These coronavirus posts are otherwise an excellent community resource and you are making them less valuable.
While I understand that this was first written for your own personal blog and then republished here, I do not believe that the entire section on Trump is appropriate in a LessWrong context. Not just in terms of Politics is the Mind Killer over the contentious claims you make, but primarily over the assertion that you can make contentious claims and shut down discussion over them. This seems like a very serious norms violation regarding what LessWrong is about.
I do think this concern is right and appropriate to raise. I didn’t include that section lightly, but didn’t feel like I had a choice given the situation. I did realize that there was a cost to doing it.
As habryka says, these are written for my personal blog, and reposted to LessWrong automatically. I am happy that the community gets use out of them, but they are not designed for the front page of LessWrong or its norms. They couldn’t be anyway, because time sensitive stuff is not front page material.
I don’t believe I made contentious claims on non-Covid topics. But to the extent that I did do that, no one saying you have to accept them or agree with them. But I do not think discussion in comments would be productive—only bad things would likely happen if one started—and I’m setting norms to that effect.
I agree that politics is the mindkiller and so I make every effort to avoid it whenever possible even when not trying to abide by LW norms. Unless things that I consider very low probability to happen, happen, the issue won’t come up again.
I think it would be both more effective and more LessWrong-norm-ish to argue that there was no widespread election fraud rather than claim that there was no widespread election fraud. Like, describe and refute specific claims, or at least tell readers that you dug into them before dismissing them (I assume you did). It only takes a sentence or two! You link to the best arguments on both sides, and then say you read them both, and this one checks out, and that one is full of easily-refuted lies and confusions. Or whatever. Otherwise what’s the point? Most of your audience already agrees with you, the rest will assume you’re just another sucker who blindly trusts the lamestream media… :-P
these are written for my personal blog, and reposted to LessWrong automatically
What happens if you update the article on your website? Is it reimported automatically?
Is it possible to edit the imported article afterwards?
Would it makes sense to support HTML tags like <div class=”lesswrong-exclude”>...</div>? (Probably only useful for people who edit the HTML code manually; not possible in WYSIWYG editors.)
It needs to be reimported, it does not automatically update. If I change only a few words it is easy to fix twice, but more than that I have them do a reimport.
The norms are that you get to talk about whatever you want, including election stuff, on your personal blog (which this and basically all other Coronavirus posts are on). We might hide things from the frontpage and all-posts page completely if they seem to get out of hand. On personal blog, bringing up a topic but asking others not to talk about it, also seems totally fine to me. If you want to respond you can always create a new top-level post (though in either case people might downvote stuff).
This norm does seem right to me but it is probably worth noting the asymmetry in audience between a typical personal blog post and these COVID updates. I feel like Zvi has earned the right to do this if he wants but would personally prefer the topics to be separated into different posts.
Agreed that doing what I did here on a regular basis would be quite bad. You and/or history can decide whether it was appropriate, but I hope to never do it again to this extent.
In order to see personal blogposts on the frontpage, you have to (at some point of using LessWrong) explicitly enabled the display of personal blogposts. New users and unregistered visitors do not have personal blogposts show up in the same way.
I don’t have Personal enabled under Latest and thus I don’t see the personal blog posts under “Latest”. But I do see them under “Recent Discussion”, maybe that is what ShardPhoenix is referring to? (In fact this is how I arrived here)
I suspect a bug. I have no recollection of turning personal blog posts on, but I still see the tag on next to Latest. It’s entirely possible that I forgot about this, but that doesn’t sound like a thing I’d do.
(That said, just realizing I can set a personal blog post penalty of −25 is going to make LessWrong much more tolerable.)
We’ve maintained backwards compatibility with many past iterations of filtering out personal blogposts. So you might have sometime in the past checked one of the checkboxes we had on the frontpage for filtering out personal blogposts.
I sympathize, but I think it’s better if we allow this kind of thing, generally, under the conditions ‘we’ require now.
And, as other comments mention, you can discuss these things, even on LessWrong. And I think it should be fine to make a comment, e.g. on this post, linking to your own response to the ‘forbidden’ topics.
Not just in terms of Politics is the Mind Killer over the contentious claims you make, but primarily over the assertion that you can make contentious claims and shut down discussion over them. This seems like a very serious norms violation regarding what LessWrong is about.
Shutting down comments is not shutting down all discussion. If you have a disagreement that you find needs to be heard you can still write your own post to voice it.
Top-level posts are more important then comments for LessWrong and the LessWrong policy is that to encourage people to make top-level post this comes with the right to dictate the comment policy freely.
I just saw this in recent discussion, just want to add a detail to Christian’s comment, which is that you can dictate comment policy freely on Personal Blog; there are more standards for Frontpage posts.
Yeah, looks like we don’t have super much on the comment moderation on frontpage posts. Generally, we apply roughly the same dimensions for evaluating comments as for posts, which are listed here:
Useful, novel, and relevant to many LessWrong members
“Timeless”, i.e. minimizes references to current events and is likely to remain useful even after a few years
The post attempts to explain rather than persuade
This comment might also provide some useful additional clarification.
Below the comment box on every frontpage post (after you click on it), it also shows a set of guidelines:
Frontpage comment guidelines:
Aim to explain, not persuade
Try to offer concrete models and predictions
If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking
Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
Which claims, specifically, do you have evidence against (of any weight)?
The fact that people are making mouth noises that could be interpreted as disagreeing with the accuracy of a claim (ie, the claim is contentious) is not evidence against the claim. And such mouth noises should not discourage the distribution of true information.
These coronavirus posts are otherwise an excellent community resource and you are making them less valuable.
While I understand that this was first written for your own personal blog and then republished here, I do not believe that the entire section on Trump is appropriate in a LessWrong context. Not just in terms of Politics is the Mind Killer over the contentious claims you make, but primarily over the assertion that you can make contentious claims and shut down discussion over them. This seems like a very serious norms violation regarding what LessWrong is about.
I do think this concern is right and appropriate to raise. I didn’t include that section lightly, but didn’t feel like I had a choice given the situation. I did realize that there was a cost to doing it.
As habryka says, these are written for my personal blog, and reposted to LessWrong automatically. I am happy that the community gets use out of them, but they are not designed for the front page of LessWrong or its norms. They couldn’t be anyway, because time sensitive stuff is not front page material.
I don’t believe I made contentious claims on non-Covid topics. But to the extent that I did do that, no one saying you have to accept them or agree with them. But I do not think discussion in comments would be productive—only bad things would likely happen if one started—and I’m setting norms to that effect.
I agree that politics is the mindkiller and so I make every effort to avoid it whenever possible even when not trying to abide by LW norms. Unless things that I consider very low probability to happen, happen, the issue won’t come up again.
I think it would be both more effective and more LessWrong-norm-ish to argue that there was no widespread election fraud rather than claim that there was no widespread election fraud. Like, describe and refute specific claims, or at least tell readers that you dug into them before dismissing them (I assume you did). It only takes a sentence or two! You link to the best arguments on both sides, and then say you read them both, and this one checks out, and that one is full of easily-refuted lies and confusions. Or whatever. Otherwise what’s the point? Most of your audience already agrees with you, the rest will assume you’re just another sucker who blindly trusts the lamestream media… :-P
What happens if you update the article on your website? Is it reimported automatically?
Is it possible to edit the imported article afterwards?
Would it makes sense to support HTML tags like <div class=”lesswrong-exclude”>...</div>? (Probably only useful for people who edit the HTML code manually; not possible in WYSIWYG editors.)
It needs to be reimported, it does not automatically update. If I change only a few words it is easy to fix twice, but more than that I have them do a reimport.
The norms are that you get to talk about whatever you want, including election stuff, on your personal blog (which this and basically all other Coronavirus posts are on). We might hide things from the frontpage and all-posts page completely if they seem to get out of hand. On personal blog, bringing up a topic but asking others not to talk about it, also seems totally fine to me. If you want to respond you can always create a new top-level post (though in either case people might downvote stuff).
This norm does seem right to me but it is probably worth noting the asymmetry in audience between a typical personal blog post and these COVID updates. I feel like Zvi has earned the right to do this if he wants but would personally prefer the topics to be separated into different posts.
Agreed that doing what I did here on a regular basis would be quite bad. You and/or history can decide whether it was appropriate, but I hope to never do it again to this extent.
Being a “personal blog” seems like a bit of a technicality when I come to the site and it shows up on my front page like any other post.
In order to see personal blogposts on the frontpage, you have to (at some point of using LessWrong) explicitly enabled the display of personal blogposts. New users and unregistered visitors do not have personal blogposts show up in the same way.
I don’t have Personal enabled under Latest and thus I don’t see the personal blog posts under “Latest”. But I do see them under “Recent Discussion”, maybe that is what ShardPhoenix is referring to? (In fact this is how I arrived here)
Ah, yeah. They do still show up under Recent Discussion. Fair point.
I suspect a bug. I have no recollection of turning personal blog posts on, but I still see the tag on next to Latest. It’s entirely possible that I forgot about this, but that doesn’t sound like a thing I’d do.
(That said, just realizing I can set a personal blog post penalty of −25 is going to make LessWrong much more tolerable.)
We’ve maintained backwards compatibility with many past iterations of filtering out personal blogposts. So you might have sometime in the past checked one of the checkboxes we had on the frontpage for filtering out personal blogposts.
Yeah, it’s easier to abstain talking about politics if the article doesn’t do it first.
Otherwise, great article and thanks for the work you put into it!
I sympathize, but I think it’s better if we allow this kind of thing, generally, under the conditions ‘we’ require now.
And, as other comments mention, you can discuss these things, even on LessWrong. And I think it should be fine to make a comment, e.g. on this post, linking to your own response to the ‘forbidden’ topics.
Shutting down comments is not shutting down all discussion. If you have a disagreement that you find needs to be heard you can still write your own post to voice it.
Top-level posts are more important then comments for LessWrong and the LessWrong policy is that to encourage people to make top-level post this comes with the right to dictate the comment policy freely.
I just saw this in recent discussion, just want to add a detail to Christian’s comment, which is that you can dictate comment policy freely on Personal Blog; there are more standards for Frontpage posts.
The FAQ says:
If there are more standards for the moderation of Frontpage posts, where are they written down?
Yeah, looks like we don’t have super much on the comment moderation on frontpage posts. Generally, we apply roughly the same dimensions for evaluating comments as for posts, which are listed here:
This comment might also provide some useful additional clarification.
Below the comment box on every frontpage post (after you click on it), it also shows a set of guidelines:
You’re not exactly wrong, but OP does tell us people are being irrational in ways that you could use to get cold hard cash.
Which claims, specifically, do you have evidence against (of any weight)?
The fact that people are making mouth noises that could be interpreted as disagreeing with the accuracy of a claim (ie, the claim is contentious) is not evidence against the claim. And such mouth noises should not discourage the distribution of true information.
I’m not going to delete this question, but please don’t answer it. That’s the discussion I do not want to have.