Avoid telling racist or sexist or homophobic jokes, unless perhaps if they are empowering because the target of the joke is the racist or sexist or homophobe. Don’t ever target specific real people with jokes or suggestions about rape or anal self-abuse.
I really hate it when someone tells me not to do something in a way that really makes me want to do it. I mean, I never thought of literally telling someone to self-abuse themselves anally before reading this post.
the explanation is banal. 10 hour days at my “day job” + i sleep 6 hours + and have a daughter. not much on the margin. i devote way more time to moderation of comments than a typical blogger as it is, so it shows when i cut back.
Fallout from Razib banning or driving away quality commenters has reached even here.
i don’t see what that has to do with anything. LW people say stupid things all the time.
addendum: i don’t have much experience on this forum, but i am friends with people associated with the berkeley/bay area LW group. as i said, LW people say stupid things all the time. but, LW people tend to not take it personally when you explain that they’re being ignorant outside of domain, which is great. so my last comment wasn’t really meant as negatively as it might have seemed. but the back & forth that i have/had with the LW set does not translate well onto my blog, where there is usually a domain-knowledge asymmetry (i’m pretty good at guessing the identity of commenters who know more than me, and usually excuse those from aggressive moderation, because i wouldn’t know what to moderate).
There is a reason I usually state “the comments are well worth reading” when linking to your blog posts here. You are clearly doing something right, while there are of course false positives people can point to, the losses from those are far outweighed by the gains.
LW if anything is remarkably bad at this kind of gardening. We don’t down vote well meaning but clueless commenter’s enough and when we do one merely has to complain about being down voted to inch back into positive karma.
LW if anything is remarkably bad at this kind of gardening.
I agree, yet for some reason suspect that your ideal would see an entirely different subset of comments downvoted to oblivion and suspect I would just leave if you had your way (and that you would do likewise if I had my way). From what I have seen I’d also leave in an instant if Razib had that kind of power.
This is the advantage of having the moderation influence distributed (among multiple moderators or in this case just voting) rather than in the hands of one individual. Neither one of us has enough power to change the forum such that it is intolerable to the other. The failure mode only comes when the collective judgement is abysmal and even then it is less catastrophic to one ego holding sway.
Really? Honestly I think I would find a forum moderated by you well worth visiting and depending on how much time you put into it, might be much better than LW.
I think we probably agree on 90% of posts that should be down voted but aren’t.
I think we probably agree on 90% of posts that should be down voted but aren’t.
Almost certainly and likewise probably more agreement than between randomly selected individuals. The problem comes if any part of that 10% happens to include things that I am strongly averse to but which you consider ok and use. I wouldn’t expect you to hang around if I started banning your comments—I certainly wouldn’t take that kind of treatment from anyone (unless I was getting paid well).
I never understood people who get all offended and scream censorship if one or two of their posts get moderated while the vast majority are let through. If however you’d feel that a quarter or a third of my comments where objectionable I wouldn’t bother commenting any more, though I might keep reading.
I never understood people who get all offended and scream censorship if one or two of their posts get moderated while the vast majority are let through.
I wouldn’t accept too many more than, say, two or three a year that I reflectively endorsed even after judgement. But I wouldn’t call it censorship. It’s some guy with power exercising it with either (subjectively) poor judgement or personal opposition to me. It’s not something I prefer to accept but I’m not going to abuse the word ‘censorship’.
The comment section there is vigorously moderated by him and thus mostly worth reading as well.
… struck me as odd. Before seeing your contradiction and then confirming your judgement for myself I had been substituting “and yet despite that” for “thus”. Fallout from Razib banning or driving away quality commenters has reached even here. At a first approximation I expect such moderation to support the ego of moderator and drive away any intellectual rivals, not guarantee that it is worth reading.
It takes more than ‘vigor’ to make moderation beneficial.
Fallout from Razib banning or driving away quality commenters has reached even here.
Don’t multiply your anecdotes, since your source is just gwern getting banned for a while.
It is easy to speak like this since it appeals to the anti-authoritarian impulse of the average LW reader but I invite you to inspect the uninformed drivel one can read in the comment sections on some other quality blogs dealing with similar topics.
I would argue based on comparison to other such blogs that the occasional mistakes are worth it to maintain a good signal to noise ratio. I am not alone in this assessment.
Don’t multiply your anecdotes, since your source is just gwern getting banned for a while.
Excuse me? No it isn’t. You are mind reading, and incorrectly. (Discussions at that time brought attention to other who didn’t wish to bother with Razib.)
but I invite you to inspect the uninformed drivel one can read in the comment sections on some other quality blogs dealing with similar topics.
No. I don’t want to compare to a known inferior solution and the endorsement being evaluated was that they were worth reading, not that elsewhere on the web is worse. There is a reason I don’t tend to hang out in the comments sections of personal blogs. They aren’t an environment that provides incentives for valuable comment contributions and neither lax moderation not vigorous moderation in defense of self interest produce particularly impressive outcomes. Actual ‘moderate’ and vaguely objective moderation is rare. Lesswrong’s karma system is far superior and produces barely tolerable comment threads most of the time.
The karma system in itself is not what made this site interesting, not by a long stretch. While some very bad comments did make it through that now don’t, Overcoming Bias before the karma system had interesting discussions as well.
The karma system is a key feature of what made LW what it is, but it isn’t exceptional in this. Just as vital where the features of its demographics, the topics we chose, the norms and culture that developed. If any of those wash out LessWrong becomes nothing but a smaller suckier reddit.
I didn’t mean to state that was what you where saying but I was questioning why you seem so sure moderation is an inferior solution based on conversations on LessWrong sucking less. I pointed out that seems rather weak evidence since OB didn’t suck much more.
if LW gave me dictatorial powers i would have nuked this sub-thread a long time ago, and saved a lot of people productive time they could have devoted to more edifying intellectual pursuits.
also, as a moderate diss, i don’t delve deep into LW comments much anymore. but some of these remind now me of usenet in the 1990s. what i appreciate about the ‘rationality’ community in berkeley is that these are people who are interested in being smart, not seeming smart.
I follow your comments, because you usually have something interesting to say—and usually something that gets a little close to the borders of what is permissible on less wrong.
Now, sorry to say, your recent comments have become boring. Has Less Wrong become even more repressive, or did you just run out of things to say?
You are right on my recent comments being somewhat boring. In the past I’ve been told by people that they tend to read my posts because they are usually high quality correction or fun gadflyish needling.
Maybe my comments are more boring because there are fewer things wrong in interesting ways? Not that I would imply there are fewer things wrong in general unfortunate. I mostly agree with all recent criticisms I’ve made but some of it was pretty dull to write, I guess that shows. There are some signs that the political discourse is on a lower level than it was. I unfortunately often end up talking about politics, as I saw politically motivated stupidity on some topics. The other explanation is that I’ve been using the site to procrastinate more and thus didn’t bother to abstain from marginal comments. There is however no excuse for spending way too much time on useless crappy meta debates as I did about a week or two ago.
When I think of what posts of value I think made in the past 30 days in which I’m apparently among the top contributors all I can think of that is of real value are the link posts. Which aren’t bad, as I think LessWrong doesn’t as a community does not update when exposed to good ideas and material from the outside. That this is the only kind of recent posts I see value in does shows I haven’t either not taken the time or had the inspiration for new original ideas or synthesis.
Perhaps I need to study more new material, perhaps I need to do more thinking, perhaps I need a break. On the other hand I do think LW didn’t really learn what I hoped it would from my old comments, so maybe this is more a problem of me sounding like a broken record because I have to keep repeating the same points, since this bores me I do it more poorly than before. So perhaps I need a new venue.
I’ve been meaning to take another month’s leave from the site starting some time this September, to improve the quality of my writing. I guess this is as good as any day to start. Since this topic is open I may as well ask for any more specific feedback you or anyone else on the site might have.
On the other hand I do think LW didn’t really learn what I hoped it would from my old comments, so maybe this is more a problem of me sounding like a broken record because I have to keep repeating the same points, since this bores me I do it more poorly than before. So perhaps I need a new venue.
My suggestion to you is the same as the one I gave to wedrifid: write more posts relative to comments. Comments are for asking/answering questions, or fixing mistakes in other people’s posts, or debates. If you think you have something to teach LW, please do it via posts, where you can organize your thoughts, put in the effort necessary to bridge the inferential gaps, and get the attention you deserve.
(If the suggestion doesn’t make sense to you, I’d be interested to know why. As I said, I made the same suggestion to wedrifid before, but he didn’t respond to agree or disagree, nor did he subsequently write more posts, which leaves me wondering why some LWers choose to write so few posts relative to comments.)
It does make sense to me. I seem to have massive will failure when it comes to writing actual articles. I’ve tried to fix this by writing more public and private drafts, but these generally come out disappointing in my eyes. Also writing comments requires little motivation while writing articles feels like work.
While the strategy of comment>draft>article has done some good, it isn’t good enough at all. No more commenting until I write up an article that is worth submitting, if I don’t, well too bad.
It does make sense to me. I seem to have massive will failure when it comes to writing actual articles. I’ve tried to fix this by writing more public and private drafts, but these generally come out disappointing in my eyes. Also writing comments requires little motivation while writing articles feels like work.
While the strategy of comment>draft>article has done some good, it isn’t good enough at all. No more commenting until I write up an article that is worth submitting, if I don’t, well too bad.
An interesting blog post by Razib Khan on “Atheism+”.
I personally love nothing more than a Great Loyalty Oath Crusade.
Linked from Richard Carrier is this piece:
I really hate it when someone tells me not to do something in a way that really makes me want to do it. I mean, I never thought of literally telling someone to self-abuse themselves anally before reading this post.
These comments seem terrible
They are usually better. I’m not sure why he isn’t wielding the moderator rod as harshly as usual, perhaps he is afraid of coming off as partisan?
the explanation is banal. 10 hour days at my “day job” + i sleep 6 hours + and have a daughter. not much on the margin. i devote way more time to moderation of comments than a typical blogger as it is, so it shows when i cut back.
i don’t see what that has to do with anything. LW people say stupid things all the time.
addendum: i don’t have much experience on this forum, but i am friends with people associated with the berkeley/bay area LW group. as i said, LW people say stupid things all the time. but, LW people tend to not take it personally when you explain that they’re being ignorant outside of domain, which is great. so my last comment wasn’t really meant as negatively as it might have seemed. but the back & forth that i have/had with the LW set does not translate well onto my blog, where there is usually a domain-knowledge asymmetry (i’m pretty good at guessing the identity of commenters who know more than me, and usually excuse those from aggressive moderation, because i wouldn’t know what to moderate).
There is a reason I usually state “the comments are well worth reading” when linking to your blog posts here. You are clearly doing something right, while there are of course false positives people can point to, the losses from those are far outweighed by the gains.
LW if anything is remarkably bad at this kind of gardening. We don’t down vote well meaning but clueless commenter’s enough and when we do one merely has to complain about being down voted to inch back into positive karma.
I agree, yet for some reason suspect that your ideal would see an entirely different subset of comments downvoted to oblivion and suspect I would just leave if you had your way (and that you would do likewise if I had my way). From what I have seen I’d also leave in an instant if Razib had that kind of power.
This is the advantage of having the moderation influence distributed (among multiple moderators or in this case just voting) rather than in the hands of one individual. Neither one of us has enough power to change the forum such that it is intolerable to the other. The failure mode only comes when the collective judgement is abysmal and even then it is less catastrophic to one ego holding sway.
Really? Honestly I think I would find a forum moderated by you well worth visiting and depending on how much time you put into it, might be much better than LW.
I think we probably agree on 90% of posts that should be down voted but aren’t.
Almost certainly and likewise probably more agreement than between randomly selected individuals. The problem comes if any part of that 10% happens to include things that I am strongly averse to but which you consider ok and use. I wouldn’t expect you to hang around if I started banning your comments—I certainly wouldn’t take that kind of treatment from anyone (unless I was getting paid well).
I never understood people who get all offended and scream censorship if one or two of their posts get moderated while the vast majority are let through. If however you’d feel that a quarter or a third of my comments where objectionable I wouldn’t bother commenting any more, though I might keep reading.
I wouldn’t accept too many more than, say, two or three a year that I reflectively endorsed even after judgement. But I wouldn’t call it censorship. It’s some guy with power exercising it with either (subjectively) poor judgement or personal opposition to me. It’s not something I prefer to accept but I’m not going to abuse the word ‘censorship’.
i wasn’t expecting much from that thread. i was more curious about the rationale of the atheism+ proponents. i got confirmation of what i feared....
That isn’t surprising. The reasoning:
… struck me as odd. Before seeing your contradiction and then confirming your judgement for myself I had been substituting “and yet despite that” for “thus”. Fallout from Razib banning or driving away quality commenters has reached even here. At a first approximation I expect such moderation to support the ego of moderator and drive away any intellectual rivals, not guarantee that it is worth reading.
It takes more than ‘vigor’ to make moderation beneficial.
Don’t multiply your anecdotes, since your source is just gwern getting banned for a while.
It is easy to speak like this since it appeals to the anti-authoritarian impulse of the average LW reader but I invite you to inspect the uninformed drivel one can read in the comment sections on some other quality blogs dealing with similar topics.
I would argue based on comparison to other such blogs that the occasional mistakes are worth it to maintain a good signal to noise ratio. I am not alone in this assessment.
Excuse me? No it isn’t. You are mind reading, and incorrectly. (Discussions at that time brought attention to other who didn’t wish to bother with Razib.)
No. I don’t want to compare to a known inferior solution and the endorsement being evaluated was that they were worth reading, not that elsewhere on the web is worse. There is a reason I don’t tend to hang out in the comments sections of personal blogs. They aren’t an environment that provides incentives for valuable comment contributions and neither lax moderation not vigorous moderation in defense of self interest produce particularly impressive outcomes. Actual ‘moderate’ and vaguely objective moderation is rare. Lesswrong’s karma system is far superior and produces barely tolerable comment threads most of the time.
The karma system in itself is not what made this site interesting, not by a long stretch. While some very bad comments did make it through that now don’t, Overcoming Bias before the karma system had interesting discussions as well.
The karma system is a key feature of what made LW what it is, but it isn’t exceptional in this. Just as vital where the features of its demographics, the topics we chose, the norms and culture that developed. If any of those wash out LessWrong becomes nothing but a smaller suckier reddit.
That would indeed be a strange position for someone to take.
I didn’t mean to state that was what you where saying but I was questioning why you seem so sure moderation is an inferior solution based on conversations on LessWrong sucking less. I pointed out that seems rather weak evidence since OB didn’t suck much more.
if LW gave me dictatorial powers i would have nuked this sub-thread a long time ago, and saved a lot of people productive time they could have devoted to more edifying intellectual pursuits.
also, as a moderate diss, i don’t delve deep into LW comments much anymore. but some of these remind now me of usenet in the 1990s. what i appreciate about the ‘rationality’ community in berkeley is that these are people who are interested in being smart, not seeming smart.
I follow your comments, because you usually have something interesting to say—and usually something that gets a little close to the borders of what is permissible on less wrong.
Now, sorry to say, your recent comments have become boring. Has Less Wrong become even more repressive, or did you just run out of things to say?
You are right on my recent comments being somewhat boring. In the past I’ve been told by people that they tend to read my posts because they are usually high quality correction or fun gadflyish needling.
Maybe my comments are more boring because there are fewer things wrong in interesting ways? Not that I would imply there are fewer things wrong in general unfortunate. I mostly agree with all recent criticisms I’ve made but some of it was pretty dull to write, I guess that shows. There are some signs that the political discourse is on a lower level than it was. I unfortunately often end up talking about politics, as I saw politically motivated stupidity on some topics. The other explanation is that I’ve been using the site to procrastinate more and thus didn’t bother to abstain from marginal comments. There is however no excuse for spending way too much time on useless crappy meta debates as I did about a week or two ago.
When I think of what posts of value I think made in the past 30 days in which I’m apparently among the top contributors all I can think of that is of real value are the link posts. Which aren’t bad, as I think LessWrong doesn’t as a community does not update when exposed to good ideas and material from the outside. That this is the only kind of recent posts I see value in does shows I haven’t either not taken the time or had the inspiration for new original ideas or synthesis.
Perhaps I need to study more new material, perhaps I need to do more thinking, perhaps I need a break. On the other hand I do think LW didn’t really learn what I hoped it would from my old comments, so maybe this is more a problem of me sounding like a broken record because I have to keep repeating the same points, since this bores me I do it more poorly than before. So perhaps I need a new venue.
I’ve been meaning to take another month’s leave from the site starting some time this September, to improve the quality of my writing. I guess this is as good as any day to start. Since this topic is open I may as well ask for any more specific feedback you or anyone else on the site might have.
My suggestion to you is the same as the one I gave to wedrifid: write more posts relative to comments. Comments are for asking/answering questions, or fixing mistakes in other people’s posts, or debates. If you think you have something to teach LW, please do it via posts, where you can organize your thoughts, put in the effort necessary to bridge the inferential gaps, and get the attention you deserve.
(If the suggestion doesn’t make sense to you, I’d be interested to know why. As I said, I made the same suggestion to wedrifid before, but he didn’t respond to agree or disagree, nor did he subsequently write more posts, which leaves me wondering why some LWers choose to write so few posts relative to comments.)
It does make sense to me. I seem to have massive will failure when it comes to writing actual articles. I’ve tried to fix this by writing more public and private drafts, but these generally come out disappointing in my eyes. Also writing comments requires little motivation while writing articles feels like work.
While the strategy of comment>draft>article has done some good, it isn’t good enough at all. No more commenting until I write up an article that is worth submitting, if I don’t, well too bad.
It does make sense to me. I seem to have massive will failure when it comes to writing actual articles. I’ve tried to fix this by writing more public and private drafts, but these generally come out disappointing in my eyes. Also writing comments requires little motivation while writing articles feels like work.
While the strategy of comment>draft>article has done some good, it isn’t good enough at all. No more commenting until I write up an article that is worth submitting, if I don’t, well too bad.