My views here aren’t fully clarified, but I’m more saying “the pendulum needs to swing this way for LessWrong to be good” than saying “LessWrong being good is the pendulum being all the way over there.”
Or, to the extent that I understood you and am accurately representing Ben Pace, I agree with you both.
“You have to know the rules before you can break them.”
There has to be some sense that you’re riffing deliberately and not just wrong about the defaults
The ability to depart from The Standard Forms is dependent on both the level of trust and the number of bystanders who will get the wrong idea (see my and Critch’s related posts, or my essay on the social motte-and-bailey).
“Level three players can’t distinguish level two players from level four players.”
This suggests to me a different idea on how to improve LessWrong: make an automated “basics of disagreement” test. This involves recognizing a couple of basic concepts like cruxes and common knowledge, and involves looking at some comment threads and correctly diagnosing “what’s going on” in them (e.g. where are they talking past each other) and you have to notice a bunch of useful ways to intervene.
Then if you pass, your username on comments gets a little badge next to it, and your strong vote strength gets moved up to +4 (if you’re not already there).
The idea is to make it clearer who is breaking the rules that they know, versus who is breaking the rules that they don’t know.
My views here aren’t fully clarified, but I’m more saying “the pendulum needs to swing this way for LessWrong to be good” than saying “LessWrong being good is the pendulum being all the way over there.”
Or, to the extent that I understood you and am accurately representing Ben Pace, I agree with you both.
Some strings of wisdom that seem related:
“You have to know the rules before you can break them.”
There has to be some sense that you’re riffing deliberately and not just wrong about the defaults
The ability to depart from The Standard Forms is dependent on both the level of trust and the number of bystanders who will get the wrong idea (see my and Critch’s related posts, or my essay on the social motte-and-bailey).
“Level three players can’t distinguish level two players from level four players.”
This suggests to me a different idea on how to improve LessWrong: make an automated “basics of disagreement” test. This involves recognizing a couple of basic concepts like cruxes and common knowledge, and involves looking at some comment threads and correctly diagnosing “what’s going on” in them (e.g. where are they talking past each other) and you have to notice a bunch of useful ways to intervene.
Then if you pass, your username on comments gets a little badge next to it, and your strong vote strength gets moved up to +4 (if you’re not already there).
The idea is to make it clearer who is breaking the rules that they know, versus who is breaking the rules that they don’t know.
Interestingly, my next planned essay is an exploration of a single basic of disagreement.