Experiment: Comment on this thread whenever you notice that you wanted to respond to a comment with something that could be encapsulated with a simple react, by adding a comment with that react.
Top level comments in this subthread should be the simplest possible expression of a reaction that conveys the right nuances. (Child comments can have fully fledged conversations)
Only add things here if a real comment that actually happened led you to wish you could do a simple react to it.
“That clarifies it to my satisfaction, thanks for explaining.”
(I often see something like 👌 or ✔️being used for this on Discord/Slack, though those are more about acknowledging the explanation rather than the expression of gratitude.)
I think “this comment makes the thread subtly worse given opportunity costs of reading time” is really important, and I really want a 1 or 2-word handle for it.
Edit: Options, which potentially work but each 1-word loss of nuance seems to matter quite a bit:
“Hmm. This comment makes the thread subtly worse.”
Usually the situation is that it’s adding value, but also reducing a (different form of) value. (And in some cases I think it’s locally adding more value than it’s destroying, but I expect it to divert the thread in a direction that is longterm net negative)
“Upvoted because it’s relevant and perhaps important, but the premises are too far from both my intuitions and reasoned beliefs (which I acknowledge are deeply entwined with intuitions, and not necessarily “truth”) for me to participate. I look forward to seeing the conversation. ”
I’m not sure what the emoticon or short phrase for that looks like. perhaps thumbs-up+shrug.
FYI I think that’s a complex enough sentiment that just making the comment is fine (and in a React world, once you’ve made that comment, anyone with similar responses can say ‘agree’ to your comment).
Possible shorthand might be something like “Interested in seeing the discussion” (which I expect to be commonly used for topics that seem important but require domain expertise to contribute meaningfully)
I think there’s a place for humor on LW. I think there are some places where humor in the middle of a serious discussion can happen. But if it happened all the time it’d be extremely disruptive.
I think an actual good equilibrium is “you can make jokes at the expense of the discussion clarity. If so, you may get a combination of ‘downvotes that effect your longterm karma’, but also ‘haha’ reacts rewarding your humor. And it’s sort of up to you whether this is worth it.” (I would change my mind if it happened a lot)
(On the original thread, someone suggested making the joke as a comment rather than an official Question Answer. I think the joke is funnier if it’s an answer, and so long as that doesn’t happen often I think it’s fine. I personally found it pretty hilarious in context, but admittedly I’m fairly far on the ‘likes bad puns and worse meta-humor’ spectrum)
[I expect this to be a more controversial opinion that other mods don’t necessarily share, curious what people think about the general principle]
If I’m deciding whether to post a comment, and my worry is an impact on my long term karma versus how many little dopamine hits I’ll get from reactions, that feels like exactly the types of questions I want to avoid in my life. If either of these things is driving my decision, rather than what would help build knowledge or be useful to myself and others, then I’d consider it time to pack it in and stop posting entirely.
Huh. This feels like the exactly the sort of question I’m normally navigating when deciding whether to make a bad pun in the middle of a serious meeting. Maybe the joke is good enough that everyone likes it and I come out neutral to positive on “business relationship points”, but maybe not, but maybe I actually care enough about the entirely orthogonal “guy who makes bad puns points” to do it anyway.
The choices come down to either:
people are encouraged to make jokes on LW willy-nilly
people are encouraged to not make jokes on LW
people can make jokes sometimes but it’s highly context dependent and you have to navigate social situations to be able to do it.
And it sort of seems like it just has to be the third one.
I’m somewhat surprised that this is your view, in part because awhile ago someone on LW asked a slightly annoying question, and lost some karma, and someone said “it seems kinda bad that this person lost karma for asking a question” and you said “I dunno they asked a sort of annoying question, paid some karma, but got the answer to the question, which seemed like a fine trade that should be okay to make sometimes.” It’s not exactly the same concept here but seemed like a pretty similar principle.
(Since then we’ve implemented the questions feature which sends different signals about how and whether it’s okay to ask questions, but I think the original principle was pretty fine at the time)
It’s not that you don’t have to track those points in the meeting as part of your decision. You definitely do. It’s that if the primary reason you’re doing anything in the meeting is so that you can maximize various point totals to seem like a good meeting-attender, then the meeting is no longer serving its original intended purpose and you’re stuck in a signaling nightmare (and likely a moral maze). Remember that (almost) everyone hates meetings and wants to avoid them. Being caught in a continuous permanently-available meeting of that type seems like something to avoid.
I do agree that we want there to be jokes when they are high-value and not when they are low-value, like most other things, but I’d like this to be about questions like “will this help this discussion accomplish something worthwhile and illustrate the questions involved?” and “is it funny and therefore Worth It to tell this?”
In terms of the answer I gave earlier, I totally stand by that—losing a little karma is a (small) price of a negative dopamine hit and a small hit to total karma, and the karma gives the message that the question was annoying so they can update that they’re imposing real costs, and sometimes it’s worth imposing real costs and taking small status hits to do things anyway. I was more pushing back against this idea that “If you get negative karma on a post/comment you should react as if this is a crisis situation and you are bad and should feel bad.”
Sometimes I want to specifically upvote a post as “important if true”, where I don’t want to be signaling that I think the post is necessarily true.
Theoretically, if we had approval and agree-votes for posts, I should be able to signal this, but I kinda don’t believe that signal actually propagates, since AFAICT a lot of people use approval voting without agree-voting by default.
“I was reading your post, but suddenly I had to leave in the middle of it. I would like to say that I agree/liked your intuition (to the point that I read it), and I would like to signal this immediately, because I’m afraid I won’t remember to finish the reading in the future, although I would like myself to finish it in the future.”
“Although your post seemed to be going in a direction I like, I had to abandon the reading. Forgive me for leaving it and not finishing absorbing a seemingly important message. I hope this reaction helps you, I’m out of time to explain why I would like to help you, bye”
″That sounds like something someone from my tribe would say. Then you seem to be an ally.”
“There’s only one part of your message that seems to be important.”
″I’ll hit like, because you quoted ‘the super important thing’. Although I’ve seen a lot of irrelevant information in your post, I’m short of time to comment and say which part is important and which part is not. This reaction represents that ‘there is an important thing in your post’ and ‘this thing’ is the ‘super important thing’.”
Experiment: Comment on this thread whenever you notice that you wanted to respond to a comment with something that could be encapsulated with a simple react, by adding a comment with that react.
Top level comments in this subthread should be the simplest possible expression of a reaction that conveys the right nuances. (Child comments can have fully fledged conversations)
Only add things here if a real comment that actually happened led you to wish you could do a simple react to it.
“That clarifies it to my satisfaction, thanks for explaining.”
(I often see something like 👌 or ✔️being used for this on Discord/Slack, though those are more about acknowledging the explanation rather than the expression of gratitude.)
“Agree with central point but logic flawed.”
“Important.”
“This is wrong, harmful, and/or in bad faith, but I expect arguing this point against determined verbally clever opposition would be too costly.”
This gif:
(See also: “This is a reach”, “you need to explain this more”, “I don’t understand why you said this”, etc)
“Thanks!”
On slack, Thumbs Up, OK, and Horns hand signs meet all my minor needs for thanking people.
(If I want to express stronger gratitude than that, I’d rather write it out.)
Nod.
This comment changed my mind.
“Uses anecdotes on a question that’s asking for more rigor”
“Muddled thinking but very interesting direction”
I think “this comment makes the thread subtly worse given opportunity costs of reading time” is really important, and I really want a 1 or 2-word handle for it.
Edit: Options, which potentially work but each 1-word loss of nuance seems to matter quite a bit:
“Hmm. This comment makes the thread subtly worse.”
“Makes thread subtly worse.”
“Hmm. Makes thread subtly worse.”
Maybe, “Not value adding”
Usually the situation is that it’s adding value, but also reducing a (different form of) value. (And in some cases I think it’s locally adding more value than it’s destroying, but I expect it to divert the thread in a direction that is longterm net negative)
Nod
“None of your claims are wrong but they are presented as a counter argument to a claim I didn’t make”.
Possible subvariants:
“You’re arguing with an argument you read elsewhere and projected on to me”
“You are using different definitions of words than I am.”
“Your reading of my claim makes sense in insolation but not when you include context available in this [post/subthread/comment section]”
“Shrug”
Could use more examples.
Sounds plausible. Would be interested in seeing more evidence that this works.
Here’s a challenge: I was about to make this (low-value) comment on: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cnBGXGSFGpfvknFc3/ramifications-of-limited-positive-value-unlimited-negative-1
“Upvoted because it’s relevant and perhaps important, but the premises are too far from both my intuitions and reasoned beliefs (which I acknowledge are deeply entwined with intuitions, and not necessarily “truth”) for me to participate. I look forward to seeing the conversation. ”
I’m not sure what the emoticon or short phrase for that looks like. perhaps thumbs-up+shrug.
FYI I think that’s a complex enough sentiment that just making the comment is fine (and in a React world, once you’ve made that comment, anyone with similar responses can say ‘agree’ to your comment).
Possible shorthand might be something like “Interested in seeing the discussion” (which I expect to be commonly used for topics that seem important but require domain expertise to contribute meaningfully)
“Sheds more heat than light”
“lol”
The comment that triggered this is actually a pretty good case study of a particular kind of thing.
I think there’s a place for humor on LW. I think there are some places where humor in the middle of a serious discussion can happen. But if it happened all the time it’d be extremely disruptive.
I think an actual good equilibrium is “you can make jokes at the expense of the discussion clarity. If so, you may get a combination of ‘downvotes that effect your longterm karma’, but also ‘haha’ reacts rewarding your humor. And it’s sort of up to you whether this is worth it.” (I would change my mind if it happened a lot)
(On the original thread, someone suggested making the joke as a comment rather than an official Question Answer. I think the joke is funnier if it’s an answer, and so long as that doesn’t happen often I think it’s fine. I personally found it pretty hilarious in context, but admittedly I’m fairly far on the ‘likes bad puns and worse meta-humor’ spectrum)
[I expect this to be a more controversial opinion that other mods don’t necessarily share, curious what people think about the general principle]
If I’m deciding whether to post a comment, and my worry is an impact on my long term karma versus how many little dopamine hits I’ll get from reactions, that feels like exactly the types of questions I want to avoid in my life. If either of these things is driving my decision, rather than what would help build knowledge or be useful to myself and others, then I’d consider it time to pack it in and stop posting entirely.
Huh. This feels like the exactly the sort of question I’m normally navigating when deciding whether to make a bad pun in the middle of a serious meeting. Maybe the joke is good enough that everyone likes it and I come out neutral to positive on “business relationship points”, but maybe not, but maybe I actually care enough about the entirely orthogonal “guy who makes bad puns points” to do it anyway.
The choices come down to either:
people are encouraged to make jokes on LW willy-nilly
people are encouraged to not make jokes on LW
people can make jokes sometimes but it’s highly context dependent and you have to navigate social situations to be able to do it.
And it sort of seems like it just has to be the third one.
I’m somewhat surprised that this is your view, in part because awhile ago someone on LW asked a slightly annoying question, and lost some karma, and someone said “it seems kinda bad that this person lost karma for asking a question” and you said “I dunno they asked a sort of annoying question, paid some karma, but got the answer to the question, which seemed like a fine trade that should be okay to make sometimes.” It’s not exactly the same concept here but seemed like a pretty similar principle.
(Since then we’ve implemented the questions feature which sends different signals about how and whether it’s okay to ask questions, but I think the original principle was pretty fine at the time)
It’s not that you don’t have to track those points in the meeting as part of your decision. You definitely do. It’s that if the primary reason you’re doing anything in the meeting is so that you can maximize various point totals to seem like a good meeting-attender, then the meeting is no longer serving its original intended purpose and you’re stuck in a signaling nightmare (and likely a moral maze). Remember that (almost) everyone hates meetings and wants to avoid them. Being caught in a continuous permanently-available meeting of that type seems like something to avoid.
I do agree that we want there to be jokes when they are high-value and not when they are low-value, like most other things, but I’d like this to be about questions like “will this help this discussion accomplish something worthwhile and illustrate the questions involved?” and “is it funny and therefore Worth It to tell this?”
In terms of the answer I gave earlier, I totally stand by that—losing a little karma is a (small) price of a negative dopamine hit and a small hit to total karma, and the karma gives the message that the question was annoying so they can update that they’re imposing real costs, and sometimes it’s worth imposing real costs and taking small status hits to do things anyway. I was more pushing back against this idea that “If you get negative karma on a post/comment you should react as if this is a crisis situation and you are bad and should feel bad.”
“Agree.”
“You are asking a 101 question in a 301 conversation”
Sometimes I want to specifically upvote a post as “important if true”, where I don’t want to be signaling that I think the post is necessarily true.
Theoretically, if we had approval and agree-votes for posts, I should be able to signal this, but I kinda don’t believe that signal actually propagates, since AFAICT a lot of people use approval voting without agree-voting by default.
“High epistemic legibility/cooperation”
“this makes LW higher friction for me”
“I’m not sure if this is true, but it’s novel and I’m glad I heard it” or “thought-provoking” or 🤔
“Your questions about my claim are reasonable but this discussion in particular is premised on the claim being true”
“I appreciate all the effort you put into this”
“Easy to follow (given complexity of topic)”
“I don’t know if you’re wrong because I gave up before i got to your point”
“You’re right but please chill out”
“I have answered this argument [in OP/earlier in thread/elsewhere in comments]”
“I was reading your post, but suddenly I had to leave in the middle of it. I would like to say that I agree/liked your intuition (to the point that I read it), and I would like to signal this immediately, because I’m afraid I won’t remember to finish the reading in the future, although I would like myself to finish it in the future.”
“Although your post seemed to be going in a direction I like, I had to abandon the reading. Forgive me for leaving it and not finishing absorbing a seemingly important message. I hope this reaction helps you, I’m out of time to explain why I would like to help you, bye”
″That sounds like something someone from my tribe would say. Then you seem to be an ally.”
“There’s only one part of your message that seems to be important.”
″I’ll hit like, because you quoted ‘the super important thing’. Although I’ve seen a lot of irrelevant information in your post, I’m short of time to comment and say which part is important and which part is not. This reaction represents that ‘there is an important thing in your post’ and ‘this thing’ is the ‘super important thing’.”
“I especially like/benefited from this bit:
Quote from post/comment”
A vision of hell.
“Wariness, thoughtfully following, should think about this more.”