Elsewhere in comments here it’s suggested that one reason why LW (allegedly) has less interesting posts and discussions than it used to is that “Eliezer has taken to disseminating his current work via open Facebook discussions”. I am curious about how the rest of the LW community feels about this.
Poll! The fact that Eliezer now tends to talk about his current work on Facebook rather than LW is …
[pollid:697]
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that Eliezer has any obligation to do what anyone votes for here. Among many reasons there’s this: If he’s posting things on FB rather than LW because there are lots of people who want to read his stuff but for whatever reason will never read anything on LW then this poll can’t possibly detect that other than weakly and indirectly.)
The main problem is that facebook encourages drastically different quality of thought and expressions than lesswrong does. The quality of thought in Eliezer’s comments on facebook is sloppy. I chose to unfollow him on facebook because seeing Eliezer at his worst makes it rather a lot more difficult to appreciate Eliezer at his best (contempt is the mind killer). I assumed that any particularly insteresting work he did (that is safe to share with the public) would end up finding its way into a less transient medium than facebook eventually...
facebook encourages drastically different quality of thought and expressions
Not sure if this applies to Eliezer’s debate threads, but not having downvotes is a horrible setup for a debate. Every stupid comment is either ignored, which seems like “silence is consent”, or starts a flamewar. There is simply no way to reduce noise.
Not sure if this applies to Eliezer’s debate threads, but not having downvotes is a horrible setup for a debate. Every stupid comment is either ignored, which seems like “silence is consent”, or starts a flamewar. There is simply no way to reduce noise.
There is no way to reduce noise for everyone else. For myself I’ve adopted a strategy of using the ‘block use’ feature whenever I encounter a comment that I especially wish to downvote. These days I consider ‘block’ to be a far more critical feature than downvoting is (despite remaining a big fan of downvoting liberally).
Elsewhere in comments here it’s suggested that one reason why LW (allegedly) has less interesting posts and discussions than it used to is that “Eliezer has taken to disseminating his current work via open Facebook discussions”. I am curious about how the rest of the LW community feels about this.
Poll! The fact that Eliezer now tends to talk about his current work on Facebook rather than LW is …
[pollid:697]
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that Eliezer has any obligation to do what anyone votes for here. Among many reasons there’s this: If he’s posting things on FB rather than LW because there are lots of people who want to read his stuff but for whatever reason will never read anything on LW then this poll can’t possibly detect that other than weakly and indirectly.)
The main problem is that facebook encourages drastically different quality of thought and expressions than lesswrong does. The quality of thought in Eliezer’s comments on facebook is sloppy. I chose to unfollow him on facebook because seeing Eliezer at his worst makes it rather a lot more difficult to appreciate Eliezer at his best (contempt is the mind killer). I assumed that any particularly insteresting work he did (that is safe to share with the public) would end up finding its way into a less transient medium than facebook eventually...
...Have I been missing anything exciting?
Not sure if this applies to Eliezer’s debate threads, but not having downvotes is a horrible setup for a debate. Every stupid comment is either ignored, which seems like “silence is consent”, or starts a flamewar. There is simply no way to reduce noise.
There is no way to reduce noise for everyone else. For myself I’ve adopted a strategy of using the ‘block use’ feature whenever I encounter a comment that I especially wish to downvote. These days I consider ‘block’ to be a far more critical feature than downvoting is (despite remaining a big fan of downvoting liberally).
You can delete comments to your posts, and IIRC EY has endorsed doing so.