Add a check box that they have to click where it says “By entering the hard discussion area, I’m inviting everyone’s honest criticisms of my ideas. I agree to take responsibility for my own emotional reactions to feedback and to treat feedback as valuable. In return for their valuable feedback, which is a privilege and service to me, I will state my honest criticisms of their ideas as well, regardless of whether the truth could upset them.”
I am strongly opposed to requiring a version of Crocker’s rules to get into good discussions. Wanting to have people be civil to me does not particularly mean that I compromise intellectual rigor. A forum that required Crocker’s Rules to participate could be interesting, but it could also be 4chan.
And poorly-informed ranters hereabouts typically think they are the smartest people on the site and the sheep around them are too cowardly, emotional, or stupid to “rationally debate” them. Adding an explicit norm according to which poorly-informed ranters may identify themselves as magnanimously granting favors to everyone they harass, and people who object to such harassment as in violation of that norm (because they’re not “taking responsibility for their emotional reactions”) would not be an improvement. (Of course they’ll ignore the part about receiving feedback as a favor.)
You seem to be assuming that honest criticism also has to mean throwing manners out the window. I do not assume this, and it didn’t occur to me to predict that others would assume that when I was writing this. I’ll have to update that part.
Poorly informed ranters wanting to debate does sound annoying, I didn’t realize there was a problem with that. It seems to me the best way to deter them would be to paste a link that’s directly related to their points and ignore them. Do that enough times and they’ll probably wake up and realize they’ve got a problem with not knowing what they’re talking about. What have you guys tried? Maybe a better question would be “What would you suggest?”
You seem to be assuming that honest criticism also has to mean throwing manners out the window.
Hm—rather, I’d say she is assuming that the words you posted, which she then quoted, would reduce civility for a net loss.
I’ll requote what I thought was the relevant (i.e. most disagreed-upon) part:
I agree to take responsibility for my own emotional reactions
Making good posts requires that you take a large measure of responsibility for the audience’s response. And this is a skill that is difficult to learn/teach as a new user/culture. Having something like the quoted phrase in an authoritative place would send conflicting messages about what constitutes a “good post,” leading to fewer people learning the skill of writing for their audience.
I agree in that I think most people would interpret my wording to mean “Throw manners out the window in favor of honesty.” but I don’t think it has to be that way.
As far as taking responsibility for emotions goes, there’s a limit to what you can do. If you have to tell them something unpleasant and disappointing, if that’s the truth, you can’t control the fact that they’re going to be disappointed. If you sugar-coat, they may not realize the gravity of the situation, and what happens next could be worse. Reality is sometimes unpleasant, that’s all there is to it. I can want you to be happy all I feel like, but if the reality isn’t happy for you, there’s nothing I can do about that. If I know of a solution, I’ll usually say so. If not, I can say things like “I know you really care about this, so I hate to say this...” and reassure them that I don’t dislike them, but that doesn’t change the fact that the reality is unpleasant.
“Throw manners out the window” is not what I said you were proposing. I think you may be missing some of what I am saying, or maybe I was just being opaque. So I’ll try and give you one clear paragraph:
Thinking about other peoples’ emotional responses makes communicating with them much more effective, not less effective. If we want to have a “hard discussion” section, or even just a difficult discussion, I want people to be in the habit of thinking about other peoples’ emotional responses, not to consider it “not their responsibility.”
To be clear, when I say “thinking about other peoples’ emotions,” I don’t mean typical “manners stuff” like sweetening difficult truths, etc. I mean actual thinking, about other peoples’ emotions. And changing what you say so that the other person will understand what you’re trying to communicate. That part’s important! Or to put it another way, in order to communicate as best you can, you must take responsibility for your audience’s emotional responses insofar as they affect what happens to your message, which is often a lot.
I mean actual thinking, about other peoples’ emotions. And changing what you say so that the other person will understand what you’re trying to communicate. That part’s important! Or to put it another way, in order to communicate as best you can, you must take responsibility for your audience’s emotional responses insofar as they affect what happens to your message, which is often a lot.
Yeah, that’s worthwhile, and it’s an art. I’m not sure how that would even be communicated to people if it were, say, put into the rules or something. It would be nice if that level of quality could be expected but I don’t see any way to do that. Do you?
It might be sweet to find some existing experts in teaching people to speak so that they will be understood by people with complicated and relevant internal states.
(Relationship counselors? People who teach autistic people conversation skills? Psychologists who study conversation? Psychologists who study the difference between what the speaker thinks and what the listener thinks?)
Anyhow, maybe teaching people this is a near-solved problem, maybe not (and maaaaybe I’ll do some research on this before next time I talk about it :D ). And maybe it’s unsolvable. But I’d guess it’s solvable—lots of things that seem impossible are really us being bad at the skill that makes it possible.
Poorly informed ranters wanting to debate does sound annoying, I didn’t realize there was a problem with that. It seems to me the best way to deter them would be to paste a link that’s directly related to their points and ignore them. Do that enough times and they’ll probably wake up and realize they’ve got a problem with not knowing what they’re talking about.
I haven’t come across this either. Doesn’t the downvoting minimize this problem?
That said, I like civility to be one of the core principles of any discussion group—but without every feeling we have to agree with what someone else is saying.
No, not really. They say things like “hahahaha, sure, downvote me more, that only proves me right, you’re unable to actually address my arguments!” And then people try to address their arguments and get nowhere. It’s a remarkably consistent type, actually. This problem is one of the things the controversial new trollfeeding tax is meant to handle.
No, not really. They say things like “hahahaha, sure, downvote me more, that only proves me right, you’re unable to actually address my arguments!” And then people try to address their arguments and get nowhere. It’s a remarkably consistent type, actually.
Spot on. And bizarrely enough there even seems to be a remarkable correlation in the kind of positions this type supports. Something along the lines of an “Incorrect Metacontrarian Cluster”.
We report a survey (N >1100) of climate blog users to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r .80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.
Being a new users who gets voted down sometimes, I can tell you it seems completely random. I can’t tell whether it’s a troll, or someone with a vendetta or what it is. And even if I brainstorm a bunch of guesses, the little number at the top of my comment doesn’t tell me which one is correct. This expectation that downvotes are going to help new users learn how to behave is even worse than that though, in a whole bunch of ways at once. I wrote about that here:
Being a new users who gets voted down sometimes, I can tell you it seems completely random. I can’t tell whether it’s a troll, or someone with a vendetta or what it is. And even if I brainstorm a bunch of guesses, the little number at the top of my comment doesn’t tell me which one is correct. This expectation that downvotes are going to help new users learn how to behave is even worse than that though, in a whole bunch of ways at once.
You have been given an abundance of explanations regarding people’s reactions which you could, if it is your desire, use to gain more support for your comments.
My model of the reception of your comments suggests that you do have several people with a ‘vendetta’, or at least several people who are highly predisposed to downvote you prior to reading your contributions. But that is to be expected. I get people targetting me all the time and if I didn’t it would probably be a sign that I was neglecting my duty. Having a few individuals targetting you isn’t a problem. The problem comes when you cannot garner sufficient support from the other, neutral readers to counter the initial downvotes and leave most of your comments as net positive. That is a sign that is worth paying more attention to politics and perception—and again you’ve got personal feedback you could use toward that end.
Are you really saying that, if motivated, you couldn’t work out how to change your behavior such that your comments were more likely to be well received? I mean come on, the thought “Oh, I suppose I should convey less arrogance” is a good starting place for reducing social sanction in just about any social structure that you are relatively new member of. (Note that I am talking specifically about conveyed arrogance, not actual arrogance. People can get away with being completely obstinate and incapable of learning from the words of others so long as they send the right signals of humility.)
You read that comment completely out of context and also you seem unaware that at first I was not getting constructive criticism. People only started criticizing me after I decided I was tired of unexplained downvotes and started to advertise in various places (at the ends of my discussion posts, and in my various comments expressing an interest in being challenged intellectually) that I genuinely want honest criticism. My experience is that LessWrong members needed to be convinced that it really was okay to criticize me before they started giving me the large amount of helpful feedback you’re seeing. You’re very bold, Wedrifid, so you probably figure other people are as comfortable criticizing others as you are. Maybe you think I must have been getting bold criticisms this whole time. I wasn’t.
The context in which I wrote that comment was this: I was explaining that OTHER new people don’t get feedback, in order to explain that the downvotes aren’t training them. If you think about it, you even said in your own post that it was the explanation that people use to improve themselves. The votes aren’t the same as verbal feedback. Are the other newbies getting the kind of feedback I am? I bet most of them aren’t. I was outgoing enough to guess that the reason I wasn’t getting feedback is because people didn’t feel comfortable criticizing me and chose to begin advertising that I want honest criticisms. I doubt most of your newbies are doing the same thing. Try an experiment. Make a new account. Post things people won’t like. See how many of them actually get verbal feedback. Then, advertise that you want constructive criticism. Post the same number of things people won’t like, and count how many of those got you verbal feedback.
I find your perspective on vendettas and duty refreshing, so thank you. Your comment makes me feel glad that you think I am worth saving. But since you intended to save me from my own stupidity, I feel a little annoyed that you thought I needed it. Do you observe from my behaviors that I do not apply constructive criticism? That I whine about problems rather than contributing to the solution? My intent was to notify you guys that without feedback, the downvotes don’t train newbies. People seem to think they do, but unless people tell you their reasons for pressing the button, it’s just a flurry of numbers. The power is not in vote buttons, it’s in clear communication.
I definitely want to know when I make a mistake, but if you find yourself typing something to me like “oh, come on” or “are you really” in the future, please consider that I may not actually be stupid enough to warrant it. Thanks.
I’m not sure to what extent I did that, but in any case I have a core disagreement with the claim that downvotes do not train newbies. My expectation is that the simple feedback mechanism increases the speed at which newbies absorb local norms and all my observations thus far confirm this. It isn’t the only thing that teaches newbies and it isn’t a perfect mechanism but it certainly helps. Most people don’t like getting downvotes and are take action to avoid them.
The context in which I wrote that comment was this: I was explaining that OTHER new people don’t get feedback, in order to explain that the downvotes aren’t training them.
My position is that even in the absence of any explicit verbal feedback downvotes do train newbies (and non-newbies). Verbal explanations can also help (and sometimes hinder). I expect that there is plenty of scope for improving newbie learning through constructive feedback—this is something that complements and works alongside the karma system, not something made necessary because the the karma system is completely ineffective for the purpose.
But since you intended to save me from my own stupidity, I feel a little annoyed that you thought I needed it.
It is almost always a bad idea to use oneself as an example when making any kind of general criticism of the karma system. Disagreement will inevitably seem personal!
My intent was to notify you guys that without feedback, the downvotes don’t train newbies. People seem to think they do, but unless people tell you their reasons for pressing the button, it’s just a flurry of numbers. The power is not in vote buttons, it’s in clear communication.
I disagreed. This is a testable prediction but not easily so. With a suitably designed experiment I would predict a greater degree of learning in the voted on but not explained group than you would. To be clear I think the power is in the vote buttons AND in clear communicaiton.
I definitely want to know when I make a mistake, but if you find yourself typing something to me like “oh, come on” or “are you really” in the future, please consider that I may not actually be stupid enough to warrant it. Thanks.
I am of course willing to use different phrasing. I was intending to convey that it is well within your capability to avoid downvotes if that was a task you set for yourself. It is legitimate to have other higher priorities than avoiding downvotes but those who are not trying to avoid them may appear not to be learning from them. That is, I was questioning that the “Ephiphany” anecdote is an indication that newbies do not learn from downvotes because they don’t have enough information. I acknowledge from the parent that you are referring to earlier experience prior to you changing the way you interact and so the above is less applicable.
Poorly informed ranters wanting to debate does sound annoying, I didn’t realize there was a problem with that. It seems to me the best way to deter them would be to paste a link that’s directly related to their points and ignore them.
If you’re willing to make Crocker’s rules a codified and accepted norm of the “hard discussion area”, you might as well go the whole way and make it very clear to ranters how wrong they are, in the most obnoxious way you can come up with—including flames, status putdowns, etc.
Yes it sounds distasteful and it is, but it has some very compelling advantages: (1) it deters other users from naïvely expending effort on unproductive discussions, which is something Eliezer has been complaining about; (2) it will hopefully discourage the vast majority of ranters, thus allowing us to minimize the scope of controversial technical measures such as bans and posting restrictions and restrict them to the most intractable cases.
Just “pasting a link that’s relevant to their points” is not nearly enough to discourage anyone.
I am strongly opposed to requiring a version of Crocker’s rules to get into good discussions. Wanting to have people be civil to me does not particularly mean that I compromise intellectual rigor. A forum that required Crocker’s Rules to participate could be interesting, but it could also be 4chan.
And poorly-informed ranters hereabouts typically think they are the smartest people on the site and the sheep around them are too cowardly, emotional, or stupid to “rationally debate” them. Adding an explicit norm according to which poorly-informed ranters may identify themselves as magnanimously granting favors to everyone they harass, and people who object to such harassment as in violation of that norm (because they’re not “taking responsibility for their emotional reactions”) would not be an improvement. (Of course they’ll ignore the part about receiving feedback as a favor.)
You seem to be assuming that honest criticism also has to mean throwing manners out the window. I do not assume this, and it didn’t occur to me to predict that others would assume that when I was writing this. I’ll have to update that part.
Poorly informed ranters wanting to debate does sound annoying, I didn’t realize there was a problem with that. It seems to me the best way to deter them would be to paste a link that’s directly related to their points and ignore them. Do that enough times and they’ll probably wake up and realize they’ve got a problem with not knowing what they’re talking about. What have you guys tried? Maybe a better question would be “What would you suggest?”
Hm—rather, I’d say she is assuming that the words you posted, which she then quoted, would reduce civility for a net loss.
I’ll requote what I thought was the relevant (i.e. most disagreed-upon) part:
Making good posts requires that you take a large measure of responsibility for the audience’s response. And this is a skill that is difficult to learn/teach as a new user/culture. Having something like the quoted phrase in an authoritative place would send conflicting messages about what constitutes a “good post,” leading to fewer people learning the skill of writing for their audience.
I agree in that I think most people would interpret my wording to mean “Throw manners out the window in favor of honesty.” but I don’t think it has to be that way.
As far as taking responsibility for emotions goes, there’s a limit to what you can do. If you have to tell them something unpleasant and disappointing, if that’s the truth, you can’t control the fact that they’re going to be disappointed. If you sugar-coat, they may not realize the gravity of the situation, and what happens next could be worse. Reality is sometimes unpleasant, that’s all there is to it. I can want you to be happy all I feel like, but if the reality isn’t happy for you, there’s nothing I can do about that. If I know of a solution, I’ll usually say so. If not, I can say things like “I know you really care about this, so I hate to say this...” and reassure them that I don’t dislike them, but that doesn’t change the fact that the reality is unpleasant.
“Throw manners out the window” is not what I said you were proposing. I think you may be missing some of what I am saying, or maybe I was just being opaque. So I’ll try and give you one clear paragraph:
Thinking about other peoples’ emotional responses makes communicating with them much more effective, not less effective. If we want to have a “hard discussion” section, or even just a difficult discussion, I want people to be in the habit of thinking about other peoples’ emotional responses, not to consider it “not their responsibility.”
To be clear, when I say “thinking about other peoples’ emotions,” I don’t mean typical “manners stuff” like sweetening difficult truths, etc. I mean actual thinking, about other peoples’ emotions. And changing what you say so that the other person will understand what you’re trying to communicate. That part’s important! Or to put it another way, in order to communicate as best you can, you must take responsibility for your audience’s emotional responses insofar as they affect what happens to your message, which is often a lot.
Yeah, that’s worthwhile, and it’s an art. I’m not sure how that would even be communicated to people if it were, say, put into the rules or something. It would be nice if that level of quality could be expected but I don’t see any way to do that. Do you?
It might be sweet to find some existing experts in teaching people to speak so that they will be understood by people with complicated and relevant internal states.
(Relationship counselors? People who teach autistic people conversation skills? Psychologists who study conversation? Psychologists who study the difference between what the speaker thinks and what the listener thinks?)
Anyhow, maybe teaching people this is a near-solved problem, maybe not (and maaaaybe I’ll do some research on this before next time I talk about it :D ). And maybe it’s unsolvable. But I’d guess it’s solvable—lots of things that seem impossible are really us being bad at the skill that makes it possible.
I haven’t come across this either. Doesn’t the downvoting minimize this problem?
That said, I like civility to be one of the core principles of any discussion group—but without every feeling we have to agree with what someone else is saying.
No, not really. They say things like “hahahaha, sure, downvote me more, that only proves me right, you’re unable to actually address my arguments!” And then people try to address their arguments and get nowhere. It’s a remarkably consistent type, actually. This problem is one of the things the controversial new trollfeeding tax is meant to handle.
Spot on. And bizarrely enough there even seems to be a remarkable correlation in the kind of positions this type supports. Something along the lines of an “Incorrect Metacontrarian Cluster”.
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf seems relevant:
Votes don’t train newbies.
Being a new users who gets voted down sometimes, I can tell you it seems completely random. I can’t tell whether it’s a troll, or someone with a vendetta or what it is. And even if I brainstorm a bunch of guesses, the little number at the top of my comment doesn’t tell me which one is correct. This expectation that downvotes are going to help new users learn how to behave is even worse than that though, in a whole bunch of ways at once. I wrote about that here:
Idea For Karma Improvements and Why We Need Them
Yes they do.
You have been given an abundance of explanations regarding people’s reactions which you could, if it is your desire, use to gain more support for your comments.
My model of the reception of your comments suggests that you do have several people with a ‘vendetta’, or at least several people who are highly predisposed to downvote you prior to reading your contributions. But that is to be expected. I get people targetting me all the time and if I didn’t it would probably be a sign that I was neglecting my duty. Having a few individuals targetting you isn’t a problem. The problem comes when you cannot garner sufficient support from the other, neutral readers to counter the initial downvotes and leave most of your comments as net positive. That is a sign that is worth paying more attention to politics and perception—and again you’ve got personal feedback you could use toward that end.
Are you really saying that, if motivated, you couldn’t work out how to change your behavior such that your comments were more likely to be well received? I mean come on, the thought “Oh, I suppose I should convey less arrogance” is a good starting place for reducing social sanction in just about any social structure that you are relatively new member of. (Note that I am talking specifically about conveyed arrogance, not actual arrogance. People can get away with being completely obstinate and incapable of learning from the words of others so long as they send the right signals of humility.)
You read that comment completely out of context and also you seem unaware that at first I was not getting constructive criticism. People only started criticizing me after I decided I was tired of unexplained downvotes and started to advertise in various places (at the ends of my discussion posts, and in my various comments expressing an interest in being challenged intellectually) that I genuinely want honest criticism. My experience is that LessWrong members needed to be convinced that it really was okay to criticize me before they started giving me the large amount of helpful feedback you’re seeing. You’re very bold, Wedrifid, so you probably figure other people are as comfortable criticizing others as you are. Maybe you think I must have been getting bold criticisms this whole time. I wasn’t.
The context in which I wrote that comment was this: I was explaining that OTHER new people don’t get feedback, in order to explain that the downvotes aren’t training them. If you think about it, you even said in your own post that it was the explanation that people use to improve themselves. The votes aren’t the same as verbal feedback. Are the other newbies getting the kind of feedback I am? I bet most of them aren’t. I was outgoing enough to guess that the reason I wasn’t getting feedback is because people didn’t feel comfortable criticizing me and chose to begin advertising that I want honest criticisms. I doubt most of your newbies are doing the same thing. Try an experiment. Make a new account. Post things people won’t like. See how many of them actually get verbal feedback. Then, advertise that you want constructive criticism. Post the same number of things people won’t like, and count how many of those got you verbal feedback.
I find your perspective on vendettas and duty refreshing, so thank you. Your comment makes me feel glad that you think I am worth saving. But since you intended to save me from my own stupidity, I feel a little annoyed that you thought I needed it. Do you observe from my behaviors that I do not apply constructive criticism? That I whine about problems rather than contributing to the solution? My intent was to notify you guys that without feedback, the downvotes don’t train newbies. People seem to think they do, but unless people tell you their reasons for pressing the button, it’s just a flurry of numbers. The power is not in vote buttons, it’s in clear communication.
I definitely want to know when I make a mistake, but if you find yourself typing something to me like “oh, come on” or “are you really” in the future, please consider that I may not actually be stupid enough to warrant it. Thanks.
I’m not sure to what extent I did that, but in any case I have a core disagreement with the claim that downvotes do not train newbies. My expectation is that the simple feedback mechanism increases the speed at which newbies absorb local norms and all my observations thus far confirm this. It isn’t the only thing that teaches newbies and it isn’t a perfect mechanism but it certainly helps. Most people don’t like getting downvotes and are take action to avoid them.
My position is that even in the absence of any explicit verbal feedback downvotes do train newbies (and non-newbies). Verbal explanations can also help (and sometimes hinder). I expect that there is plenty of scope for improving newbie learning through constructive feedback—this is something that complements and works alongside the karma system, not something made necessary because the the karma system is completely ineffective for the purpose.
It is almost always a bad idea to use oneself as an example when making any kind of general criticism of the karma system. Disagreement will inevitably seem personal!
I disagreed. This is a testable prediction but not easily so. With a suitably designed experiment I would predict a greater degree of learning in the voted on but not explained group than you would. To be clear I think the power is in the vote buttons AND in clear communicaiton.
I am of course willing to use different phrasing. I was intending to convey that it is well within your capability to avoid downvotes if that was a task you set for yourself. It is legitimate to have other higher priorities than avoiding downvotes but those who are not trying to avoid them may appear not to be learning from them. That is, I was questioning that the “Ephiphany” anecdote is an indication that newbies do not learn from downvotes because they don’t have enough information. I acknowledge from the parent that you are referring to earlier experience prior to you changing the way you interact and so the above is less applicable.
If you’re willing to make Crocker’s rules a codified and accepted norm of the “hard discussion area”, you might as well go the whole way and make it very clear to ranters how wrong they are, in the most obnoxious way you can come up with—including flames, status putdowns, etc.
Yes it sounds distasteful and it is, but it has some very compelling advantages: (1) it deters other users from naïvely expending effort on unproductive discussions, which is something Eliezer has been complaining about; (2) it will hopefully discourage the vast majority of ranters, thus allowing us to minimize the scope of controversial technical measures such as bans and posting restrictions and restrict them to the most intractable cases.
Just “pasting a link that’s relevant to their points” is not nearly enough to discourage anyone.
In my experience, being obnoxious doesn’t deter others from being obnoxious. Quite the opposite, in fact.