Something that was previously seemed some-manner-of-cruxy between me and Duncan (but I’m not 100% sure about the flavor of the crux) is “LessWrong who’s primary job is to be a rationality dojo” vs “LessWrong who’s primary job is to output intellectual progress.”
Where, certainly, there’s good reason to think the Intellectual Progress machine might benefit from a rationality dojo embedded in it. But, that’s just one of the ideas for how to improve rate-of-intellectual progress. And my other background models point more towards other things as being more important for that.
BUT there is a particular model-update I’ve had that is new, which I haven’t gotten around to writing up yet. (This is less of a reply to Duncan and more to other people I’ve argued with over the years)
A key piece of my model is that a generative intellectual process looks very different from the finished output. It includes lots of leaps of intuition, inferential distance, etc. In order to get top-thinkers onto LW on a regular basis rather than in small private discords, it’s really important for them to be able to think-out-loud without being legible at every step here. And the LW team got a lot of complaints from good authors about LW being punishing about this in 2018.
But there’s a different problem which is that newcomers who haven’t yet gotten a lot of practice thinking deliberately/rationality, need to get that practice. If you show up at university, you basically write bad essays for 4 years and only your professor (who is paid) is obligated to read them.
And then, there is a blurry line between “metaphorical undergraduates who are still learning”, “metaphorical grad students (who write ‘real’ things but not always at high quality with good judgment”), and “metaphorical professors”.
In 2018, lots of people agreed LW was too nitpicky. But an update I made in late 2019 was that the solutions for metaphorical undergrads, grads, and professors might look pretty different. This probably has relationship with the preformal/formal/postformal distinction that Vaniver points at elsethread. And I think this lends itself to a reasonable operationalization of “who are the cool kids who are above the law?” (if one tried implementing something like that suggestion in Duncan’s OP)
So I now think it’s more reasonable to have new users basically expect to have all of their stuff critiqued about basic things.
(but – I still think it’s important to have a good model of what intellectual generativity requires for the critique to be useful, a fair amount of the time)
A further complication is “what’s up with metaphorical ‘grad students’” who sort of blur the line between on how much leeway it makes sense to give them. I think many past LW arguments about moderation also had a component of “who exactly are the students, grad students and professors here?”
None of this translates immediately into an obviously good process. But is part of the model of how I think such a process should get designed.
Strong agreement with this, assuming I’ve understood it. High confidence that it overlaps with what Vaniver laid out, and with my interpretation of what Ben was saying in the recent interaction I described under Vaniver’s comment.
EDIT: One clarification that popped up under a Vanvier subthread: I think the pendulum should swing more in the direction laid out in the OP. I do not think that the pendulum should swing all the way there, nor that “the interventions gestured at by the OP” are sufficient. Just that they’re something like necessary.
Something that was previously seemed some-manner-of-cruxy between me and Duncan (but I’m not 100% sure about the flavor of the crux) is “LessWrong who’s primary job is to be a rationality dojo” vs “LessWrong who’s primary job is to output intellectual progress.”
Where, certainly, there’s good reason to think the Intellectual Progress machine might benefit from a rationality dojo embedded in it. But, that’s just one of the ideas for how to improve rate-of-intellectual progress. And my other background models point more towards other things as being more important for that.
BUT there is a particular model-update I’ve had that is new, which I haven’t gotten around to writing up yet. (This is less of a reply to Duncan and more to other people I’ve argued with over the years)
A key piece of my model is that a generative intellectual process looks very different from the finished output. It includes lots of leaps of intuition, inferential distance, etc. In order to get top-thinkers onto LW on a regular basis rather than in small private discords, it’s really important for them to be able to think-out-loud without being legible at every step here. And the LW team got a lot of complaints from good authors about LW being punishing about this in 2018.
But there’s a different problem which is that newcomers who haven’t yet gotten a lot of practice thinking deliberately/rationality, need to get that practice. If you show up at university, you basically write bad essays for 4 years and only your professor (who is paid) is obligated to read them.
And then, there is a blurry line between “metaphorical undergraduates who are still learning”, “metaphorical grad students (who write ‘real’ things but not always at high quality with good judgment”), and “metaphorical professors”.
In 2018, lots of people agreed LW was too nitpicky. But an update I made in late 2019 was that the solutions for metaphorical undergrads, grads, and professors might look pretty different. This probably has relationship with the preformal/formal/postformal distinction that Vaniver points at elsethread. And I think this lends itself to a reasonable operationalization of “who are the cool kids who are above the law?” (if one tried implementing something like that suggestion in Duncan’s OP)
So I now think it’s more reasonable to have new users basically expect to have all of their stuff critiqued about basic things.
(but – I still think it’s important to have a good model of what intellectual generativity requires for the critique to be useful, a fair amount of the time)
A further complication is “what’s up with metaphorical ‘grad students’” who sort of blur the line between on how much leeway it makes sense to give them. I think many past LW arguments about moderation also had a component of “who exactly are the students, grad students and professors here?”
None of this translates immediately into an obviously good process. But is part of the model of how I think such a process should get designed.
Strong agreement with this, assuming I’ve understood it. High confidence that it overlaps with what Vaniver laid out, and with my interpretation of what Ben was saying in the recent interaction I described under Vaniver’s comment.
EDIT: One clarification that popped up under a Vanvier subthread: I think the pendulum should swing more in the direction laid out in the OP. I do not think that the pendulum should swing all the way there, nor that “the interventions gestured at by the OP” are sufficient. Just that they’re something like necessary.