I understand the impulse to go “really, you can’t be serious”, especially given the tendency of LWers to nitpick, but I think one should be cautious about invoking it as long as there are charitable alternative interpretations.
That’s not sustainable. There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.
That actually *needs* a strong pushback. It creates a kind of emotional fatigue on the authors that legitimately drags down the quality of future articles.
On the other hand, if one wishes to solve this problem, one also needs to have a clear idea of what exactly is causing it. If people’s behavior is driven by status-seeking, then that probably warrants different methods for dealing with it than if their behavior was driven by something else.
I have no doubt that some of the thing you described, is driven mostly by status-seeking. But I still maintain that, when evaluating the behavior of any given commenter, one should be cautious about jumping to that conclusion. Because:
1) On LW, “You’re just trying to win status rather than caring about the truth” is one of the easiest and most negative assumptions of someone’s motives that you can find. And when people are annoyed at something, they really like jumping to easy conclusions that paint the other person in a very bad light. If one does not take the time to look at reasonable alternative hypotheses, it’s easy to end up concluding that everyone else is just some shade of “evil or dumb”, regardless of whether that was true or not.
2) Ascribing bad motives to someone is a self-fulfilling propechy. Maybe someone is just genuinely confused and trying to figure out what you are saying. Then you go “oh, you want to play this game? could we stop dueling for status?” Well, now you’ve made a public accusation of them having low motives, forcing them to defend themselves if they don’t want to lose face. Regardless of whether the conversation had a status-seeking element to it before, it sure does now.
I’ll admit to having some kind of cognitive privilege here, in that I genuinely don’t experience the ‘death by papercuts’ tone that you and a lot of others are talking about. I don’t know why not; it’s always puzzled me that people have talked about LW feeling like a hostile environment to post things on, and I’ve never felt that. This is particularly weird since I feel like I’ve been pretty thin-skinned on other online forums, easily getting upset if people imply bad things about me. But here I never get that vibe, maybe because people always seem to focus their criticism on arguments rather than on people. I’ve always felt like discussions on LW are mostly just rigorous and thorough, but rarely hostile.
Similarly, I see very few comments that I’d describe as “whataboutisms” or similar. I just see people coming from different directions and perspectives, inhabiting different places in mindspace, with the inevitable consequence that often one needs to do a lot of work to bridge the inferential distances involved. I don’t see that as a bad thing; I see it as something good and healthy, and one of the things that makes LW great, that it reveals differences between minds that people had never thought to question before, and helps the participants understand each other better when the details and differences are thoroughly hashed out.
But like I said, my perspective is strongly biased by the fact that I don’t seem to experience the emotional cost that other people seem to experience. (In terms of the parable of the dog and the lizard, I’m the dog.) So I don’t really know how to appropriately weigh it, as I basically only feel the benefits of the current discussion culture, and none of the costs.
We have limited cognition and limited emotional investment, much of which has already just been spent on creating what is hopefully a high-quality post. ONE person doing it through status-seeking creates like 10 copy-cats, of which eight probably ARE doing it genuinely.
But giving them all the benefit of the doubt lets the status-seeking saboteur hide among the rest, and separating them all out takes effort that wears down the author.
I think that kaj is talking about “don’t read motivations into people as part of your criticism, or at least be more cautious about doing so” – criticize them for the action they’re doing if the action is bad.
I think ialdabaoth is saying ’yeah, but right now basically nobody is criticizing or stopping the people doing the death-by-cuts-thing, and whenever anyone tries, the moderators yell at them instead.”
(I think right now the death-by-papercutters are basically coming in juuust under a line that the moderators feel awkward about taking action on, and the people criticizing them are coming in juust over that line, and yes, this is a bad dynamic)
I’m currently looking into solutions that are more on the “solve it with technology” side of things than the “solve it with social”, but regardless agree that the status quo is bad.
What kinds of technological solutions are you thinking of?
Feel free to talk about it later if the ideas aren’t ready for public presentation yet. In general I’m concerned that criticism is important, truth-seeking is hard to separate from status-seeking (authors can be self-deceived as easily as commenters about their judgments/motivations), and whatever solution we adopt not cause more harm than good through unintended side effects.
I touched upon this in a recent meta post, although in a different context. (Basically, I expect small/big upvote distinctions to help with this issue, at least somewhat, while also being positive from a truthseeking perspective. Later on I’ll write up clearer thoughts on why I’m expecting this to help)
I anticipate that your tech solution will also help Eliezer come back—my intuition says that this is part of what he feels aversion to wasting energy on.
Weren’t the new moderation tools—where someone can make a top-level post and then delete every critical or contrary comment without a trace[1] (or, indeed, any comment at all, for any reason)—supposed to be Eliezer’s precondition for returning? I opposed that change, and still do, but it’s done—and now we’re hearing that it wasn’t enough? How seriously can we take Eliezer’s “I’ll come back when you __” stance this time, and how many other changes do you intend to make in the service of this goal?
[1] By the way, what’s the status of the moderation log feature?
Oh, actually I got a basic version of the moderation log done awhile ago and then I think I forgot to list it in an update post (or maybe I mentioned it but it got lost in the shuffle, unsure). Sorry
Neat. Er, are the “User” and “Deleted by user” columns meant to be the same? Because it seems like they *are* the same but I’d have expected the former to contain the name of the user who *posted* the thing-that-got-deleted, not the name of the user who deleted it.
Oh, yeah. (actually come to think of it I may have noticed that bug, though “I’ll fix that bug and then announce it, and then never got around to fixing it.”)
Sure. But in the meantime, realize that the fact that Val’s comment was downvoted into the negatives is a signal about something, and it’s about something you and Ben and Ollie and Kaj are doing.
And then decide whether you’re okay with all the consequences of that.
There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.
Can you link to some posts that have suffered from this?
That’s not sustainable. There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.
That actually *needs* a strong pushback. It creates a kind of emotional fatigue on the authors that legitimately drags down the quality of future articles.
That’s a reasonable point.
On the other hand, if one wishes to solve this problem, one also needs to have a clear idea of what exactly is causing it. If people’s behavior is driven by status-seeking, then that probably warrants different methods for dealing with it than if their behavior was driven by something else.
I have no doubt that some of the thing you described, is driven mostly by status-seeking. But I still maintain that, when evaluating the behavior of any given commenter, one should be cautious about jumping to that conclusion. Because:
1) On LW, “You’re just trying to win status rather than caring about the truth” is one of the easiest and most negative assumptions of someone’s motives that you can find. And when people are annoyed at something, they really like jumping to easy conclusions that paint the other person in a very bad light. If one does not take the time to look at reasonable alternative hypotheses, it’s easy to end up concluding that everyone else is just some shade of “evil or dumb”, regardless of whether that was true or not.
2) Ascribing bad motives to someone is a self-fulfilling propechy. Maybe someone is just genuinely confused and trying to figure out what you are saying. Then you go “oh, you want to play this game? could we stop dueling for status?” Well, now you’ve made a public accusation of them having low motives, forcing them to defend themselves if they don’t want to lose face. Regardless of whether the conversation had a status-seeking element to it before, it sure does now.
I’ll admit to having some kind of cognitive privilege here, in that I genuinely don’t experience the ‘death by papercuts’ tone that you and a lot of others are talking about. I don’t know why not; it’s always puzzled me that people have talked about LW feeling like a hostile environment to post things on, and I’ve never felt that. This is particularly weird since I feel like I’ve been pretty thin-skinned on other online forums, easily getting upset if people imply bad things about me. But here I never get that vibe, maybe because people always seem to focus their criticism on arguments rather than on people. I’ve always felt like discussions on LW are mostly just rigorous and thorough, but rarely hostile.
Similarly, I see very few comments that I’d describe as “whataboutisms” or similar. I just see people coming from different directions and perspectives, inhabiting different places in mindspace, with the inevitable consequence that often one needs to do a lot of work to bridge the inferential distances involved. I don’t see that as a bad thing; I see it as something good and healthy, and one of the things that makes LW great, that it reveals differences between minds that people had never thought to question before, and helps the participants understand each other better when the details and differences are thoroughly hashed out.
But like I said, my perspective is strongly biased by the fact that I don’t seem to experience the emotional cost that other people seem to experience. (In terms of the parable of the dog and the lizard, I’m the dog.) So I don’t really know how to appropriately weigh it, as I basically only feel the benefits of the current discussion culture, and none of the costs.
We have limited cognition and limited emotional investment, much of which has already just been spent on creating what is hopefully a high-quality post. ONE person doing it through status-seeking creates like 10 copy-cats, of which eight probably ARE doing it genuinely.
But giving them all the benefit of the doubt lets the status-seeking saboteur hide among the rest, and separating them all out takes effort that wears down the author.
It’s not sustainable.
I think that kaj is talking about “don’t read motivations into people as part of your criticism, or at least be more cautious about doing so” – criticize them for the action they’re doing if the action is bad.
I think ialdabaoth is saying ’yeah, but right now basically nobody is criticizing or stopping the people doing the death-by-cuts-thing, and whenever anyone tries, the moderators yell at them instead.”
(I think right now the death-by-papercutters are basically coming in juuust under a line that the moderators feel awkward about taking action on, and the people criticizing them are coming in juust over that line, and yes, this is a bad dynamic)
I’m currently looking into solutions that are more on the “solve it with technology” side of things than the “solve it with social”, but regardless agree that the status quo is bad.
What kinds of technological solutions are you thinking of?
Feel free to talk about it later if the ideas aren’t ready for public presentation yet. In general I’m concerned that criticism is important, truth-seeking is hard to separate from status-seeking (authors can be self-deceived as easily as commenters about their judgments/motivations), and whatever solution we adopt not cause more harm than good through unintended side effects.
I touched upon this in a recent meta post, although in a different context. (Basically, I expect small/big upvote distinctions to help with this issue, at least somewhat, while also being positive from a truthseeking perspective. Later on I’ll write up clearer thoughts on why I’m expecting this to help)
I anticipate that your tech solution will also help Eliezer come back—my intuition says that this is part of what he feels aversion to wasting energy on.
Oh yeah I have better than intuition, I have Eliezer literally* saying to us “dude I will try coming back when you take care of this shit.”
*okay okay almost literally
Weren’t the new moderation tools—where someone can make a top-level post and then delete every critical or contrary comment without a trace[1] (or, indeed, any comment at all, for any reason)—supposed to be Eliezer’s precondition for returning? I opposed that change, and still do, but it’s done—and now we’re hearing that it wasn’t enough? How seriously can we take Eliezer’s “I’ll come back when you __” stance this time, and how many other changes do you intend to make in the service of this goal?
[1] By the way, what’s the status of the moderation log feature?
Oh, actually I got a basic version of the moderation log done awhile ago and then I think I forgot to list it in an update post (or maybe I mentioned it but it got lost in the shuffle, unsure). Sorry
In any case, https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation is here. Haven’t yet implemented a “link this at the bottom of the comment section” or some-such yet.
Sorry about that.
Neat. Er, are the “User” and “Deleted by user” columns meant to be the same? Because it seems like they *are* the same but I’d have expected the former to contain the name of the user who *posted* the thing-that-got-deleted, not the name of the user who deleted it.
Oh, yeah. (actually come to think of it I may have noticed that bug, though “I’ll fix that bug and then announce it, and then never got around to fixing it.”)
Sure. But in the meantime, realize that the fact that Val’s comment was downvoted into the negatives is a signal about something, and it’s about something you and Ben and Ollie and Kaj are doing.
And then decide whether you’re okay with all the consequences of that.
Can you link to some posts that have suffered from this?