s how.” There’s a competition to exhibit methods of self-improvement that one has personally discovered and employed; who is the best at helping others to help themselves? Now that there’s a Discussion section, there’s less need to shape every post into that form; that’s now reserved for the featured articles. But I’ve certainly shaped one or two of my posts, somewhat artificially, to conform to an imagined LW style of communication.
So we’re all aware that there are standards and conventions which apply to ambitious :-) LW posts, and we can expect that they’ll be moved into Discussion if they’re judged not good enough, that people may ask us to rewrite them, and so on. But this is the first time I can remember when a direct modification like this was made by a moderator. He gave an opportunity for dissent a short time later, but, it still seems like bad practice, and this seems to have been recognized.
Basically, Eliezer took someone’s essay, give it a new title that is a psychological self-assessment written in the first person (that is, written as if it was produced by the article’s author, rather than by the editor), and then promoted the essay on the front page. The new title went immediately into Google, into the RSS feed (from where it also ended up on Twitter), and who knows how many other places. Then he asked the author if she liked her new look.
Thank you for 1) reconsidering, and 2) explaining. Upon reading the above-quoted paragraph, I now understand what you were so upset about. Since Swimmer had no objection, I saw the incident as no-harm, no-foul, and didn’t “get” what you were objecting to exactly.
The criticism was fair, but I was objecting to the scale, which Mitchell_Porter has since called a “massive overreaction”. One should verify that one’s complaints really are falling on deaf ears before even making a threat, let alone carrying it out. (Props to MP for (and EY) for changing their minds.)
As long as you are in charge, I am never posting here again. That is too much editorial power being exercised without consent.
It was a faux pas, not an overt infraction! I would be concerned if Eliezer was unwilling to reverse the change upon objection (and didn’t allow the author to reverse the change herself). I would also be concerned if Eliezer didn’t admit he made a mistake!
Willingness to admit errors and change behavior is a good thing!
Ya know, it’s people like you what cause people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error that they will never be allowed to correct.
Ya know, it’s people like you what cause people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error that they will never be allowed to correct.
You did notice that you’re doing the exact same thing sie is doing, right? (That is, jumping to a conclusion about what kind of person someone is, based on a single action.)
Gender neutral. “Mitchell Porter” sounds male, but for some reason my brain pings back that I’ve heard of a female with that exact first and last name, and the probability it could be that Mitchell Porter seems high.
No, that would be saying, “I will never again reply to any thread in which you have participated” or something like that. The important thing is to be allowed to say “Oops”.
I didn’t say that you were doing the same thing you were accusing hir of doing; I said you were both jumping to conclusions about character on the basis of single actions. And hir objection, while a significant over-reaction, didn’t go so far as to directly reduce you to a mere class of person.
If you’d said that throwing tantrums like that caused people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed, that’d get the same point across without stooping to the actual personal attack of “people like you”.
(Certainly, some people might still take it as a personal attack without that phrase, but you’d be less likely to have your existing allies take up their side, interpreting you as needlessly kicking an underdog.)
Ya know, it’s people like you what cause people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error that they will never be allowed to correct.
On a related note, I am very pleased thus far with Eliezer’s performance as Less Wrong dictator. I very much doubt that the quality of discourse would be this high if he didn’t decide to ban the mention of The Topics that Must Not be Named or warn against engaging in discussion of mind-killing things like politics.
Ya know, it’s people like you what cause people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error that they will never be allowed to correct.
Alternate causal model: It is people that spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error not seeking suitable treatment for crippling anxiety that causes said lifelong phenomenon.
Maybe it’s an over-reaction; do I really want to maintain a permanent vote of no confidence (via post-boycott) regarding your editorial judgment, because of one mistake? You have to put up with lots of ridiculous crap, just by trying to do what you’re doing (or what you were doing, before it turned into generalized rationality outreach); am I just adding to that?
Or perhaps adhering to my word would be a constructively adversarial thing to do in this instance. Oddly enough, the last time I made an inconvenient pledge on this site turns out to be relevant. That was the bet about AspiringKnitter’s identity. One of AK’s stated reasons for showing up here was fear that SIAI would one day (via the power of a super-AI) engage in non-consensual modifications of human value systems. And the standard view is that getting AI values wrong is indeed an “error that [you] will never be allowed to correct”—but in this case, it won’t be society that prevents you from saying oops, it will just be reality.
So if you’re having any adverse reactions to this instance of ostentatious righteousness, try to redirect that energy towards getting the real job done. You’ll have my support in that respect!
I think you were fairly justified in changing the title, but i would think people have good reason to fear an error that could never be corrected. Why else would it be valuable to discern the future ramifications of a decision? Also i should probably note that you could correct this if you wanted to, but have insufficient reason to consider this an error. Again, I think the title change was a good thing, but that last comment felt like it was cheating on a site as devoted to precision in argument as we are. Also, Mitchell_Porter’s overreaction hardly reveals enough about his character to justify a widespread negative effect on society caused by such personalities.
I really don’t want to use the downvote-to-disagree mechanic here, so just chiming in with a datapoint that I’m fine with wiki-style proactive back-and-forth editing as a general style on this site and on anything I end up writing in favor of always running everything by the original author before doing anything.
True. Seems to be something of a sliding scale though from personal blog to community blog to wiki. The Stack Overflow sites for example do attribute all questions to the specific users who first asked them, but also have a strong wiki-like active editing culture. Getting the details of the site culture right is tricky and important, but a communal editing culture doesn’t seem like a categorically bad thing.
It is obviously trickier than a simple leave-as-it-is-or-delete moderation style.
There is certainly a loss of potential when blog posts are left static rather than potentially being refined and improved by both the original author and the community. It seems to be something of a local minimum that we may not be easily able to improve upon given the basic format.
There is certainly a loss of potential when blog posts are left static rather than potentially being refined and improved by both the original author and the community.
I endorse the improvement of old posts. But one should add a note with a date to it, declaring that it has been edited, to account for comments that were made prior to the editing that might refer to a problem with the initial version.
I also endorse the improvement of comments. But in the case of comments the editing should either be more limited, to not confuse people reading the follow-up comments, or mention the gist of the initial comment as a side note.
I strongly oppose having someone else edit signed material without consent.
I’m ok with an edit link which could include notes or a wiki link, or a clearly marked area which mentions edited versions (including a mention of how much was edited and by whom) and gives the edited versions’ karma.
I’ve changed the post title to “How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious” and promoted.
Reasons for change: More specific description of actual content; worry about titles that countersignal at the expense of such specificity (original was “Why Less Wrong hasn’t changed my life (yet)”.)
I know this was from good motives (and I agree that the new title is better), but I think that changing somebody else’s post as you promote it sends off bad signaling, compared to saying “Really want to promote this, but the title looks wrong for the post. How about...?”
You know, you’re right. I felt bad for not having promoted the post already and felt the title needed to be changed before it was promoted, and worried that Swimmer wouldn’t have seen the request for a while; but in retrospect I should’ve posted the proposed change first and then waited 4 hours to see if there was a reply.
If you’re making changes before receiving permission, regardless of waiting period, I’d suggest that a quick editor’s note at the TOP of the article would be appropriate. In the case of minor grammar fixes and other touch-ups, a footnote or a comment letting the author know about the changes seems sufficient, but an actual content change (such as rewriting the title) seems like it needs a clearer disclaimer.
Looking at the current post, there is no such indicator of editing, which is my primary discomfort with the activity.
I’m also curious how you decided on “4 hours”, since it seems like an unusual value. I would normally expect “24 hours” / 1 day, and I’m curious what lead to this instead. I think that clear signalling is the more important aspect of this, though (but I do appreciate your willingness to compromise and wait in the future!)
Seconded. I don’t go as far as Mitchell Porter because I’m not into protests. To take another example, Barkley Rosser told me he’s boycotting the comments at EconLog to protest censorship, but I just assume I’d stray too far and get banned again if I had my privileges reinstated.
I was just about to comment and ask why the title changed...after I figured out it wasn’t some other “copycat” post that someone else had made on the same theme. Thanks, though… I spent quite a while switching titles and trying to find a good one, and yours is better.
Oh, having not read the post under either title I had assumed Swimmer had written two. The titles seem so completely unrelated!
The new title does make me more inclined to read it. My thought when reading the original title was “Pffft. Why would it be expected to? Humans changing their lives based on supplied information is relative rarity!”
It doesn’t appear promoted at the moment.
As long as you are in charge, I am never posting here again. That is too much editorial power being exercised without consent.
All right. I think I did overreact. And it’s not right to try to defensively turn it into a point about something bigger, even if that bigger thing is much more important.
However, since no-one has talked very much about why an intervention like this looks so bad, let me try to do so. But first, let’s bear in mind the sort of intervention which normally leads to criticism of editors and moderators: negative interventions, like deletions and blocks. This was actually a promotion, so it’s a different sort of faux pas (as wedrifid aptly termed it).
Basically, Eliezer took someone’s essay, give it a new title that is a psychological self-assessment written in the first person (that is, written as if it was produced by the article’s author, rather than by the editor), and then promoted the essay on the front page. The new title went immediately into Google, into the RSS feed (from where it also ended up on Twitter), and who knows how many other places. Then he asked the author if she liked her new look.
The old title was somewhat forward-looking: “Why Less Wrong hasn’t changed my life (yet)”. The new title is not: it’s just “How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious”. The new title corresponds more directly to the content of the essay, but presumably the old title reflected authorial intent as well. Maybe there is a push and pull going on inside Swimmer963 between a will to realism, some LW social pressure to attempt great things, authentic personal ambition versus a desire for a comfortable life and a desire to avoid fiascos, who knows what else.
The reason this situation even arises is because of LW’s ambiguous status halfway between “group blog” and “rationality broadsheet”. If LW was a magazine with columnists, we wouldn’t be so surprised at such editorial interventions. But if someone hacked into your personal blog and changed the titles of all the posts according to their private understanding of what the posts were really about, that would feel very invasive.
In practice, people do try to shape their posts so that they meet an imagined LW standard—I don’t just mean quality of reasoning or clarity of expression; I also mean a tone whereby the author says “There is this issue that you run across in life, how can we deal with it? Here’s how.” There’s a competition to exhibit methods of self-improvement that one has personally discovered and employed; who is the best at helping others to help themselves? Now that there’s a Discussion section, there’s less need to shape every post into that form; that’s now reserved for the featured articles. But I’ve certainly shaped one or two of my posts, somewhat artificially, to conform to an imagined LW style of communication.
So we’re all aware that there are standards and conventions which apply to ambitious :-) LW posts, and we can expect that they’ll be moved into Discussion if they’re judged not good enough, that people may ask us to rewrite them, and so on. But this is the first time I can remember when a direct modification like this was made by a moderator. He gave an opportunity for dissent a short time later, but, it still seems like bad practice, and this seems to have been recognized.
Your analysis seems accurate and thorough.
Thank you for 1) reconsidering, and 2) explaining. Upon reading the above-quoted paragraph, I now understand what you were so upset about. Since Swimmer had no objection, I saw the incident as no-harm, no-foul, and didn’t “get” what you were objecting to exactly.
I’ve spelt out the issue, but it was still a massive over-reaction on my part, which was due to entirely unrelated matters.
Downvote: save the nuclear option for a larger infraction, preferably one protested by the author and committed without remorse.
He made this reply before Eliezer’s second post. Given that fact, it seems at least more fair than it would otherwise have been.
The criticism was fair, but I was objecting to the scale, which Mitchell_Porter has since called a “massive overreaction”. One should verify that one’s complaints really are falling on deaf ears before even making a threat, let alone carrying it out. (Props to MP for (and EY) for changing their minds.)
It was a faux pas, not an overt infraction! I would be concerned if Eliezer was unwilling to reverse the change upon objection (and didn’t allow the author to reverse the change herself). I would also be concerned if Eliezer didn’t admit he made a mistake!
Willingness to admit errors and change behavior is a good thing!
Ya know, it’s people like you what cause people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error that they will never be allowed to correct.
You did notice that you’re doing the exact same thing sie is doing, right? (That is, jumping to a conclusion about what kind of person someone is, based on a single action.)
Out of interest is “sie” one of those gender neutral terms that have been invented or a typo?
Gender neutral. “Mitchell Porter” sounds male, but for some reason my brain pings back that I’ve heard of a female with that exact first and last name, and the probability it could be that Mitchell Porter seems high.
Bad choice; it’s German for “she”.
The ‘i’ key is not adjacent to ‘s’, ‘h’ or ‘e’, so I guess it’s intentional.
No, that would be saying, “I will never again reply to any thread in which you have participated” or something like that. The important thing is to be allowed to say “Oops”.
I didn’t say that you were doing the same thing you were accusing hir of doing; I said you were both jumping to conclusions about character on the basis of single actions. And hir objection, while a significant over-reaction, didn’t go so far as to directly reduce you to a mere class of person.
If you’d said that throwing tantrums like that caused people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed, that’d get the same point across without stooping to the actual personal attack of “people like you”.
(Certainly, some people might still take it as a personal attack without that phrase, but you’d be less likely to have your existing allies take up their side, interpreting you as needlessly kicking an underdog.)
Either you are committing the fundamental attribution error or I am suffering from WYSIATI.
On a related note, I am very pleased thus far with Eliezer’s performance as Less Wrong dictator. I very much doubt that the quality of discourse would be this high if he didn’t decide to ban the mention of The Topics that Must Not be Named or warn against engaging in discussion of mind-killing things like politics.
Starts to make some kind of body language gesture to convey being in this category, but chickens out halfway through and slinks away...
Alternate causal model: It is people that spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error not seeking suitable treatment for crippling anxiety that causes said lifelong phenomenon.
These are not mutually exclusive alternatives. They could easily both be true.
Maybe it’s an over-reaction; do I really want to maintain a permanent vote of no confidence (via post-boycott) regarding your editorial judgment, because of one mistake? You have to put up with lots of ridiculous crap, just by trying to do what you’re doing (or what you were doing, before it turned into generalized rationality outreach); am I just adding to that?
Or perhaps adhering to my word would be a constructively adversarial thing to do in this instance. Oddly enough, the last time I made an inconvenient pledge on this site turns out to be relevant. That was the bet about AspiringKnitter’s identity. One of AK’s stated reasons for showing up here was fear that SIAI would one day (via the power of a super-AI) engage in non-consensual modifications of human value systems. And the standard view is that getting AI values wrong is indeed an “error that [you] will never be allowed to correct”—but in this case, it won’t be society that prevents you from saying oops, it will just be reality.
So if you’re having any adverse reactions to this instance of ostentatious righteousness, try to redirect that energy towards getting the real job done. You’ll have my support in that respect!
I think you were fairly justified in changing the title, but i would think people have good reason to fear an error that could never be corrected. Why else would it be valuable to discern the future ramifications of a decision? Also i should probably note that you could correct this if you wanted to, but have insufficient reason to consider this an error. Again, I think the title change was a good thing, but that last comment felt like it was cheating on a site as devoted to precision in argument as we are. Also, Mitchell_Porter’s overreaction hardly reveals enough about his character to justify a widespread negative effect on society caused by such personalities.
I really don’t want to use the downvote-to-disagree mechanic here, so just chiming in with a datapoint that I’m fine with wiki-style proactive back-and-forth editing as a general style on this site and on anything I end up writing in favor of always running everything by the original author before doing anything.
Wiki’s do not publish things in your name. That matters.
True. Seems to be something of a sliding scale though from personal blog to community blog to wiki. The Stack Overflow sites for example do attribute all questions to the specific users who first asked them, but also have a strong wiki-like active editing culture. Getting the details of the site culture right is tricky and important, but a communal editing culture doesn’t seem like a categorically bad thing.
It is obviously trickier than a simple leave-as-it-is-or-delete moderation style.
There is certainly a loss of potential when blog posts are left static rather than potentially being refined and improved by both the original author and the community. It seems to be something of a local minimum that we may not be easily able to improve upon given the basic format.
I endorse the improvement of old posts. But one should add a note with a date to it, declaring that it has been edited, to account for comments that were made prior to the editing that might refer to a problem with the initial version.
I also endorse the improvement of comments. But in the case of comments the editing should either be more limited, to not confuse people reading the follow-up comments, or mention the gist of the initial comment as a side note.
I strongly oppose having someone else edit signed material without consent.
I’m ok with an edit link which could include notes or a wiki link, or a clearly marked area which mentions edited versions (including a mention of how much was edited and by whom) and gives the edited versions’ karma.
You’ll be missed. Wouldn’t be so bad if you blogged regularly at one location.