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.
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.