What you say makes sense if, and only if, the presence of “bad” content is costless.
And that condition has (at least) these prerequisites:
Everyone (or near enough) clearly sees which content is bad; everyone agrees that the content is bad, and also on what makes it bad; and thus…
… the bad content is clearly and publicly judged as such, and firmly discarded, so that…
… nobody adopts or integrates the bad ideas from the bad content, and nobody’s reasoning, models, practices, behavior, etc. is affected (negatively) by the bad content; and relatedly…
… the bad content does not “crowd out” the good content, bad ideas from it do not outcompete opposing good ideas on corresponding topics, the bad ideas in the bad content never become the consensus views on any relevant subjects, and the bad reasoning in the bad content never affects the norms for discussion (of good content, or of anything) on the site (e.g., is never viewed by newcomers, taken to be representative, and understood to be acceptable).
If, indeed, these conditions obtain, then your perspective is eminently reasonable, and your chosen policy almost certainly the right one.
But it seems very clear to me that these conditions absolutely do not obtain. Every single thing I listed above is, in fact, entirely false, on Less Wrong.
And that means that “bad” content is far from costless. It means that such content imposes terrible costs, in fact; it means that tolerating such content means that we tolerate the corrosion of our ability to produce good content—which is to say, our ability to find what is true, and to do useful things. (And when I say “our”, I mean both “Less Wrong’s, collectively” and “the participants’, individually”.)
(Unlike your comment, which is, commendably, rife with examples, you’ll note that my reply provides no examples at all. This is intentional; I have little desire to start a fight, as it were, by “calling out” any posters or commenters. I will provide examples on request… but I suspect that anyone participating in this conversation will have little trouble coming up with more than a few examples, even without my help.)
What you say makes sense if, and only if, the presence of “bad” content is costless.
“Iff” is far too strong. I agree that the “if” claim holds. However, I think that what Ben says also makes sense ifthe bad/high-variance content has costs which are less than its benefits. Demanding costlessness imposes an unnecessarily high standard on positions disagreeing with your own, I think.
Contrasting your position with Ben’s, I sense a potential false dichotomy. Must it be true that either we open the floodgates and allow who-knows-what on the site in order to encourage higher-variance moves, or we sternly allow only the most well-supported reasoning? I think not. What other solutions might be available?
The first—but surely not best—to come to mind is the curation < LW review < ??? pipeline, where posts are subjected to increasing levels of scrutiny and rewarded with increasing levels of visibility. Perhaps there might be some way for people to modulate “how much they update on a post” by “the amount of scrutiny the post has received.” I don’t think this quite fights the corrosion you point at. But it seems like something is possible here, and in any case it seems to me too early to conclude there is only one axis of variation in responses to the situation (free-wheeling vs strict).
I have repeatedly suggested/advocated the (to me, fairly obvious) solution where (to summarize / crystallize my previous commentary on this):
People post things on their personal LW blogs. Post authors have moderation powers on their personal-blog posts.
Things are posted to the front page only if (but not necessarily “if”!) they are intended to be subject to the sort of scrutiny wherein we insist that posts live up to non-trivial epistemic/etc. standards (with attendant criticism, picking-apart, analysis, etc.; and also with attendant downvotes for posts judged to be bad). Importantly, post authors do not have moderation powers in this case, nor the ability to decide on moderation standards for comments on their posts. (In this case a post might be front-paged by the author, or, with the author’s consent, by the mods.)
Posts that go to the front page, are evaluated by the above-described process, and judged to be unusually good, may be “curated” or what have you.
In this case, it would be proper for the community to judge personal-blog posts, that have not been subjected to “frontpage-level” scrutiny, as essentially ignorable. This would go a long way toward ensuring that posts of the “jam-packed with bullshit” type (which would either be posted to personal blogs only, or would go to the front page and be mercilessly torn apart, and clearly and publicly judged to be poor) would be largely costless.
I agree with you that this sort of setup would not quite solve the problem, and also that it would nonetheless improve the situation markedly.
But the LW team has consistently been opposed to this sort of proposal.
It sounds to me like posting on your High-Standards-Frontpage is a very high effort endeavor, an amount of effort that currently only around 3-30 posts each year have put into them. I’ve thought of this idea before with the name “LW Journal” or “LW Peer Review”, which also had a part where it wasn’t only commenters critiquing your post, but we paid a few people full-time for reviewing of the posts in this pipeline, and there was also a clear pass/failure with each submission. (Scott Garrabrant has also suggested this idea to me in the past, as a publishing place for his papers.)
I think the main requirement I see is a correspondingly larger incentive to write something that passes this bar. Else I mostly expect the same fate to befall us as with LW 1.0, where Main became increasingly effortful and unpleasant for authors to post to, such that writers like Scott Alexander moved away to writing on their personal blogs.
(I’m generally interested to hear ideas for what would be a big reward for writers to do this sort of thing. The first ones that come to my mind are “money” and “being published in physical books”.)
I do think that something like this would really help the site in certain ways; I think a lot of people have a hard time figuring out what standard to hold their posts to, and having a clearly “high standard” and “lower standard” place would help authors feel more comfortable knowing what they’re aiming for in their writing. (“Shortform” was an experiment with a kind of lower-standards place.) But I don’t currently see a simple way to cause a lot of people to produce high-effort high-standards content for that part of the site, beyond the amount of effort we currently receive on the highest effort posts each year.
The first ones that come to my mind are “money” and “being published in physical books”.
So I think the Review is pretty good at getting good old content, but I think the thing Said is talking about should happen more quickly, and should be more like Royal Society Letters or w/e.
Actually, I wonder about Rohin’s newsletters as a model/seed. They attract more scrutiny to things, but they come with the reward of Rohin’s summary (and, presumably, more eyeballs than it would have gotten on its own). But also people were going to be writing those things for their own reasons anyway.
I think if we had the Eliezer-curated weekly newsletter of “here are the LW posts that caught my interest plus commentary on them”, we would probably think the reward and scrutiny were balanced. Of course, as with any suggestion that proposes spending Eliezer-time on something, I think this is pretty dang expensive—but the Royal Society Letters were also colossally expensive to produce.
I would likely do this from my own motivation (i.e. not necessarily need money) if I were given at least one of:
a) guaranteed protection from the badgunk comments by e.g. three moderators willing to be dependably high-effort down in the comments
b) given the power to hide badgunk comments pending their author rewriting them to eliminate the badgunk
c) given the power to leave inline commentary on people’s badgunk comments
The only thing holding me back from doing something much more like what Said proposes is “LW comment sections regularly abuse and exhaust me.” Literally that’s the only barrier, and it’s a substantial one. If LW comment sections did not regularly abuse and exhaust me, such that every post feels like I need to set aside fifty hours of life and spoons just in case, then I could and would be much more prolific.
(To be clear: some people whose pushback on this post was emphatically not abuse or exhausting include supposedlyfun, Said, Elizabeth, johnswentsworth, and agrippa.)
a) guaranteed protection from the badgunk comments by e.g. three moderators willing to be dependably high-effort down in the comments
Would you accept this substitute:
“A site/community culture where other commenters will reliably ‘call out’ (and downvote) undesirable comments, and will not be punished for doing so (and attempts to punish them for such ‘vigilante-style’ a.k.a. ‘grassroots’ ‘comment policing’ will themselves be punished—by other commenters, recursively, with support from moderators if required).”
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for noting it. That substitute is much more what the OP is pushing for.
EDIT: With the further claim that, once such activity is reliable and credible, its rate will also decrease. That standards, clearly held and reliably enforced, tend to beget fewer violations in the first place, and that, in other words, I don’t think this would be a permanent uptick in policing.
Strong-upvote. I want to register that I have had disagreements with Said in the past about this, and while I am still not completely sure whether I agree with his frame, recent developments have in fact caused me to update significantly towards his view.
I suspect this is true of others as well, such that I think Said’s view (as well as associated views that may differ in specifics but agree in thrust) can no longer be treated as the minority viewpoint. (They may still be the minority view, but if so I don’t expect it to be a small minority anymore, where “small” might be operationalized as “less than 1 in 5 people on this site”.)
There are, at the very least, three prominent examples that spring to mind of people advocating something like “higher epistemic standards on LW”: Duncan, Said, and (if I might be so bold) myself. There are, moreover, a smattering of comments from less prolific commenters, most of whom seem to express agreement with Duncan’s OP. I do not think this is something that should be ignored, and I think the site may benefit from some kind of poll of its userbase, just to see exactly how much consensus there is on this.
(I recognize that the LW/Lightcone team may nonetheless choose to ignore the result of any such poll, and for the sake of clarity I wish to add that I do not view this as problematic. I do not, on the whole, think that the LW team should be reduced to a proxy that implements whatever the userbase thinks they want; my expectation is that this would produce worse long-term outcomes than if the team regularly exercised their own judgement, even if that judgement sometimes results in policy decisions that conflict with a substantial fraction of the userbase’s desires. Even so, however, I claim that information of the form “X% of LW users believe Y” is useful information to have, and will at the very least play a role in any kind of healthy decision-making process.)
I am generally in favor of people running polls and surveys about information they’re interested in.
(Here’s a very random one I did, and looking through search I see people have done them on general demographics, nootropics, existential risk, akrasia, and more.)
I’m pretty confused by your numbered list, because they seem directly in contradiction with how scientific journals have worked historically. Here’s a quote from an earlier post of mine:
I looked through a volume of the London Mathematical Society, in particular, the volume where Turing published his groundbreaking paper proving that not all mathematical propositions are decidable (thanks to sci-hub for making it possible for me to read the papers!). My eyes looked at about 60% of the pages in the journal (about 12 papers), and not one of them disagreed with any prior work. There was :
A footnote that thanked an advisor for finding a flaw in a proof
An addendum page (to the whole volume) that consisted of a single sentence thanking someone for showing one of their theorems was a special case of someone else’s theorem
One person who was skeptical of another person’s theorem. But that theorem by Ramanujan (who was famous for stating theorems without proofs), and the whole paper primarily found proofs of his other theorems.
There were lots of discussions of people’s work but always building, or extending, or finding a neater way of achieving the same results. Never disagreement, correction, or the finding of errors.
I think that many-to-most papers published in scientific journals are basically on unhelpful questions and add little to the field, and I’d bet some of the proofs are false. And yet it seems to be very rarely published that they’re unhelpful or wrong or even criticized in the journals. People build on the good content, and forget about the rest. And journals provide a publishing house for the best ideas at a given time. (Not too dissimilar to the annual LW Review.)
It seems to me that low-quality content is indeed pretty low cost if you have a good filtering mechanism for the best content, and an incentive for people to produce great content. I think on the margin I am interested in creating more of both — better filtering and stronger incentives. That is where my mind currently goes when I think of ways to improve LessWrong.
This seems like a very odd response given the fact of the replication crisis, the many cases of scientific knowledge being forgotten for decades after being discovered, the rise of false or inaccurate (and sometimes quite harmful!) models, etc.
I think that (in many, or most, scientific fields) people often don’t build on the good content, and don’t forget about the bad content; often, the reverse happens. It’s true that it’s “very rarely published that [bad papers/proofs are] unhelpful or wrong or even criticized in the journals”! But this is, actually, very bad, and is a huge reason why more and more scientific fields are being revealed to be full of un-replicable nonsense, egregious mistakes, and even outright fraud! The filtering mechanisms we have are actually quite poor.
The “papers in scientific journals” example / case study seems to me to yield clear, strong support for my view.
It’s very worthwhile to understand the ways in which academia has died over the last 60 years or so, and part of it definitely involves failures in the journal system. But the axis of public criticism in journals doesn’t seem at all to have been what changed in the last 60 years? Insofar as you think that’s a primary reason, you seem to be explaining a change by pointing to a variable that has not changed.
In replying to your proposed norms, it’s not odd to point out that the very mechanism of labeling everything that’s bad as bad and ensuring we have common knowledge of it, was not remotely present when science was at its most productive — when Turing was inventing his machines, or when Crick & Watson were discovering the structure of DNA. In fact it seems to have been actively opposed in the journal system, because you do not get zero criticism without active optimization for it. That is why it seems to me to be strong evidence against the system you propose.
There may be a system that works via criticizing everything bad in public, but when science was most successful it did not, and instead seems to me to be based around the system I describe (a lot of submissions and high reward for success, little punishment for failure).
Re: standards:
What you say makes sense if, and only if, the presence of “bad” content is costless.
And that condition has (at least) these prerequisites:
Everyone (or near enough) clearly sees which content is bad; everyone agrees that the content is bad, and also on what makes it bad; and thus…
… the bad content is clearly and publicly judged as such, and firmly discarded, so that…
… nobody adopts or integrates the bad ideas from the bad content, and nobody’s reasoning, models, practices, behavior, etc. is affected (negatively) by the bad content; and relatedly…
… the bad content does not “crowd out” the good content, bad ideas from it do not outcompete opposing good ideas on corresponding topics, the bad ideas in the bad content never become the consensus views on any relevant subjects, and the bad reasoning in the bad content never affects the norms for discussion (of good content, or of anything) on the site (e.g., is never viewed by newcomers, taken to be representative, and understood to be acceptable).
If, indeed, these conditions obtain, then your perspective is eminently reasonable, and your chosen policy almost certainly the right one.
But it seems very clear to me that these conditions absolutely do not obtain. Every single thing I listed above is, in fact, entirely false, on Less Wrong.
And that means that “bad” content is far from costless. It means that such content imposes terrible costs, in fact; it means that tolerating such content means that we tolerate the corrosion of our ability to produce good content—which is to say, our ability to find what is true, and to do useful things. (And when I say “our”, I mean both “Less Wrong’s, collectively” and “the participants’, individually”.)
(Unlike your comment, which is, commendably, rife with examples, you’ll note that my reply provides no examples at all. This is intentional; I have little desire to start a fight, as it were, by “calling out” any posters or commenters. I will provide examples on request… but I suspect that anyone participating in this conversation will have little trouble coming up with more than a few examples, even without my help.)
“Iff” is far too strong. I agree that the “if” claim holds. However, I think that what Ben says also makes sense if the bad/high-variance content has costs which are less than its benefits. Demanding costlessness imposes an unnecessarily high standard on positions disagreeing with your own, I think.
Contrasting your position with Ben’s, I sense a potential false dichotomy. Must it be true that either we open the floodgates and allow who-knows-what on the site in order to encourage higher-variance moves, or we sternly allow only the most well-supported reasoning? I think not. What other solutions might be available?
The first—but surely not best—to come to mind is the curation < LW review < ??? pipeline, where posts are subjected to increasing levels of scrutiny and rewarded with increasing levels of visibility. Perhaps there might be some way for people to modulate “how much they update on a post” by “the amount of scrutiny the post has received.” I don’t think this quite fights the corrosion you point at. But it seems like something is possible here, and in any case it seems to me too early to conclude there is only one axis of variation in responses to the situation (free-wheeling vs strict).
Re: other solutions:
I have repeatedly suggested/advocated the (to me, fairly obvious) solution where (to summarize / crystallize my previous commentary on this):
People post things on their personal LW blogs. Post authors have moderation powers on their personal-blog posts.
Things are posted to the front page only if (but not necessarily “if”!) they are intended to be subject to the sort of scrutiny wherein we insist that posts live up to non-trivial epistemic/etc. standards (with attendant criticism, picking-apart, analysis, etc.; and also with attendant downvotes for posts judged to be bad). Importantly, post authors do not have moderation powers in this case, nor the ability to decide on moderation standards for comments on their posts. (In this case a post might be front-paged by the author, or, with the author’s consent, by the mods.)
Posts that go to the front page, are evaluated by the above-described process, and judged to be unusually good, may be “curated” or what have you.
In this case, it would be proper for the community to judge personal-blog posts, that have not been subjected to “frontpage-level” scrutiny, as essentially ignorable. This would go a long way toward ensuring that posts of the “jam-packed with bullshit” type (which would either be posted to personal blogs only, or would go to the front page and be mercilessly torn apart, and clearly and publicly judged to be poor) would be largely costless.
I agree with you that this sort of setup would not quite solve the problem, and also that it would nonetheless improve the situation markedly.
But the LW team has consistently been opposed to this sort of proposal.
It sounds to me like posting on your High-Standards-Frontpage is a very high effort endeavor, an amount of effort that currently only around 3-30 posts each year have put into them. I’ve thought of this idea before with the name “LW Journal” or “LW Peer Review”, which also had a part where it wasn’t only commenters critiquing your post, but we paid a few people full-time for reviewing of the posts in this pipeline, and there was also a clear pass/failure with each submission. (Scott Garrabrant has also suggested this idea to me in the past, as a publishing place for his papers.)
I think the main requirement I see is a correspondingly larger incentive to write something that passes this bar. Else I mostly expect the same fate to befall us as with LW 1.0, where Main became increasingly effortful and unpleasant for authors to post to, such that writers like Scott Alexander moved away to writing on their personal blogs.
(I’m generally interested to hear ideas for what would be a big reward for writers to do this sort of thing. The first ones that come to my mind are “money” and “being published in physical books”.)
I do think that something like this would really help the site in certain ways; I think a lot of people have a hard time figuring out what standard to hold their posts to, and having a clearly “high standard” and “lower standard” place would help authors feel more comfortable knowing what they’re aiming for in their writing. (“Shortform” was an experiment with a kind of lower-standards place.) But I don’t currently see a simple way to cause a lot of people to produce high-effort high-standards content for that part of the site, beyond the amount of effort we currently receive on the highest effort posts each year.
So I think the Review is pretty good at getting good old content, but I think the thing Said is talking about should happen more quickly, and should be more like Royal Society Letters or w/e.
Actually, I wonder about Rohin’s newsletters as a model/seed. They attract more scrutiny to things, but they come with the reward of Rohin’s summary (and, presumably, more eyeballs than it would have gotten on its own). But also people were going to be writing those things for their own reasons anyway.
I think if we had the Eliezer-curated weekly newsletter of “here are the LW posts that caught my interest plus commentary on them”, we would probably think the reward and scrutiny were balanced. Of course, as with any suggestion that proposes spending Eliezer-time on something, I think this is pretty dang expensive—but the Royal Society Letters were also colossally expensive to produce.
I would likely do this from my own motivation (i.e. not necessarily need money) if I were given at least one of:
a) guaranteed protection from the badgunk comments by e.g. three moderators willing to be dependably high-effort down in the comments
b) given the power to hide badgunk comments pending their author rewriting them to eliminate the badgunk
c) given the power to leave inline commentary on people’s badgunk comments
The only thing holding me back from doing something much more like what Said proposes is “LW comment sections regularly abuse and exhaust me.” Literally that’s the only barrier, and it’s a substantial one. If LW comment sections did not regularly abuse and exhaust me, such that every post feels like I need to set aside fifty hours of life and spoons just in case, then I could and would be much more prolific.
(To be clear: some people whose pushback on this post was emphatically not abuse or exhausting include supposedlyfun, Said, Elizabeth, johnswentsworth, and agrippa.)
Would you accept this substitute:
“A site/community culture where other commenters will reliably ‘call out’ (and downvote) undesirable comments, and will not be punished for doing so (and attempts to punish them for such ‘vigilante-style’ a.k.a. ‘grassroots’ ‘comment policing’ will themselves be punished—by other commenters, recursively, with support from moderators if required).”
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for noting it. That substitute is much more what the OP is pushing for.
EDIT: With the further claim that, once such activity is reliable and credible, its rate will also decrease. That standards, clearly held and reliably enforced, tend to beget fewer violations in the first place, and that, in other words, I don’t think this would be a permanent uptick in policing.
Strong-upvote. I want to register that I have had disagreements with Said in the past about this, and while I am still not completely sure whether I agree with his frame, recent developments have in fact caused me to update significantly towards his view.
I suspect this is true of others as well, such that I think Said’s view (as well as associated views that may differ in specifics but agree in thrust) can no longer be treated as the minority viewpoint. (They may still be the minority view, but if so I don’t expect it to be a small minority anymore, where “small” might be operationalized as “less than 1 in 5 people on this site”.)
There are, at the very least, three prominent examples that spring to mind of people advocating something like “higher epistemic standards on LW”: Duncan, Said, and (if I might be so bold) myself. There are, moreover, a smattering of comments from less prolific commenters, most of whom seem to express agreement with Duncan’s OP. I do not think this is something that should be ignored, and I think the site may benefit from some kind of poll of its userbase, just to see exactly how much consensus there is on this.
(I recognize that the LW/Lightcone team may nonetheless choose to ignore the result of any such poll, and for the sake of clarity I wish to add that I do not view this as problematic. I do not, on the whole, think that the LW team should be reduced to a proxy that implements whatever the userbase thinks they want; my expectation is that this would produce worse long-term outcomes than if the team regularly exercised their own judgement, even if that judgement sometimes results in policy decisions that conflict with a substantial fraction of the userbase’s desires. Even so, however, I claim that information of the form “X% of LW users believe Y” is useful information to have, and will at the very least play a role in any kind of healthy decision-making process.)
I am generally in favor of people running polls and surveys about information they’re interested in.
(Here’s a very random one I did, and looking through search I see people have done them on general demographics, nootropics, existential risk, akrasia, and more.)
I’m pretty confused by your numbered list, because they seem directly in contradiction with how scientific journals have worked historically. Here’s a quote from an earlier post of mine:
I think that many-to-most papers published in scientific journals are basically on unhelpful questions and add little to the field, and I’d bet some of the proofs are false. And yet it seems to be very rarely published that they’re unhelpful or wrong or even criticized in the journals. People build on the good content, and forget about the rest. And journals provide a publishing house for the best ideas at a given time. (Not too dissimilar to the annual LW Review.)
It seems to me that low-quality content is indeed pretty low cost if you have a good filtering mechanism for the best content, and an incentive for people to produce great content. I think on the margin I am interested in creating more of both — better filtering and stronger incentives. That is where my mind currently goes when I think of ways to improve LessWrong.
This seems like a very odd response given the fact of the replication crisis, the many cases of scientific knowledge being forgotten for decades after being discovered, the rise of false or inaccurate (and sometimes quite harmful!) models, etc.
I think that (in many, or most, scientific fields) people often don’t build on the good content, and don’t forget about the bad content; often, the reverse happens. It’s true that it’s “very rarely published that [bad papers/proofs are] unhelpful or wrong or even criticized in the journals”! But this is, actually, very bad, and is a huge reason why more and more scientific fields are being revealed to be full of un-replicable nonsense, egregious mistakes, and even outright fraud! The filtering mechanisms we have are actually quite poor.
The “papers in scientific journals” example / case study seems to me to yield clear, strong support for my view.
It’s very worthwhile to understand the ways in which academia has died over the last 60 years or so, and part of it definitely involves failures in the journal system. But the axis of public criticism in journals doesn’t seem at all to have been what changed in the last 60 years? Insofar as you think that’s a primary reason, you seem to be explaining a change by pointing to a variable that has not changed.
In replying to your proposed norms, it’s not odd to point out that the very mechanism of labeling everything that’s bad as bad and ensuring we have common knowledge of it, was not remotely present when science was at its most productive — when Turing was inventing his machines, or when Crick & Watson were discovering the structure of DNA. In fact it seems to have been actively opposed in the journal system, because you do not get zero criticism without active optimization for it. That is why it seems to me to be strong evidence against the system you propose.
There may be a system that works via criticizing everything bad in public, but when science was most successful it did not, and instead seems to me to be based around the system I describe (a lot of submissions and high reward for success, little punishment for failure).