Its Eliezer’s site and all, but doesn’t it kinda go against seeking the truth to pretend someone never said something when they did? I mean, if J.K. Rowling makes a statement about Harry Potter and retracts it, does that make the statement a spoiler? Eliezer chose to give information to people in his notes. He can’t really take that knowledge away. If anything, retracting a statement indicates that the statement is no longer valid, not that it is now a secret (this by the way would’ve been enough to answer my question, after which I would have gladly deleted my “spoiler” with no more than 3, rather than 30, downvotes). Rules are rules, but it just seems to me that it sorta goes against rationalism to hold to a rule just because someone says so, when it doesn’t entirely make sense.
(This better not get downvoted like all my other comments here. I said nothing irrational or detrimental to any reader. I was making an honest case, and if anyone wants to provide a civilized response, I welcome them. We’re trying to be rational here, that implies treating arguments with a degree of fairness)
Look. It’s very simple. The only response necessary is a gesture toward the main post:
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that you weren’t aware your statement fell under that category. It’s just impolite that your response was something other than “oops, fixed.” If you think the policy is misguided somehow, make a top-level comment about it.
It’s your right to ignore the clearly-stated rules of these threads, just as it’s our right to downvote you for it.
I hadn’t realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules. Someone said it should be coded, but nobody actually explained why I had broken the rules until after I went to sleep. When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it. At this point I don’t feel that I did anything wrong enough to warrant more than 5 downvotes on what was otherwise a reasonable query and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it. [...]
and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
Too bad, agreeing to follow the rules of the thread, even if that means editing/rot13ing past comments, would have been the easiest way to get your karma back.
Edited to add: Some Quirrel-type lesson about learning when to lose, and the costs of needless escalation, seems appropriate.
The initial shock of having lost so much karma was the only time I felt I really “lost” here. I notice that karma loss does more to infuriate than actually punish, and that it has the potential to hurt the site more than me, by nullifying my ability to reach a larger audience when I have something important to say. When I see a rule I don’t like, I tend to ignore it, not that doing so was my intention here. My problem wasn’t that I lost karma, it was that I was accused of wrongdoing which I did not believe myself to have committed.
(That said, you are probably right about learning to lose. One of my biggest problems has been that I find escalation of conflict fun after it reaches a point where I cannot possibly win. I’m very popular with authority, as you could probably guess.)
As far as he knew it was gone. I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes, and I’m not sure if you’re not being too optimistic to expect it of the others who downvoted.
When I started here I went back and changed posts, hoping that downvotes would be replaced with upvotes. There was little reaction and I think it really wasn’t worth the time.
I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes,
We were still in the discussion thread. I don’t promise to stick around indefinitely, but he would have obviously chosen to mention he has now fixed it, same way that he chose to complain instead.
I hadn’t realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules.
In general, when someone says something is a spoiler and should be put in ROT13, the polite thing to do is to comply. You can then argue that it shouldn’t be necessary, after the damage control is done.
If you’re failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view. I will generally check back in a day to see if the spoiler has been ROT13′d, and reverse my downvote if it has.
The policy is listed in the post header, and the “more specifically” link says exactly what it is that should only be mentioned in ROT13.
And if you’d just bothered to go down to the local planning office, you’d see the policy was available for anyone to look at for the last nine months.
I have never posted a spoiler before, nor had I intended to. I was not aware that confidence was to be given to the accusing party. I will keep this in mind in the future.
It’s not about who’s the “accusing party”, it’s about limiting potential damage. It would have cost you only a few seconds to edit in order to rot13 or remove something you were told was spoiler—an action which would have been of positive utility to us, of hardly any cost to you—instead you preferred to spend a hundredfold times that amount of time in a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.
Why don’t we instead trade utilities, you by editing to remove/rot13 the spoiler, and I by removing my own downvotes of you? As could have been done from the very first post?
a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.
Not everyone is losing. For example, I’ve been enjoying this. I doubt I’m the only one.
For example, I’ve been enjoying this. I doubt I’m the only one.
First time it can be amusing, but if such situation would repeat often, the amusement would fade and the costs would stay. So I cooperate with my future selves by resisting to act on my amusement.
First time it can be amusing, but if such situation would repeat often, the amusement would fade and the costs would stay.
I can’t tell if you’re telling me I don’t actually enjoy this or if you’re threatening me with promises that time will deliver retribution.
I cooperate with my future selves
Things like this are why I can’t convince my friends that you guys aren’t a “system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” I don’t know what you’re saying but I’ll bet p>0.75 there’s a way to say it without sounding like a fucking time traveler.
EDIT: I mean to say that you use phrases that reference something common to some group you belong to, but uncommon to the public majority. I could say you sound like you come from fairy land or a phyg or outer space, but saying that you sound like you come from another time seemed the most apt until I noticed the phrase I criticized said something about your future selves. Maybe that’s why I thought of time travel. I wasn’t taking you literally.
I’m threatening you that time may deliver more discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t rot-13 the spoilers, how exactly the spoiler is defined, etc… and that can become rather boring.
And by the way, I am a time traveller, I just always move in the same direction with a constant speed.
Actually, I would say that this whole affair was a net positive. It brought to light an issue that I’m sure some of us believe should be reformed. At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall. Rationalists cannot agree to disagree, so when we argue correctly, we become stronger. I suppose I was briefly frustrated by this and its possible that some animosity sprung up here and there, but in the end we’re all really friends here trying to talk about a story we enjoy, and this was undeniably amusing.
At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An exaggerated example: if someone writes something bad and gets −10 karma, and two people react with “stop doing this!” and get +5 karma each, the total balance is 0, but the total utility is negative.) Also chronical procrastinators like me probably have a bias against recognizing the opportunity cost of time spent reading comments, which makes us ignore comments that—judged strictly by the utility they give us—should be downvoted.
This is just a speculation about the nature of karma on LW. I don’t think that you did something horrible here, and I consider the downvoting of the offending comment a sufficient fix. But next time be more careful, because on this site torturing a person for 50 years is considered appropriate to avoid 3^^^3 readers getting spoilers in their eyes. :D
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
(see my comment below for why this was actually positive-sum)
We’re kinda wasting time in the first place. I mean, we’re debating a Harry Potter fanfiction. That’s hardly the most productive use of our time. Your trade would be very reasonable if I valued my karma as much as I value leaving my comment. i apologize to anyone who might have the story ruined for them by the revelation at the end of the first book, from more than 15 years ago. I’m not going to use the rot13 because it would be putting symbolism over substance. I would be censoring myself to avoid what is only technically defined as a spoiler because spoilers are “bad” regardless of whether their presence does any real harm.
Honestly, does anyone here actually say, “Rot13! I better not read this question because this guy is going to tell me the entire third act”? If anything, Rot13 just makes me more curious, as does a simple “Spoiler Alert”. I realized that this is only evidence for my mind, but even if someone on here as a deadly allergy to information they’re probably going to know anyway by next week, my comment would barely hurt them, if at all. Harry traded a 100,000 galleons because the value he assigned to Hermione was exponentially greater. I would trade twice my current amount of karma because the value I assign to resisting absurd technicalities is exponentially greater.
If you’re failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view.
A post only needs a score of −1 to be hidden.
The post currently stands at −12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).
By default, posts with −2 or less are hidden. (I just created a new account to check). I’m pretty sure the default used to be −4.
The post currently stands at −12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).
That is not relevant to anything I said. People can downvote for whatever reason they want, and should generally do so to mean “I want to see fewer comments like this one”.
By default, comments with a score of −2 are visible and with a score of −3 are hidden. The preferences page is confusing because it uses “below” as a strict inequality. I believe this was the original default, though there may have been something else in the middle.
Are you suggesting there’s some rule about what a post ‘deserves’ in terms of votes?
The actual mechanic is that scores or hundreds of individuals read each post. If they like it, they hit upvote. If they don’t like it, they hit downvote. Some voters may think “this has enough upvotes already” and not upvote even though they like a post. Some voters may think “this has enough downvotes to collapse and I only get a limited number of downvotes myself so I’ll save them for things other people aren’t downvoting.” But in the end it is mostly a reflect of the number of people that noticed your post and felt something about it.
You don’t deserve 12 downvotes for this, that’s just what happened.
Also, you can prevent accumulation of negative karma, if you’re concerned about that, by retracting.
I didn’t mean to say you were suggesting particular rules.
If a thing is unfair, then it is not following therules. It does sound like you believe or believed that there were some rules that should have been followed, but were not.
Your hypothetical rules might have been reasonable. If my vague speculation about roughly what those rule might have been is close, then there isn’t a means in place on this board to enforce rules like that.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action. I thought you guys were being silly by insisting that I had spoiled something everyone already knew. I thought you were all too quick to judge, and I felt that you became biased against my comments, even ones unrelated to the spoiler. I was not aware that I had broken any rules until I had nothing left to lose. An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty. If this were not the case then the accusing party would wield far too much power to be trustworthy. I think I have made it very clear why I thought this was unfair.
i don’t take it personally. He questioned my understanding of fairness. I answered him. I wasn’t complaining, because I have not really been harmed. And downvotes did not solve the problem, as the “damage” remains. Do try to follow the conversation.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action.
Of course—each person’s reaction was to downvote your post once (ignoring for the moment the issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere of additional penalties for defending yourself—it’s not really relevant in this case since that’s theoretically a second ‘initial action’). So, what you really mean is the collective response should be proportionate to the initial action. The way the voting system works creates a strange set of incentives—downvoting a post that already has a low score—or a person who already has low karma—does not cost any more (in terms of the cost to the downvote cap) than downvoting a post which is just on the visibility threshold.
Yet it’s hard to see how this could be otherwise, particularly if both the downvote cap and karma scores need to be statically calculated.
I’ve been thinking about that, but didn’t want to say anything because its really not my site and I probably couldn’t design a better one if I tried. But, yeah, I think the downvote system does warrant some reform, and I have no idea how that would work because it would vary from case to case. Maybe there could be some guidelines advising the community on which general infractions deserve a certain number of downvotes. It could be an interesting project, actually...
It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause “bad” comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for “soft” downvotes that don’t subtract from the karma of the author of the post until the post gets upvoted past a certain threshold. Another would be to limit, reduce, or eliminate the contribution to karma of negative-scored posts (if it is limited to −2, this is equivalent to making all downvotes “soft” under the first proposal)
If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn’t make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they’ll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or not a person should be trusted. There should probably be limits on how much of these a person can have.
The likes and dislikes should be used when someone says something either clever or amusing, or something like my comment which people might consider unhelpful, but does not reflect on my rationality. This would be displayed above the comments, but the total amount of likes a commenter has stored up will be private.
This way the emotional element will still be present, but will not interfere with a person’s ability to add to our understanding of rationality.
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Yes, this sort of thing was proposed at the site’s inception (I was a major proponent), but it failed to get off the ground. Mostly, the objection was that the UI would necessarily be confusing.
An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty
Sorry, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. If you do not possess the means to defend a right, you don’t actually have it. In this case, no authority greater than your own had declared this right, and you have no expectation for any power to intercede on your behalf.
Not really. I got the idea from the author’s noted and my knowledge of canon. Its entirely possible that I could be wrong about the existence of a twist, but it would kind of ruin the story. I mean half the time people on these threads refer to the character as “Qurrellmort”. If that doesn’t count as a spoiler, then I don’t see how my post is any worse.
Eliezer has retracted that comment, and has stated that such retractions should be spoilered as they are no longer common knowledge.
We can’t force you to ROT13 your original comment as well as this one, but you’re not being fair to the spirit of the fanfiction and you should expect to take a karma hit if you don’t.
Eliezer has retracted that comment, and has stated that such retractions should be spoilered as they are no longer common knowledge.
Eliezer does not have the power to declare what is common knowledge. Common knowledge is an objective element of the world, not directly subject to authority. What he can exert power to enforce is that all repetitions of said common knowledge are censored.
That’s not how common knowledge works. I was following the fanfic at the time, and I took that revelation as a statement that gur Cvbarre cyndhr guvat jnf vagraqrq nf n pbapyhfvir va-fgbel erirny. It doesn’t matter why EY decided to take it back, or even that he did; it clearly wasn’t intended at the time he wrote it as a twist to be revealed later, and it was revealed at the time for everyone who was reading it at the time, so why should new readers get a twist we don’t get? He made his decision—and the tone IIRC was that he felt that people who didn’t figure it out then were stupid—so he should live with it.
It is commonly held that making friends is easier when you keep judgements about what people should do with their lives and their possessions to a minimum.
so why should new readers get a twist we don’t get?
Why shouldn’t they? Eliezer has edited lots of things in the past in order to improve the story according to his judgment—e.g. removing a mention of the Philosopher’s Stone at chapter 4, or editing Draco’s words at chapter 7 to make them less vulgar.
What meta-ethical theory is your objection supposed to be indicative of?
For one thing, there is a difference between editing the text of the story (and we don’t seem to be forbidden from mentioning in cleartext what those edits were) and (EDIT turns out this part is wrong) --deciding that a scene is no longer meant to be the big reveal without (as far as I know) changing a word of the text.--
A general norm in forums discussing fiction is that all material published through normal channels (or all but the most recent) is treated equally in regards to the spoiler policy. This would include the entire fic and all authors notes, and not allow for any “retractions” to make something “no longer common knowledge”
My objection was also specifically to the use of the phrase “no longer common knowledge”. Stuff cannot be removed from common knowledge by decree, it can only be removed by actually being forgotten by people. I was surprised by this subthread because as recently as this week it was mentioned on IRC with no-one saying anything about it being retracted. Is there a list somewhere of all edits and retractions?
A general norm in forums discussing fiction is that all material published through normal channels (or all but the most recent) is treated equally in regards to the spoiler policy. This would include the entire fic and all authors notes, and not allow for any “retractions” to make something “no longer common knowledge”
Even granting that this is indeed the “general norm” in such forums (I wouldn’t know), don’t you think that when a thread in some forum states different rules, then it ought be respected?
Or do you feel that no thread, anywhere in the internet, should be allowed to utilize different rules than what you consider the norm?
What I described as the norm has the distinct advantage that the set of things considered “non-spoilery” can never have things removed from it, only added. So people don’t have to keep track of removals to know if they can still discuss something that was openly discussed in the past. Having a rule that does not have this property just doesn’t work well. You end up with people ignoring the rule, people complaining about the rule, people getting punished for posting things they believed were okay to post… basically everything we’ve seen in this subthread.
Also, as an aside: Why don’t comments have a proper spoiler tag, that you can just select text to see it? I’ve seen people use them in posts. Some of the resistance to rot13 may be the complexity of using it: it requires multiple steps and an external program.
This is not a point for using it for something that the majority of people posting in the thread already know.
If spreading spoilers hurts then its hurt is not limited to vulnerable people posting in the thread, but encompasses all vulnerable people reading the thread.
I doubt you have evidence that the majority of people posting in the thread are aware of the spoiler. I am certain you have only weak reasons to believe you know about all the people reading the thread. I lurked here for over a year.
Do the numerous positive-scored posts on this thread mentioning the spoiler (due to the sporadic enforcement of the rule) count as such evidence? If not, why not?
I think the first step toward evidence is being evident. You can find out how to cleanly include a link in your post by clicking Show Help to the right and below the box you type your comments in.
When you find a post you’d like to link, you can right click on the little links of chain below and to the right of that post and choose to copy the link.
From doing some searching, this thread contains at least nine positively
scored comments I classify as mentioning the spoiler. here and here are representative examples.
Full list of the “nine”: 6azo 6ar5 6amx6al76as66all6anm6ait6alr. Some of these are weaker than others, but the overall impression I have is that people have no problem writing posts as if it is a fact with no spoiler obfuscation.
It’s not treating it a fact that’s frowned upon, same way that it’s not frowned upon to treat Hat&Cloak as Quirrel, or Dumbledore as Santa Claus—we don’t ask that people treat their conclusions as if they’re spoilers.
What’s against the rules is to reveal the specific announcements that have been “unrevealed”.
Is this too fine a distinction for you to understand? Here’s a clue, none of those nine comments say anything about what Eliezer has or hasn’t revealed in retracted Authorial Notes.
I have is that people have no problem writing posts as if it is a fact with no spoiler obfuscation.
That is correct. The policy does not require that those comments be obfuscated.
You need to obfuscate “Eliezer said X” and you don’t need to obfuscate “X”.
For example, I would have to obfuscate “Eliezer told me that the true source of magic is really a supercomputer in Atlantis” (not spoilered here because he didn’t really) but I would not have to obfuscate an assertion / guess / assumption “the true source of magic is really a supercomputer in Atlantis”.
The policy is very clear—if you don’t think the policy is clear on this, please point to how the wording can be improved.
So… no obfuscation is required to prevent people from noticing that if people are asserting “X” and not ever giving any reasoning for it or discussing how new evidence updates its probability, that their basis is probably “Eliezer said X” rather than it being an actual theory they have evidence for?
Or to prevent someone who doesn’t want to be spoiled from inadvertently creating a trap for themselves by asking what the evidence for “X” is? (if the response is in rot13, ”....oh. crap.”)
I also don’t think that not attributing the insider information is sufficient not to qualify as “posting insider information”. The second paragraph of the rule therefore seems to contradict the first rather than clarifying it.
P.S. Even given that, I think the language “we are to understand” in post 6ar5 is still a violation because it implies a basis in an authoritative source.
Your whole argument seems to be “if someone might potentially get spoiled, then by golly everyone should be”.
We realize the rule can’t prevent all spoilage. But it can reduce it, and (it being simple and specific) it’s extremely easy to follow for anyone who is a non-jerk.
I don’t think the rule right now prevents any spoilage. It is implausible that anyone learns anything from hearing “Eliezer said X” that they don’t already have (including the inevitable conclusion that Eliezer must have, in fact, said X) from seeing everyone else treat X as unquestioned fact. The rule should, if anything, be expanded to require people to either rot13 those parts of these posts, go through the motions of treating it as a hypothesis, and at the very least avoid casually tossing off allusions to X when it’s not central to what they’re posting about.
P.S. “it’s extremely easy to follow” of course it is, that’s the problem—it’s easy to follow because it is written to avoid inconveniencing people except for people who don’t know the secret handshake. A real rule that actually had a chance of preventing people from being spoiled would impose inconvenience on people who actually matter and might get pushback from people whose karma you can’t wipe out.
I don’t think the rule right now prevents any spoilage.
Unless you argue that it actually causes spoilage (which is implausible), it’s highly implausible that it’s effect is exactly zero.
Such guidelines as you suggest are perhaps nice to be followed voluntarily, but obliging people to follow them would impose an additional cost and burden—when it seems that atleast two people in this thread have a problem with the rule being as much of a burden on them as it currently is.
Unless you argue that it actually causes spoilage (which is implausible)...
I’ll argue that it causes spoilage.
Create a new account. On the day after a chapter goes up, post a complaint about someone saying that Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg and ask how anyone knows. Even if all the replies to you are ciphered, you will still know that people know. And if you were not already-in-the-know, you would be spoiled. And any non-posting lurker who has already seen this happen a half donzen times but was not in the know and did not decipher anything also has been spoiled.
The cipher rule makes people comfortable talking about spoilers, so they do talk about spoilers. But the rule doesn’t prevent the spoilage that occurs because of the talk about spoilers, just what occurs because of the spoilers themselves.
Sensitization is complicated. That’s one reason censorship is so popular.
I completely agree with the plausibility of your scenario, but think that on net it causes less spoilage than no policy at all.
My original stance was that spoily things shouldn’t be talked about at all in the clear, but that was overruled by majority plus Eliezer. That policy resulted in much more time spent correcting / arguing about corrections than the current policy, so I agree it was worse on net.
I refrained from making this argument (even though it is in essence the same as my argument that it prevents nothing) specifically because it only makes the case as compared to a general rule against posting spoilers, not as compared to a general rule allowing it. Is your contention that in the absence of any rule on the subject people would tend to self-censor spoilers (even this one, out of all spoilers)? I wasn’t comfortable making that claim.
OH, COME ON! What’d I say HERE that earned a downvote?
Is your contention that in the absence of any rule on the subject people would tend to self-censor spoilers (even this one, out of all spoilers)
The rule on Less Wrong aside from HP:MOR threads is that you shouldn’t spoil anything unless you’re really sure it’s common knowledge, and anyone claiming it’s not common knowledge is usually good enough evidence that it’s not common knowledge. So you can say “C3P0 is Luke Skywalker’s father” in a post about rationality, but if anyone complains then it should probably be changed to “Spoiler for Empire Strikes Back (ROT13): blahblahblah”, and “last week’s episode of Buffy” should always be concealed.
This rule is directly enforced by Eliezer when necessary; he is very anti-spoilers. Unfortunately, I don’t think the policy is stated directly anywhere other than here.
Thanks for the mention. It’s nice to hear that my contributions have been noted.
Just an FYI, I said almost the same thing in my very first post, “Mr. Hat-and-Cloak, who we are to understand is most certainly Quirrell” The difference is that you know a spoiler about the one, and don’t know a spoiler about the other. In both cases there are sufficient in-text cues for me to speak as confidently as I do.
This is not a point for using it for something that the majority of people posting in the thread already know.
If spreading spoilers hurts then its hurt is not limited to vulnerable people posting in the thread, but encompasses all vulnerable people reading the thread.
The context of this post was “rot13” vs “a proper collapsing or color-based spoiler tag to be implemented in markdown”, so this is not sufficient to make difficulty a point in rot13′s favor, even if it ever was. The people who don’t want to read spoilers don’t have to view them, in the case of a spoiler tag. Choosing a spoiler tag over rot13 only harms people who A) are harmed by seeing a spoiler [and do not already know the spoiler] and B) have enough willpower to resist un-rot13ing it, but not enough to avoid selecting the text to view it without an external program. That sounds like a very tiny group.
Is there a list somewhere of all edits and retractions?
There is one relevant retraction. It comes up about once per discussion thread, and it is referred to obliquely in the header of every discussion thread. I know that you already know what it is.
Perhaps we should ROT13 the actual spoiler and stick it in the standard MOR discussion header, so that people stop missing the point.
It is a better story without that spoiler. People are very annoyed when it gets spoiled, with good reason.
Sure, the cat’s out of the bag, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily clawing your face yet.
I wasn’t sure of that before you said it. There could have been another. You could be wrong. It could change tomorrow. This is not good policy.
(EDIT turns out this is wrong—If it’s a better story without revealing that at that time, why did he write the chapter in such a way as he thought at the time it was an obvious reveal? Why is the text of that section unchanged when he decided not to reveal it after all—are people who can figure it out (as he assumed everyone would when he wrote it) not entitled to as good a story as people who can’t?--)
People are very annoyed when it gets spoiled. “People”. Not you, you already knew it. I am annoyed now. Who are these people?
Why is the text of that section unchanged when he decided not to reveal it after all—are people who can figure it out (as he assumed everyone would when he wrote it) not entitled to as good a story as people who can’t?
Figuring it out != getting it spoiled.
I was confident of that fact well before that section of the story. I would expect anyone with knowledge of canon to suspect a connection between the two characters.
But if you didn’t get it spoiled, you get to test your hypothesis against every new piece of evidence, and it’s a much more entertaining read.
If it’s a better story without revealing that at that time, why did he write the chapter in such a way as he thought at the time it was an obvious reveal?
Because he was convinced that it was a better story without it, after he wrote that chapter and AN.
EDIT: (responding to unmarked edit above)
People are very annoyed when it gets spoiled. “People”. Not you, you already knew it. I am annoyed now. Who are these people?
All of my friends either enjoy speculating about that fact because it wasn’t spoiled, or are annoyed that it was spoiled. I was annoyed when it was spoiled for me, in the original AN.
Is it a norm on Less Wrong that there is not a “grace period” to make an edit within a few seconds after posting and before anyone has replied, to make minor corrections or to add something that the user forgot to say and just realized after submitting the comment?
(Also, did I really deserve −8 karma for my opinions on this issue, or is it just a matter of −2 not seeming so bad when you do it four times?)
Is it a norm on Less Wrong that there is not a “grace period” to make an edit within a few seconds after posting and before anyone has replied, to make minor corrections or to add something that the user forgot to say and just realized after submitting the comment?
I haven’t downvoted any of your posts, but it need not be just your opinions—it may very well be the way you express them, either in terms of expressed hostility, or in terms of confusion/lack of clarity.
e.g. you’ve still not explained the meaning of the ‘should’ in “He made his decision—so he should live with it.” .
But frankly, I’d wager it’s just the constant aura of hostility you seem to exude towards the rest of us.
My perception was that the “retraction” was an attempt to reverse the effect of the original author’s note. This is obviously not actually possible. While EY probably knows this, I think he is overestimating the actual benefit of the retraction (and of the related decision to suppress discussion derived from that information in these threads).
The people the retraction is most likely to [arguably] benefit are people who started reading after it was removed and people who were reading it at the time but were inattentive to the author’s note and any discussion that happened in the intervening period. My assumption is that there are not actually very many people fitting that description participating in these threads. This is weighed against by the cost of imposing rot13 on all discussion derived from that information and arbitrary downvote penalties on people who are unaware of the rule (as well as acting as the spark that sets off arguments like this).
I also think that it’s possible that HPMOR discussion would be better served by a conventional forum rather than the reddit engine, as some others have mentioned, and that this could mitigate the spoiler problem, but that’s mostly unrelated.
So mostly you object to being told to go out of your way while discussing something you enjoy so that others can enjoy it the way the person who made the thing your discussing intended?
May I put those words in your mouth or should I wait for the foot to come out?
Is it a norm on Less Wrong that there is not a “grace period” to make an edit within a few seconds after posting and before anyone has replied, to make minor corrections or to add something that the user forgot to say and just realized after submitting the comment?
I’m not certain of what you’re asking, here, but I just found out that you can delete a post if no one has responded to it yet. So in case that’s what you were after, there’s that.
He said “responding to unmarked edit” as though there was something wrong with failing to mark a simple addition made 10 seconds after the original post. I was confused, since it was not my experience that anyone considered this a problem anywhere.
Oh. I edit mine when I make a mistake that makes them mean something else. Or when someone prompts me to.
But if you’re adding information then it’s useful to you to mark that you added something. That way the people that already pounced on your post notice there’s something new there while they’re pounding Refresh to see if you’ve responded to them.
and deciding that a scene is no longer meant to be the big reveal without (as far as I know) changing a word of the text.
The text was changed; a short scene at the end was deleted for being too obvious.
The scene still means exactly what it did, it’s just that a lot of people came away from that scene without figuring out the thing that was stated in the (now deleted) Author’s Note, and as I understand it they expressed annoyance at having it thrown in their faces like that.
The Author’s Note you refer to has since been retracted. You’re ruining the twist for the people who haven’t figured it out yet. As are all those other people, yes.
I think this particular spoiler has crossed the Rosebud Line, and there’s no getting it back. If you read this forum, or for that matter if you’re like 2⁄3 of the English-speaking world and have read Philosopher’s Stone, you know perfectly well who Quirinus Quirrell actually is. Getting fussy about it being a spoiler is ridiculous.
My list of examples of people saying that (as violations of the rule) was specifically rejected, since none of them (just as Alsadius’s post) mentioned [rot13]gung Ryvrmre unq fnvq vg.[/rot13]. You can’t decide “rot13 has to be contagious to the information itself” here, and the opposite when denying that the rule is inconsistently enforced.
Everyone who has defended the policy on the grounds that it only means you can’t say [what I rot13′d above] should vote his post back up.
It may be difficult to take an apology like this at face value when you could just go back and edit the tone to something you wouldn’t have to apologize for. You either put it in before you clicked ‘Comment’ the first time or you hit Edit to put it in.
Also, he said, “you know perfectly well.” This communicates that the conclusion you would draw is the correct one. And that is spoilage.
The rule is that it’s only spoilage if you say both things in cleartext in the same post. Yes, I agree, it’s a stupid rule, but it is the rule, and I was angry because that argument was used specifically against my claim that it’s inconsistently enforced.
“edit the tone to something you wouldn’t have to apologize for.” I could only do so honestly if this did not make me angry. EDIT—done. I’m still a bit angry about it though...
Not quite the same as there isn’t potential for spoilage there.
If I said, “If you’re like 2⁄3 of the fans here and you’ve followed up on links to Methods conversations elsewhere, then you know perfectly well that gur nhgube gbyq n ohapu bs crbcyr ng n jrqqvat gung uvf zntvp flfgrz jnf qrgrezvarq ol cybg pbafgenvarq ol pbzcngvovyvgl jvgu jung ur nyernql rfgnoyvfurq.” sans cipher then that would be spoilage.
Clearly I was referring to the fan theory that QQ is Voldemort, or the fact that QQ is Voldemort in canon, not the fact that Eliezer said that DD vf Ibyqrzbeg(and if you need to rot13 to know what I’m saying there, kill yourself now).
For what it’s worth, I hadn’t read the Rowling books when I first read MoR, and finding out who Quirrell was was actually somewhat of a shock. I’m the target audience for this rule, so far as any such exists, and I think it’s pretty dumb. I wouldn’t just slap it on as a chapter title if I was the editor, but if you’re reading this forum thread, certain things are assumed of you.
Not so, good sir. Do you call me a liar? I would challenge you on the field of honor, had I any.
For what it’s worth, I hadn’t read the Rowling books when I first read MoR, and finding out who Quirrell was was actually somewhat of a shock. I’m the target audience for this rule, so far as any such exists, and I think it’s pretty dumb.
Is anyone logging anecdotes? We’ve got one here!
I wouldn’t just slap it on as a chapter title if I was the editor, but if you’re reading this forum thread, certain things are assumed of you.
Okay. That’s cool. So how do you feel about following politely asked and reasonable requests that cost you only quick trip to rot13.com and are enthusiastically enforced by at least a handful of trigger-happy registrants of karmic disapproval?
If said under-thumbers weren’t in play, would you obey the request of the author?
Seriously? I’m ruining the twist?!! I’M RUINING THE TWIST?!!!?! The author’s notes on this subject were up the last time I checked, and I didn’t have any reason to think Eliezer would change that. If you check any other thread on this topic, you’ll find dozens of people talking about Quirrelmort. How many of those are you going to downvote? There’s no way anyone can hope to follow the conversation here without that assumption. One of the replies to my comment says how both Voldemort and Quirrell are characters of Tom Riddle. And its UPVOTED!!! I had no reason whatsoever to think I was spoiling anything for anyone and I think the response to my comment is totally unfair.
You’ve been told the spoiler policy.
You’ve been asked to obey it.
Expect to be downvoted if you don’t obey the rules of the thread.
Capital letters and multiple exclamation marks aren’t an argument.
I don’t like people who deliberately join a forum whose rules they don’t have any willingness to follow, no matter how “unfair” they seem to them.
The trouble was that you attributed the information to Eliezer, and said that it had been made explicitly clear. Commonly held speculation is one thing, insider information from the author is quite another.
If your comment was (non-rot13′d):
V jbhyq arire unir thrffrq gung Dhveeryy jnf fhpu n sna bs Ngynf Fuehttrq. Nyfb, V’z fyvtugyl pbashfrq ng ubj ur’f orvat cbegenlrq va guvf puncgre. Dhveeryy vf boivbhfyl Ibyqrzbeg, naq V pna’g vzntvar jul snyfr pyhrf jbhyq or tvira gb qvfgenpg sebz n gjvfg gung rirelbar fubhyq frr pbzvat.
then it could have been read as your own speculation, and that would have been absolutely fine.
Seriously. If this was another forum, you’d have been outright banned by now for failing to follow the stated policy, even after repeated warnings. Please go elsewhere or follow the rules.
Aw. That’s like learning that the reason Mulder and Scully have such great chemistry is that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson can’t stand each other.
I have systematically upvoted the last two pages of your comments. After 14 pages of “Quirrelmort” and personal declarations from the author anyone—including Eliezer—who wants to pretend that the speculative kinship is not already a sufficiently thoroughly disseminated meme is being silly.
The accusations that pleeppleep is “not being fair to the spirit of the fanfiction” that I see in the children comments frankly disgust me. Is the “spirit of the fanfiction” playing “Simon Says” or is said spirit just inconsistent and controlling?
It is enough to acknowledge that “Quirrelmort” is no longer the Word of God.
Would you change your mind if I dug up links to the two times in the last two weeks that someone on the LW discussion page asked why everyone was so certain that Q=V, clearly displaying that they didn’t know the spoiler?
And just to reiterate, since pleeppleep is determinedly ignoring this fact despite being repeatedly made aware of it, the spoiler isn’t “X” but “Eliezer said X”.
My theory was correct: the policy did not prevent that user from being told the spoiler. You may say this is because it was violated, as of course it was, but what was the correct response?
“We can’t tell you due to the spoiler policy”? “Ryvrmre fnvq fb va na rneyvre nhgube’f abgr gung jnf ergenpgrq”? Would either of those, or indeed any response, have resulted in that user not finding out about it?
If someone says something similar in the next thread, what would you have me do?
I was under the impression this was a community rule. People were certainly talking as if they believed in the logical basis for having the policy in order to prevent people from getting spoiled, rather than just doing what he says.
Would you change your mind if I dug up links to the two times in the last two weeks that someone on the LW discussion page asked why everyone was so certain that Q=V, clearly displaying that they didn’t know the spoiler?
No. That is, this does not provide information that surprises me and requires updating—it’s 14*500 comments worth of common knowledge, not something that is completely universal.
The point is—this kind of reality editing is tacky and I’m never going to support vilifying pleep or anyone else for not getting behind it. If you go as far as to outright patronize people for not understanding something then it is just too late to pretend it is a secret.
If you go as far as to outright patronize people for not understanding something then it is just too late to pretend it is a secret.
See, I could’ve sworn I said
And just to reiterate, since pleeppleep is determinedly ignoring this fact despite being repeatedly made aware of it, the spoiler isn’t “X” but “Eliezer said X”.
thank you so much! I’ve actually gotten back almost all my karma now, an I’m really sorry if you’ve lost any points defending me.
Don’t worry those particular points went into battle never expecting to return. Sometimes you need to make them use force!
In this case I could never expect to change majority will but I could change your role from that of lone dissenter who should know better all along to a loser in a controversial policy change. Being a loser is a better role than being weird.
The rot13 policy indicates your third sentence should be in cipher, in case you weren’t aware.
V guvax ur jebgr vg va gur grkg rdhvinyrag bs fubhgvat va fbzr rneyvre Nhgube’f Abgrf, npghnyyl.
Yes. And then he retracted that statement.
Its Eliezer’s site and all, but doesn’t it kinda go against seeking the truth to pretend someone never said something when they did? I mean, if J.K. Rowling makes a statement about Harry Potter and retracts it, does that make the statement a spoiler? Eliezer chose to give information to people in his notes. He can’t really take that knowledge away. If anything, retracting a statement indicates that the statement is no longer valid, not that it is now a secret (this by the way would’ve been enough to answer my question, after which I would have gladly deleted my “spoiler” with no more than 3, rather than 30, downvotes). Rules are rules, but it just seems to me that it sorta goes against rationalism to hold to a rule just because someone says so, when it doesn’t entirely make sense.
(This better not get downvoted like all my other comments here. I said nothing irrational or detrimental to any reader. I was making an honest case, and if anyone wants to provide a civilized response, I welcome them. We’re trying to be rational here, that implies treating arguments with a degree of fairness)
Look. It’s very simple. The only response necessary is a gesture toward the main post:
I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that you weren’t aware your statement fell under that category. It’s just impolite that your response was something other than “oops, fixed.” If you think the policy is misguided somehow, make a top-level comment about it.
It’s your right to ignore the clearly-stated rules of these threads, just as it’s our right to downvote you for it.
I hadn’t realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules. Someone said it should be coded, but nobody actually explained why I had broken the rules until after I went to sleep. When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it. At this point I don’t feel that I did anything wrong enough to warrant more than 5 downvotes on what was otherwise a reasonable query and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
Too bad, agreeing to follow the rules of the thread, even if that means editing/rot13ing past comments, would have been the easiest way to get your karma back.
Edited to add: Some Quirrel-type lesson about learning when to lose, and the costs of needless escalation, seems appropriate.
The initial shock of having lost so much karma was the only time I felt I really “lost” here. I notice that karma loss does more to infuriate than actually punish, and that it has the potential to hurt the site more than me, by nullifying my ability to reach a larger audience when I have something important to say. When I see a rule I don’t like, I tend to ignore it, not that doing so was my intention here. My problem wasn’t that I lost karma, it was that I was accused of wrongdoing which I did not believe myself to have committed.
(That said, you are probably right about learning to lose. One of my biggest problems has been that I find escalation of conflict fun after it reaches a point where I cannot possibly win. I’m very popular with authority, as you could probably guess.)
I would also guess that many of your peers don’t much care for the escalation of conflict for its own sake, either.
no, just authority.
(The people who downvoted you here are your peers, not authority.)
Okay, I’m honestly curious: why the downvotes? I thought I was being helpful.
I consider a peer to be anyone I can beat in an argument when my logic is sound, regardless of other circumstances.
As far as he knew it was gone. I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes, and I’m not sure if you’re not being too optimistic to expect it of the others who downvoted.
When I started here I went back and changed posts, hoping that downvotes would be replaced with upvotes. There was little reaction and I think it really wasn’t worth the time.
Near as I can tell, the easiest way to get your karma back is to make a top level post repeating what other people are already saying in storytelling way. That may fall out of fashion at some point, though, so don’t over invest your time in developing your storytelling and other people repeating skills, or whatever.
We were still in the discussion thread. I don’t promise to stick around indefinitely, but he would have obviously chosen to mention he has now fixed it, same way that he chose to complain instead.
In general, when someone says something is a spoiler and should be put in ROT13, the polite thing to do is to comply. You can then argue that it shouldn’t be necessary, after the damage control is done.
If you’re failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view. I will generally check back in a day to see if the spoiler has been ROT13′d, and reverse my downvote if it has.
The policy is listed in the post header, and the “more specifically” link says exactly what it is that should only be mentioned in ROT13.
And if you’d just bothered to go down to the local planning office, you’d see the policy was available for anyone to look at for the last nine months.
I have never posted a spoiler before, nor had I intended to. I was not aware that confidence was to be given to the accusing party. I will keep this in mind in the future.
It’s not about who’s the “accusing party”, it’s about limiting potential damage. It would have cost you only a few seconds to edit in order to rot13 or remove something you were told was spoiler—an action which would have been of positive utility to us, of hardly any cost to you—instead you preferred to spend a hundredfold times that amount of time in a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.
Why don’t we instead trade utilities, you by editing to remove/rot13 the spoiler, and I by removing my own downvotes of you? As could have been done from the very first post?
Not everyone is losing. For example, I’ve been enjoying this. I doubt I’m the only one.
First time it can be amusing, but if such situation would repeat often, the amusement would fade and the costs would stay. So I cooperate with my future selves by resisting to act on my amusement.
I can’t tell if you’re telling me I don’t actually enjoy this or if you’re threatening me with promises that time will deliver retribution.
Things like this are why I can’t convince my friends that you guys aren’t a “system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” I don’t know what you’re saying but I’ll bet p>0.75 there’s a way to say it without sounding like a fucking time traveler.
EDIT: I mean to say that you use phrases that reference something common to some group you belong to, but uncommon to the public majority. I could say you sound like you come from fairy land or a phyg or outer space, but saying that you sound like you come from another time seemed the most apt until I noticed the phrase I criticized said something about your future selves. Maybe that’s why I thought of time travel. I wasn’t taking you literally.
EDIT II: Son of Edit: Phyg
I’m threatening you that time may deliver more discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t rot-13 the spoilers, how exactly the spoiler is defined, etc… and that can become rather boring.
And by the way, I am a time traveller, I just always move in the same direction with a constant speed.
Point taken, though.
Actually, I would say that this whole affair was a net positive. It brought to light an issue that I’m sure some of us believe should be reformed. At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall. Rationalists cannot agree to disagree, so when we argue correctly, we become stronger. I suppose I was briefly frustrated by this and its possible that some animosity sprung up here and there, but in the end we’re all really friends here trying to talk about a story we enjoy, and this was undeniably amusing.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An exaggerated example: if someone writes something bad and gets −10 karma, and two people react with “stop doing this!” and get +5 karma each, the total balance is 0, but the total utility is negative.) Also chronical procrastinators like me probably have a bias against recognizing the opportunity cost of time spent reading comments, which makes us ignore comments that—judged strictly by the utility they give us—should be downvoted.
This is just a speculation about the nature of karma on LW. I don’t think that you did something horrible here, and I consider the downvoting of the offending comment a sufficient fix. But next time be more careful, because on this site torturing a person for 50 years is considered appropriate to avoid 3^^^3 readers getting spoilers in their eyes. :D
I would never have guessed that we had that many readers.
It depends on a few assumptions:
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
(Also, I am joking.)
Wouldn’t transhumans with sufficiently modified minds probably have the cognitive ability necessary to guess the spoiler?
I actually agree, Although it is rather exasperating to argue against a larger group of people.
(see my comment below for why this was actually positive-sum) We’re kinda wasting time in the first place. I mean, we’re debating a Harry Potter fanfiction. That’s hardly the most productive use of our time. Your trade would be very reasonable if I valued my karma as much as I value leaving my comment. i apologize to anyone who might have the story ruined for them by the revelation at the end of the first book, from more than 15 years ago. I’m not going to use the rot13 because it would be putting symbolism over substance. I would be censoring myself to avoid what is only technically defined as a spoiler because spoilers are “bad” regardless of whether their presence does any real harm.
Honestly, does anyone here actually say, “Rot13! I better not read this question because this guy is going to tell me the entire third act”? If anything, Rot13 just makes me more curious, as does a simple “Spoiler Alert”. I realized that this is only evidence for my mind, but even if someone on here as a deadly allergy to information they’re probably going to know anyway by next week, my comment would barely hurt them, if at all. Harry traded a 100,000 galleons because the value he assigned to Hermione was exponentially greater. I would trade twice my current amount of karma because the value I assign to resisting absurd technicalities is exponentially greater.
A post only needs a score of −1 to be hidden.
The post currently stands at −12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).
By default, posts with −2 or less are hidden. (I just created a new account to check). I’m pretty sure the default used to be −4.
That is not relevant to anything I said. People can downvote for whatever reason they want, and should generally do so to mean “I want to see fewer comments like this one”.
By default, comments with a score of −2 are visible and with a score of −3 are hidden. The preferences page is confusing because it uses “below” as a strict inequality. I believe this was the original default, though there may have been something else in the middle.
Are you suggesting there’s some rule about what a post ‘deserves’ in terms of votes?
The actual mechanic is that scores or hundreds of individuals read each post. If they like it, they hit upvote. If they don’t like it, they hit downvote. Some voters may think “this has enough upvotes already” and not upvote even though they like a post. Some voters may think “this has enough downvotes to collapse and I only get a limited number of downvotes myself so I’ll save them for things other people aren’t downvoting.” But in the end it is mostly a reflect of the number of people that noticed your post and felt something about it.
You don’t deserve 12 downvotes for this, that’s just what happened.
Also, you can prevent accumulation of negative karma, if you’re concerned about that, by retracting.
I wasn’t suggesting any rules, I was pointing out that this case seemed less than fair to me. In any case I suppose you’re right.
I didn’t mean to say you were suggesting particular rules.
If a thing is unfair, then it is not following the rules. It does sound like you believe or believed that there were some rules that should have been followed, but were not.
Your hypothetical rules might have been reasonable. If my vague speculation about roughly what those rule might have been is close, then there isn’t a means in place on this board to enforce rules like that.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action. I thought you guys were being silly by insisting that I had spoiled something everyone already knew. I thought you were all too quick to judge, and I felt that you became biased against my comments, even ones unrelated to the spoiler. I was not aware that I had broken any rules until I had nothing left to lose. An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty. If this were not the case then the accusing party would wield far too much power to be trustworthy. I think I have made it very clear why I thought this was unfair.
Irrelevant. Damage was done, and downvotes were used to route around the damage. Try not to take it personally.
i don’t take it personally. He questioned my understanding of fairness. I answered him. I wasn’t complaining, because I have not really been harmed. And downvotes did not solve the problem, as the “damage” remains. Do try to follow the conversation.
Of course—each person’s reaction was to downvote your post once (ignoring for the moment the issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere of additional penalties for defending yourself—it’s not really relevant in this case since that’s theoretically a second ‘initial action’). So, what you really mean is the collective response should be proportionate to the initial action. The way the voting system works creates a strange set of incentives—downvoting a post that already has a low score—or a person who already has low karma—does not cost any more (in terms of the cost to the downvote cap) than downvoting a post which is just on the visibility threshold.
Yet it’s hard to see how this could be otherwise, particularly if both the downvote cap and karma scores need to be statically calculated.
I’ve been thinking about that, but didn’t want to say anything because its really not my site and I probably couldn’t design a better one if I tried. But, yeah, I think the downvote system does warrant some reform, and I have no idea how that would work because it would vary from case to case. Maybe there could be some guidelines advising the community on which general infractions deserve a certain number of downvotes. It could be an interesting project, actually...
It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause “bad” comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for “soft” downvotes that don’t subtract from the karma of the author of the post until the post gets upvoted past a certain threshold. Another would be to limit, reduce, or eliminate the contribution to karma of negative-scored posts (if it is limited to −2, this is equivalent to making all downvotes “soft” under the first proposal)
If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn’t make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they’ll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or not a person should be trusted. There should probably be limits on how much of these a person can have.
The likes and dislikes should be used when someone says something either clever or amusing, or something like my comment which people might consider unhelpful, but does not reflect on my rationality. This would be displayed above the comments, but the total amount of likes a commenter has stored up will be private.
This way the emotional element will still be present, but will not interfere with a person’s ability to add to our understanding of rationality.
Downvotes you can make are limited to some multiple of your karma.
I didn’t know that..… How does that make sense?
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Yes, this sort of thing was proposed at the site’s inception (I was a major proponent), but it failed to get off the ground. Mostly, the objection was that the UI would necessarily be confusing.
The people who frequent this site are expected to read a sequence of posts explaining quantum physics, but a dual “like” system is too complicated?
inorite?!
Sorry, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. If you do not possess the means to defend a right, you don’t actually have it. In this case, no authority greater than your own had declared this right, and you have no expectation for any power to intercede on your behalf.
It’s like Nerf Mob Justice in here.
Not really. I got the idea from the author’s noted and my knowledge of canon. Its entirely possible that I could be wrong about the existence of a twist, but it would kind of ruin the story. I mean half the time people on these threads refer to the character as “Qurrellmort”. If that doesn’t count as a spoiler, then I don’t see how my post is any worse.
Eliezer has retracted that comment, and has stated that such retractions should be spoilered as they are no longer common knowledge.
We can’t force you to ROT13 your original comment as well as this one, but you’re not being fair to the spirit of the fanfiction and you should expect to take a karma hit if you don’t.
Eliezer does not have the power to declare what is common knowledge. Common knowledge is an objective element of the world, not directly subject to authority. What he can exert power to enforce is that all repetitions of said common knowledge are censored.
That’s not how common knowledge works. I was following the fanfic at the time, and I took that revelation as a statement that gur Cvbarre cyndhr guvat jnf vagraqrq nf n pbapyhfvir va-fgbel erirny. It doesn’t matter why EY decided to take it back, or even that he did; it clearly wasn’t intended at the time he wrote it as a twist to be revealed later, and it was revealed at the time for everyone who was reading it at the time, so why should new readers get a twist we don’t get? He made his decision—and the tone IIRC was that he felt that people who didn’t figure it out then were stupid—so he should live with it.
Because the author wants to give it to them.
It is commonly held that making friends is easier when you keep judgements about what people should do with their lives and their possessions to a minimum.
Why shouldn’t they? Eliezer has edited lots of things in the past in order to improve the story according to his judgment—e.g. removing a mention of the Philosopher’s Stone at chapter 4, or editing Draco’s words at chapter 7 to make them less vulgar.
What meta-ethical theory is your objection supposed to be indicative of?
For one thing, there is a difference between editing the text of the story (and we don’t seem to be forbidden from mentioning in cleartext what those edits were) and (EDIT turns out this part is wrong) --deciding that a scene is no longer meant to be the big reveal without (as far as I know) changing a word of the text.--
A general norm in forums discussing fiction is that all material published through normal channels (or all but the most recent) is treated equally in regards to the spoiler policy. This would include the entire fic and all authors notes, and not allow for any “retractions” to make something “no longer common knowledge”
My objection was also specifically to the use of the phrase “no longer common knowledge”. Stuff cannot be removed from common knowledge by decree, it can only be removed by actually being forgotten by people. I was surprised by this subthread because as recently as this week it was mentioned on IRC with no-one saying anything about it being retracted. Is there a list somewhere of all edits and retractions?
Even granting that this is indeed the “general norm” in such forums (I wouldn’t know), don’t you think that when a thread in some forum states different rules, then it ought be respected?
Or do you feel that no thread, anywhere in the internet, should be allowed to utilize different rules than what you consider the norm?
What I described as the norm has the distinct advantage that the set of things considered “non-spoilery” can never have things removed from it, only added. So people don’t have to keep track of removals to know if they can still discuss something that was openly discussed in the past. Having a rule that does not have this property just doesn’t work well. You end up with people ignoring the rule, people complaining about the rule, people getting punished for posting things they believed were okay to post… basically everything we’ve seen in this subthread.
Also, as an aside: Why don’t comments have a proper spoiler tag, that you can just select text to see it? I’ve seen people use them in posts. Some of the resistance to rot13 may be the complexity of using it: it requires multiple steps and an external program.
I agree that we should have a spoiler tag.
One data point in favor of rot13 however: The extra effort it takes to decode is an incentive to try and figure things out on your own.
EDIT: I mean this in general, not just for HPMoR.
This is not a point for using it for something that the majority of people posting in the thread already know. At that point it’s just annoying.
EDIT: removed some stuff that’s needlessly confrontational and redundant to a different post I made.
If spreading spoilers hurts then its hurt is not limited to vulnerable people posting in the thread, but encompasses all vulnerable people reading the thread.
I doubt you have evidence that the majority of people posting in the thread are aware of the spoiler. I am certain you have only weak reasons to believe you know about all the people reading the thread. I lurked here for over a year.
Do the numerous positive-scored posts on this thread mentioning the spoiler (due to the sporadic enforcement of the rule) count as such evidence? If not, why not?
I think the first step toward evidence is being evident. You can find out how to cleanly include a link in your post by clicking Show Help to the right and below the box you type your comments in.
When you find a post you’d like to link, you can right click on the little links of chain below and to the right of that post and choose to copy the link.
From doing some searching, this thread contains at least nine positively scored comments I classify as mentioning the spoiler. here and here are representative examples.
Full list of the “nine”: 6azo 6ar5 6amx 6al7 6as6 6all 6anm 6ait 6alr. Some of these are weaker than others, but the overall impression I have is that people have no problem writing posts as if it is a fact with no spoiler obfuscation.
It’s not treating it a fact that’s frowned upon, same way that it’s not frowned upon to treat Hat&Cloak as Quirrel, or Dumbledore as Santa Claus—we don’t ask that people treat their conclusions as if they’re spoilers.
What’s against the rules is to reveal the specific announcements that have been “unrevealed”.
Is this too fine a distinction for you to understand? Here’s a clue, none of those nine comments say anything about what Eliezer has or hasn’t revealed in retracted Authorial Notes.
So give it a rest already.
That is correct. The policy does not require that those comments be obfuscated.
You need to obfuscate “Eliezer said X” and you don’t need to obfuscate “X”.
For example, I would have to obfuscate “Eliezer told me that the true source of magic is really a supercomputer in Atlantis” (not spoilered here because he didn’t really) but I would not have to obfuscate an assertion / guess / assumption “the true source of magic is really a supercomputer in Atlantis”.
The policy is very clear—if you don’t think the policy is clear on this, please point to how the wording can be improved.
So… no obfuscation is required to prevent people from noticing that if people are asserting “X” and not ever giving any reasoning for it or discussing how new evidence updates its probability, that their basis is probably “Eliezer said X” rather than it being an actual theory they have evidence for?
Or to prevent someone who doesn’t want to be spoiled from inadvertently creating a trap for themselves by asking what the evidence for “X” is? (if the response is in rot13, ”....oh. crap.”)
I also don’t think that not attributing the insider information is sufficient not to qualify as “posting insider information”. The second paragraph of the rule therefore seems to contradict the first rather than clarifying it.
P.S. Even given that, I think the language “we are to understand” in post 6ar5 is still a violation because it implies a basis in an authoritative source.
Your whole argument seems to be “if someone might potentially get spoiled, then by golly everyone should be”.
We realize the rule can’t prevent all spoilage. But it can reduce it, and (it being simple and specific) it’s extremely easy to follow for anyone who is a non-jerk.
I don’t think the rule right now prevents any spoilage. It is implausible that anyone learns anything from hearing “Eliezer said X” that they don’t already have (including the inevitable conclusion that Eliezer must have, in fact, said X) from seeing everyone else treat X as unquestioned fact. The rule should, if anything, be expanded to require people to either rot13 those parts of these posts, go through the motions of treating it as a hypothesis, and at the very least avoid casually tossing off allusions to X when it’s not central to what they’re posting about.
P.S. “it’s extremely easy to follow” of course it is, that’s the problem—it’s easy to follow because it is written to avoid inconveniencing people except for people who don’t know the secret handshake. A real rule that actually had a chance of preventing people from being spoiled would impose inconvenience on people who actually matter and might get pushback from people whose karma you can’t wipe out.
Unless you argue that it actually causes spoilage (which is implausible), it’s highly implausible that it’s effect is exactly zero.
Such guidelines as you suggest are perhaps nice to be followed voluntarily, but obliging people to follow them would impose an additional cost and burden—when it seems that atleast two people in this thread have a problem with the rule being as much of a burden on them as it currently is.
I’ll argue that it causes spoilage.
Create a new account. On the day after a chapter goes up, post a complaint about someone saying that Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg and ask how anyone knows. Even if all the replies to you are ciphered, you will still know that people know. And if you were not already-in-the-know, you would be spoiled. And any non-posting lurker who has already seen this happen a half donzen times but was not in the know and did not decipher anything also has been spoiled.
The cipher rule makes people comfortable talking about spoilers, so they do talk about spoilers. But the rule doesn’t prevent the spoilage that occurs because of the talk about spoilers, just what occurs because of the spoilers themselves.
Sensitization is complicated. That’s one reason censorship is so popular.
I completely agree with the plausibility of your scenario, but think that on net it causes less spoilage than no policy at all.
My original stance was that spoily things shouldn’t be talked about at all in the clear, but that was overruled by majority plus Eliezer. That policy resulted in much more time spent correcting / arguing about corrections than the current policy, so I agree it was worse on net.
I agree that there is almost certainly less spoilage with this policy than there would be with no policy at all.
I refrained from making this argument (even though it is in essence the same as my argument that it prevents nothing) specifically because it only makes the case as compared to a general rule against posting spoilers, not as compared to a general rule allowing it. Is your contention that in the absence of any rule on the subject people would tend to self-censor spoilers (even this one, out of all spoilers)? I wasn’t comfortable making that claim.
OH, COME ON! What’d I say HERE that earned a downvote?
No. People do self-censor, but I’ll be damned if I can tell when.
I’m arguing that the rot13 rule leads to spoilage in a way that a no-spoilers-full-stop rule would not.
The rule on Less Wrong aside from HP:MOR threads is that you shouldn’t spoil anything unless you’re really sure it’s common knowledge, and anyone claiming it’s not common knowledge is usually good enough evidence that it’s not common knowledge. So you can say “C3P0 is Luke Skywalker’s father” in a post about rationality, but if anyone complains then it should probably be changed to “Spoiler for Empire Strikes Back (ROT13): blahblahblah”, and “last week’s episode of Buffy” should always be concealed.
This rule is directly enforced by Eliezer when necessary; he is very anti-spoilers. Unfortunately, I don’t think the policy is stated directly anywhere other than here.
This.
More fun with pictures!
Thanks for the mention. It’s nice to hear that my contributions have been noted.
Just an FYI, I said almost the same thing in my very first post, “Mr. Hat-and-Cloak, who we are to understand is most certainly Quirrell” The difference is that you know a spoiler about the one, and don’t know a spoiler about the other. In both cases there are sufficient in-text cues for me to speak as confidently as I do.
The context of this post was “rot13” vs “a proper collapsing or color-based spoiler tag to be implemented in markdown”, so this is not sufficient to make difficulty a point in rot13′s favor, even if it ever was. The people who don’t want to read spoilers don’t have to view them, in the case of a spoiler tag. Choosing a spoiler tag over rot13 only harms people who A) are harmed by seeing a spoiler [and do not already know the spoiler] and B) have enough willpower to resist un-rot13ing it, but not enough to avoid selecting the text to view it without an external program. That sounds like a very tiny group.
If you have Firefox, install the LeetKey addon.
Chrome also has an extension (the one I use is just called ‘rot13’).
There is one relevant retraction. It comes up about once per discussion thread, and it is referred to obliquely in the header of every discussion thread. I know that you already know what it is.
Perhaps we should ROT13 the actual spoiler and stick it in the standard MOR discussion header, so that people stop missing the point.
It is a better story without that spoiler. People are very annoyed when it gets spoiled, with good reason.
Sure, the cat’s out of the bag, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily clawing your face yet.
It’s mentioned explicitly in the “more specifically” link to the original spoiler policy.
What retraction are you referring to? I’ve heard of several, with none seeming more relevant than any other.
It’s mentioned explicitly in the “more specifically” link to the original spoiler policy.
Why am I repeating this?
Because you’re aptly pedantic?
It’s a blessing and a curse.
“There is one relevant retraction.”
I wasn’t sure of that before you said it. There could have been another. You could be wrong. It could change tomorrow. This is not good policy.
(EDIT turns out this is wrong—If it’s a better story without revealing that at that time, why did he write the chapter in such a way as he thought at the time it was an obvious reveal? Why is the text of that section unchanged when he decided not to reveal it after all—are people who can figure it out (as he assumed everyone would when he wrote it) not entitled to as good a story as people who can’t?--)
People are very annoyed when it gets spoiled. “People”. Not you, you already knew it. I am annoyed now. Who are these people?
Figuring it out != getting it spoiled.
I was confident of that fact well before that section of the story. I would expect anyone with knowledge of canon to suspect a connection between the two characters.
But if you didn’t get it spoiled, you get to test your hypothesis against every new piece of evidence, and it’s a much more entertaining read.
Because he was convinced that it was a better story without it, after he wrote that chapter and AN.
EDIT: (responding to unmarked edit above)
All of my friends either enjoy speculating about that fact because it wasn’t spoiled, or are annoyed that it was spoiled. I was annoyed when it was spoiled for me, in the original AN.
Is it a norm on Less Wrong that there is not a “grace period” to make an edit within a few seconds after posting and before anyone has replied, to make minor corrections or to add something that the user forgot to say and just realized after submitting the comment?
(Also, did I really deserve −8 karma for my opinions on this issue, or is it just a matter of −2 not seeming so bad when you do it four times?)
No
I haven’t downvoted any of your posts, but it need not be just your opinions—it may very well be the way you express them, either in terms of expressed hostility, or in terms of confusion/lack of clarity.
e.g. you’ve still not explained the meaning of the ‘should’ in “He made his decision—so he should live with it.” .
But frankly, I’d wager it’s just the constant aura of hostility you seem to exude towards the rest of us.
My perception was that the “retraction” was an attempt to reverse the effect of the original author’s note. This is obviously not actually possible. While EY probably knows this, I think he is overestimating the actual benefit of the retraction (and of the related decision to suppress discussion derived from that information in these threads).
The people the retraction is most likely to [arguably] benefit are people who started reading after it was removed and people who were reading it at the time but were inattentive to the author’s note and any discussion that happened in the intervening period. My assumption is that there are not actually very many people fitting that description participating in these threads. This is weighed against by the cost of imposing rot13 on all discussion derived from that information and arbitrary downvote penalties on people who are unaware of the rule (as well as acting as the spark that sets off arguments like this).
I also think that it’s possible that HPMOR discussion would be better served by a conventional forum rather than the reddit engine, as some others have mentioned, and that this could mitigate the spoiler problem, but that’s mostly unrelated.
So mostly you object to being told to go out of your way while discussing something you enjoy so that others can enjoy it the way the person who made the thing your discussing intended?
May I put those words in your mouth or should I wait for the foot to come out?
I’m not certain of what you’re asking, here, but I just found out that you can delete a post if no one has responded to it yet. So in case that’s what you were after, there’s that.
He said “responding to unmarked edit” as though there was something wrong with failing to mark a simple addition made 10 seconds after the original post. I was confused, since it was not my experience that anyone considered this a problem anywhere.
Oh. I edit mine when I make a mistake that makes them mean something else. Or when someone prompts me to.
But if you’re adding information then it’s useful to you to mark that you added something. That way the people that already pounced on your post notice there’s something new there while they’re pounding Refresh to see if you’ve responded to them.
The text was changed; a short scene at the end was deleted for being too obvious.
The scene still means exactly what it did, it’s just that a lot of people came away from that scene without figuring out the thing that was stated in the (now deleted) Author’s Note, and as I understand it they expressed annoyance at having it thrown in their faces like that.
The Author’s Note you refer to has since been retracted. You’re ruining the twist for the people who haven’t figured it out yet. As are all those other people, yes.
Am I the only one who thinks this is all silly? The cat it out of the bag, good luck pushing it back in. On the Internet, too.
I think this particular spoiler has crossed the Rosebud Line, and there’s no getting it back. If you read this forum, or for that matter if you’re like 2⁄3 of the English-speaking world and have read Philosopher’s Stone, you know perfectly well who Quirinus Quirrell actually is. Getting fussy about it being a spoiler is ridiculous.
You should probably cipher a bit of that. This part, specifically:
I mean, unless you intend specifically to not follow a rule while criticizing the rule. You might notice that seems to attract disapproval.
My list of examples of people saying that (as violations of the rule) was specifically rejected, since none of them (just as Alsadius’s post) mentioned [rot13]gung Ryvrmre unq fnvq vg.[/rot13]. You can’t decide “rot13 has to be contagious to the information itself” here, and the opposite when denying that the rule is inconsistently enforced.
Everyone who has defended the policy on the grounds that it only means you can’t say [what I rot13′d above] should vote his post back up.
EDIT changed tone
It may be difficult to take an apology like this at face value when you could just go back and edit the tone to something you wouldn’t have to apologize for. You either put it in before you clicked ‘Comment’ the first time or you hit Edit to put it in.
Also, he said, “you know perfectly well.” This communicates that the conclusion you would draw is the correct one. And that is spoilage.
The rule is that it’s only spoilage if you say both things in cleartext in the same post. Yes, I agree, it’s a stupid rule, but it is the rule, and I was angry because that argument was used specifically against my claim that it’s inconsistently enforced.
“edit the tone to something you wouldn’t have to apologize for.” I could only do so honestly if this did not make me angry. EDIT—done. I’m still a bit angry about it though...
I wouldn’t normally see that as worse than doing something while apologizing for it. This isn’t Brockian Ultra Cricket.
No, it isn’t. I can say “You know perfectly well that the true source of magic is an advanced artificial intelligence” and that’s not a spoiler.
Nonetheless, in context it was rude.
Not quite the same as there isn’t potential for spoilage there.
If I said, “If you’re like 2⁄3 of the fans here and you’ve followed up on links to Methods conversations elsewhere, then you know perfectly well that gur nhgube gbyq n ohapu bs crbcyr ng n jrqqvat gung uvf zntvp flfgrz jnf qrgrezvarq ol cybg pbafgenvarq ol pbzcngvovyvgl jvgu jung ur nyernql rfgnoyvfurq.” sans cipher then that would be spoilage.
No, that’s a bad example. I’m retracting.
Clearly I was referring to the fan theory that QQ is Voldemort, or the fact that QQ is Voldemort in canon, not the fact that Eliezer said that DD vf Ibyqrzbeg(and if you need to rot13 to know what I’m saying there, kill yourself now).
For what it’s worth, I hadn’t read the Rowling books when I first read MoR, and finding out who Quirrell was was actually somewhat of a shock. I’m the target audience for this rule, so far as any such exists, and I think it’s pretty dumb. I wouldn’t just slap it on as a chapter title if I was the editor, but if you’re reading this forum thread, certain things are assumed of you.
Not so, good sir. Do you call me a liar? I would challenge you on the field of honor, had I any.
Is anyone logging anecdotes? We’ve got one here!
Okay. That’s cool. So how do you feel about following politely asked and reasonable requests that cost you only quick trip to rot13.com and are enthusiastically enforced by at least a handful of trigger-happy registrants of karmic disapproval?
If said under-thumbers weren’t in play, would you obey the request of the author?
What’s your price?
The spoiler is “Eliezer said X”, not “X”. This has been mentioned, repeatedly, by other users in this thread.
Seriously? I’m ruining the twist?!! I’M RUINING THE TWIST?!!!?! The author’s notes on this subject were up the last time I checked, and I didn’t have any reason to think Eliezer would change that. If you check any other thread on this topic, you’ll find dozens of people talking about Quirrelmort. How many of those are you going to downvote? There’s no way anyone can hope to follow the conversation here without that assumption. One of the replies to my comment says how both Voldemort and Quirrell are characters of Tom Riddle. And its UPVOTED!!! I had no reason whatsoever to think I was spoiling anything for anyone and I think the response to my comment is totally unfair.
You’ve been told the spoiler policy. You’ve been asked to obey it. Expect to be downvoted if you don’t obey the rules of the thread. Capital letters and multiple exclamation marks aren’t an argument.
I don’t like people who deliberately join a forum whose rules they don’t have any willingness to follow, no matter how “unfair” they seem to them.
The trouble was that you attributed the information to Eliezer, and said that it had been made explicitly clear. Commonly held speculation is one thing, insider information from the author is quite another.
If your comment was (non-rot13′d):
then it could have been read as your own speculation, and that would have been absolutely fine.
Seriously. If this was another forum, you’d have been outright banned by now for failing to follow the stated policy, even after repeated warnings. Please go elsewhere or follow the rules.
Please be aware that not everyone wants you to leave. Whether you conform on not, I hope you stay.
This is fantastic and I look forward to more of the same.
EDIT: downvote me back if it helps. I doubt the regulars will defend this post with their upvotes.
FURTHER EDIT: okay, apparently I was wrong. After a reasonable dip, the comment is headed back up, despite my “No, no. Keep fighting.” encouragement.
Curious: what are you referring to by this?
The bickering.
You, specifically, do it so much. Surely you do it because you enjoy it?
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Not so much.
Aw. That’s like learning that the reason Mulder and Scully have such great chemistry is that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson can’t stand each other.
That… that isn’t true, is it?
I have systematically upvoted the last two pages of your comments. After 14 pages of “Quirrelmort” and personal declarations from the author anyone—including Eliezer—who wants to pretend that the speculative kinship is not already a sufficiently thoroughly disseminated meme is being silly.
The accusations that pleeppleep is “not being fair to the spirit of the fanfiction” that I see in the children comments frankly disgust me. Is the “spirit of the fanfiction” playing “Simon Says” or is said spirit just inconsistent and controlling?
It is enough to acknowledge that “Quirrelmort” is no longer the Word of God.
Would you change your mind if I dug up links to the two times in the last two weeks that someone on the LW discussion page asked why everyone was so certain that Q=V, clearly displaying that they didn’t know the spoiler?
And just to reiterate, since pleeppleep is determinedly ignoring this fact despite being repeatedly made aware of it, the spoiler isn’t “X” but “Eliezer said X”.
Out of interest, and as an experimental test of the point I made earlier, what sort of responses did those comments receive?
Here’s one.
My theory was correct: the policy did not prevent that user from being told the spoiler. You may say this is because it was violated, as of course it was, but what was the correct response?
“We can’t tell you due to the spoiler policy”? “Ryvrmre fnvq fb va na rneyvre nhgube’f abgr gung jnf ergenpgrq”? Would either of those, or indeed any response, have resulted in that user not finding out about it?
If someone says something similar in the next thread, what would you have me do?
The same thing I did then: inform them that it is a spoiler, and give them the option to find out.
But they already know that everyone believes Q=V. The spoiler is the fact that there is a spoiler.
What I want to know is, why are you arguing about this with everyone except the person whose opinion actually matters? Just PM Eliezer and have done.
I was under the impression this was a community rule. People were certainly talking as if they believed in the logical basis for having the policy in order to prevent people from getting spoiled, rather than just doing what he says.
If Eliezer unretracted the Author’s Note I highly doubt anyone would argue to keep the policy.
No. That is, this does not provide information that surprises me and requires updating—it’s 14*500 comments worth of common knowledge, not something that is completely universal.
The point is—this kind of reality editing is tacky and I’m never going to support vilifying pleep or anyone else for not getting behind it. If you go as far as to outright patronize people for not understanding something then it is just too late to pretend it is a secret.
See, I could’ve sworn I said
Should I change that “pleeppleep” to “wedrifid”?
thank you so much! I’ve actually gotten back almost all my karma now, an I’m really sorry if you’ve lost any points defending me.
Don’t worry those particular points went into battle never expecting to return. Sometimes you need to make them use force!
In this case I could never expect to change majority will but I could change your role from that of lone dissenter who should know better all along to a loser in a controversial policy change. Being a loser is a better role than being weird.