This isn’t intended as a “policy to be enforced” but as “a suggestion for people to try, that will improve communication on the margins.” For the foreseeable future, if people refuse to take something private to hash it out, then… well, you deal with demon threads the normal way: not very well, and occassionally warning/moderating commenters that explicitly cross clearly defined lines.
It is worth noting that many of the demon threads that seemed most disruptive to me over the past 2 years were between people who knew each other (i.e. where not just a few days of people’s time, but longterm reputation of people, organizations or major projects were at stake), so even if it only resulted in people who knew each other resolving things privately, that still seems like a win to me.
My guess/hope is that we see a trend like:
Near Future—This is something people do when they either know each other, or pretty well intentioned. They try to do it publicly enough that it starts occurring to people as an option.
Medium Future—It reaches a saturation point of “enough people in the rationalsphere are doing this sort of thing that it becomes a salient option for people who don’t know each other, and people who don’t know each other but assume they’re talking in reasonably good faith peel off privately before a things start getting heated and angry (so they aren’t recovering from a bitter conversation, they’re just proactively side-stepping a bad one)
(It’s worth noting that in Qiaochu and my case, it’s not that I thought there was risk of us getting into a heated dispute, so much as risk of a public discussion drawing in people with strong opinions about past social drama)
Longer term—I don’t really expect it to progress past the medium-term stage, but if this idea succeeded at the 90+ percentile, then eventually, there’d be enough of a cultural expectation in the rationalsphere that even people who don’t know each other well feel obligated to at least try this sort of thing in good faith. (An obvious failure mode would be people feel obligated to go through the motions without good faith, which may be bad)
(If people try this and it seems like it’s actually helping, it may be practical to build tools to facilitate it. i.e. make it a seamless process to take a set of comments private, and then if-and-only-if both people agree on a summary comment, share the summary comment that appears in the original thread. Some variation of this might make sense even if the original idea needed tweaking)
This isn’t intended as a “policy to be enforced” but as “a suggestion for people to try, that will improve communication on the margins.”
Sure, I get that. When I asked how you propose to deal with it, I meant “how do you, as proponent of this plan, propose that anyone who wishes to adopt your plan deal with this” (rather than “how do you you, as an admin of LW, plan to in fact deal with it”).
Edit: I wrote a longer comment (as an edit to this one), but something went wrong and it got lost. Sorry. I’ll try to re-create it later.
This isn’t intended as a “policy to be enforced” but as “a suggestion for people to try, that will improve communication on the margins.” For the foreseeable future, if people refuse to take something private to hash it out, then… well, you deal with demon threads the normal way: not very well, and occassionally warning/moderating commenters that explicitly cross clearly defined lines.
It is worth noting that many of the demon threads that seemed most disruptive to me over the past 2 years were between people who knew each other (i.e. where not just a few days of people’s time, but longterm reputation of people, organizations or major projects were at stake), so even if it only resulted in people who knew each other resolving things privately, that still seems like a win to me.
My guess/hope is that we see a trend like:
Near Future—This is something people do when they either know each other, or pretty well intentioned. They try to do it publicly enough that it starts occurring to people as an option.
Medium Future—It reaches a saturation point of “enough people in the rationalsphere are doing this sort of thing that it becomes a salient option for people who don’t know each other, and people who don’t know each other but assume they’re talking in reasonably good faith peel off privately before a things start getting heated and angry (so they aren’t recovering from a bitter conversation, they’re just proactively side-stepping a bad one)
(It’s worth noting that in Qiaochu and my case, it’s not that I thought there was risk of us getting into a heated dispute, so much as risk of a public discussion drawing in people with strong opinions about past social drama)
Longer term—I don’t really expect it to progress past the medium-term stage, but if this idea succeeded at the 90+ percentile, then eventually, there’d be enough of a cultural expectation in the rationalsphere that even people who don’t know each other well feel obligated to at least try this sort of thing in good faith. (An obvious failure mode would be people feel obligated to go through the motions without good faith, which may be bad)
(If people try this and it seems like it’s actually helping, it may be practical to build tools to facilitate it. i.e. make it a seamless process to take a set of comments private, and then if-and-only-if both people agree on a summary comment, share the summary comment that appears in the original thread. Some variation of this might make sense even if the original idea needed tweaking)
Sure, I get that. When I asked how you propose to deal with it, I meant “how do you, as proponent of this plan, propose that anyone who wishes to adopt your plan deal with this” (rather than “how do you you, as an admin of LW, plan to in fact deal with it”).
Edit: I wrote a longer comment (as an edit to this one), but something went wrong and it got lost. Sorry. I’ll try to re-create it later.
(I have a mediumish comment I thought I had posted in response to this, apologies for apparently not actually doing that)