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.
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’).