Your decision seems very obviously wrong to me. I don’t want to overrule you directly without further conversation, but I don’t understand at all why you unbanned the post. There’s a forum for ridiculously terribly written fanfiction, and it’s fanfiction.net which is famous for taking everything. The post is of quality less than zero. Why should it be here?
Because you underestimate how off-putting it is to people when things are deleted with no clear accountability or visibility. It’s way worse than having an off-topic lousy post sitting on the page for a few days. It is like a hundred times worse.
You have to provide transparency (e.g. a “see deleted” section or a list of moderator actions) or rationale (e.g. Metafilter’s deletion reasons and MetaTalk) or people get paranoid that there is weird, self-interested censorship and that the moderators aren’t acting in the interests of the community. This is an Ancient Internet Feeling.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to write things expressing opinions like this as if you’re presenting the majority view, even when you think it is. I for one completely disagree with the first paragraph, and would only like transparency wrt deletions if it was unobtrusive.
I agree that it’s better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don’t like it when moderators do surprising things. In particular, the post didn’t have more serious pathologies sometimes present in other posts (that are usually still not banned), such as hosting a bad prolific discussion or getting downvoted to minus 20.
(If I were to ban posts on the grounds that I consider them bad for LW, I would ban maybe a quarter of Discussion posts. I don’t have authority to do that, and don’t expect good consequences unless the procedure is accepted by the community on some level. This doesn’t seem likely or even desirable in the sense that there are better alternative procedures such as weighted votes, which would have less blind spots.)
For what it’s worth I would love if LessWrong stuck to only decision theory, microeconomics, cognitive science, &c; I’d lurk and do what I could to maintain the relatively high standards of quality that LessWrong used to have. But look at how User:badger’s excellent sequence on mechanism design went basically ignored compared to all the stupid shit that gets upvoted. I posted what I did because LessWrong has mostly been a signaling and self-help cesspit for years now and I thought my post would quietly attract a few readers who enjoyed it while those who didn’t would just downvote and move on. Pissing in a swimming pool is immoral, but I’m pissing in an ocean here.
For what it’s worth I would love if LessWrong stuck to only decision theory, microeconomics, cognitive science, …
So, now that you know the reason why your post was removed, do you agree with the decision? It seems that you’re generally in favor of removing “stupid shit that gets upvoted”. (And your post wouldn’t even have been needed to be removed if you had hosted it at fanfiction.net and posted the link in an open thread.)
This isn’t the should-world. LessWrong is irrevocably a cesspit. The stupid shit will continue to flow. So no, I do not agree with the decision, unless someone like Vladimir_Nesov gets to ban all the stupid shit, which will never happen. Arbitrarily banning my stupid shit in particular just means Eliezer making a fool of himself. There is no sympathetic magic to it that will change the equilibrium.
shrug. At this point MIRI is already doing workshops with relatively well-known mathematicians so I don’t think anyone who is a candidate to seriously help is going to be turned off by the cultish forum moderation. And it would only be for a month anyway, unless it resulted in a drastic improvement in quality of posts
I suspect Nesov in particular would put forth and uphold relatively fair-minded, non-ideological, and straightforward rules for deletion, and so Phyg points would be held to an acceptable level. But Nesov is somewhat singular in that regard. If Eliezer or other similarly ideological moderators tried to ride Nesov’s coattails then Phyg points would naturally shoot through the roof.
I’d be interested to see what would happen if that quarter of banned posts went into a Trash section. Would it be boring stuff barely distinguishable from Markoff chains? Probably so, by my standards. Would it end up generating some weird and lively stuff? Probably also true, but I’d be letting other people curate the Trash section.
Or possibly, considering how bad it might get, LW-Trash could be on reddit.
If I were to ban posts on the grounds that I consider them bad for LW, I would ban maybe a quarter of Discussion posts.
I’m not sure it would be a bad idea if you started banning posts on this level of super-obvious crap. I’m also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I’m a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.
I agree that it’s better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don’t like it when moderators do surprizing things.
It is not clear to me that this should be an important consideration in restraining moderation. If some people, including some good posters, who don’t like “surprising moderation” leave and what’s left gets more surprisingly moderated because moderators are less worried about consistency, then it’s not clear to me that this is net worse. There’s a startup cost to more vigorous and less consistent moderation, I think it’s already mostly been paid, and then once that cost is paid, maybe things decline more slowly. Maybe they don’t. It does not feel to me like leaving absolute obvious crap on Discussion because I’m worried about someone reacting poorly to a surprising moderation, is really much of a net improvement to the expected future.
I think your personal sense of offense is over-writing your judgement of how actually horrible will’s post is. It was poorly written but contained a lot of good fragments of criticism, to the point where I couldn’t decide how to vote on it. Your reiteration of how much of an obvious pile of crap it was isn’t helping you out here either.
“Harry James Potter-Yudkowsky was half Potter, half Yudkowsky. Harry just didn’t fit in. It wasn’t that he lacked humanity. It was just that no one else knew (P)Many_Worlds, (P)singularity, or (P)their_special_insight_into_the_true_beautiful_Bayesian_fractally_recursive_nature_of_reality. ”
is a nigh perfect send-up, combining over-harsh but accurate criticism of HJPEV with a meta-story dig at the author’s motivations.
I’m also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I’m a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.
This was a concrete estimate made by looking at the most recent 35 posts, with quality threshold that happens to be close to how I perceive Will’s post. (It doesn’t appear to me exceptionally horrible, and I expect there are other posts that appear exceptionally horrible to me, but not to you. So if I only deleted the posts that seem to me exceptionally horrible, Will’s post in particular wouldn’t be deleted.)
I agree that it’s better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don’t like it when moderators do surprising things.
It is not clear to me that this should be an important consideration in restraining moderation.
To clarify, the “surprising things” I consider dangerous are decisions that ignore policy, not decisions that follow a policy that’s unusual. With a policy of unrestrained moderation, individual acts of moderation won’t be as surprising in the sense I intended, for example they won’t provoke big discussions focused on them, especially if those too are against the rules.
As a constructive suggestion, I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000, or something along those lines (maybe in some form that doesn’t have as much impact on poster’s Karma, to minimize trauma). This at least would require multiple people to agree that something is horrible for it to be effectively removed.
Or an x10 downvote hammer granted by admins to community members they know personally and reasonably well, regardless of karma—an automatic karma threshold rewards volume of commenting, rather than average sanity of comments.
Unfortunately, this suggestion, like so many other good ideas, requires programming resources.
Unfortunately, this suggestion, like so many other good ideas, requires programming resources.
It doesn’t in a strict sense, establishing a protocol for this decisions to be enacted in comments is sufficient. Given a wiki page that describes the protocol and lists people authorized to vote, any of them can create a top-level comment with words “Vote to hide”, link to the wiki page, and possibly an argument. Others can reply to the comment to second/third the suggestion. A rule such as ((Post Karma - (number of votes to hide) * 10) < −20, and Post Karma is less than 10) then decides whether a moderator bans the post. The whole voting thing can even be made invisible to non-moderators, if all comments in it are hidden right after being posted.
I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000
I currently have 8,448 karma. I could reach 10,000 in a few weeks if I so desired. I don’t imagine many here would want me to have a downvote hammer. Still, this general category of solutions is good.
Alternatively, let people choose to make their votes public, then provide a way for people to provide an algorithm based on that data to filter/mark posts.
Note that I think the relevant preference controls whether that page is public, so you can’t check whether you enabled it just by looking at your own; you need to look in a logged-out browser.
You are so fascinating. I can’t tell if you simply fail to understand simple ideas out of some insanely strong self-deceptive defensiveness, or if you’re just consciously choosing to be a pathetic piece of shit. Given your reasoning the solution is simple. Ban me, idiot.
The concern has frequently been voiced on LW that rationality needs obvious wins in order to demonstrate its utility. If LW can’t even get moderation right...
One of the many reasons I left academic philosophy was that I saw how academic philosophy was run. No one liked it, and it seemed that very few people liked how colleges in general were run, but still I saw nothing being done about it. If people who basically get paid to think can’t even sort out the internal affairs of their own field, there’s no reason to assume they’re particularly good at thinking. If some of the most prominent practitioners of rationality can’t even come up with a sane moderation policy for a rationality site, either their brand of rationality is flawed or they aren’t applying it correctly.
You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “why should it be here?”; it’s “should it be deleted?”. It’s not necessarily the case that every post you think ought not to be here should be deleted. You may not always be right—and the positive karma of the original post suggests that you weren’t generally agreed with in this case—but even if you are, unannounced, unexplained arbitrary rule is decidedly suboptimal. The indirect consequences of moderating actions must be considered.
Vladimir_Nesov is right: people don’t like it when moderators do surprising things. I’ve seen this happen before: on a forum I’m on, the admin demodded one of the moderators for questioning some of his actions, and then banned four of the regulars because he decided he didn’t like them. A lot of people left after that.
Arbitrary, muddled personal rule without concerns of the indirect consequences of actions seems to be the default mode of human organization. That doesn’t mean it’s at all justified. Rationalists should be able to do better than Hastings Banda.
This is the second time this week that an administrative action has been taken that was obviously not thought through. Either LW’s brand of rationality is flawed or—more likely—LW’s moderators aren’t applying it well enough.
There are sites where the moderation isn’t bad enough for me to notice it, sure. SSC and Xenosystems come to mind.
The only non-blog sites I pay attention to anymore are this and a few forums, and the only forum that’s big enough to need moderation is the one where the admin is incompetent.
The most common strategy I’ve seen besides the Hastings Banda one is the one where moderator action is only taken to enforce near-unanimous user opinion—though often this isn’t an explicit policy, but instead an artifact of most of the old regulars being moderators. If the mods are active enough with this strategy, this brings protection against the eternal September, but with the potential cost of exclusivity. Another failure mode I’ve seen is conflict between moderators, but I’ve only seen this happen once, and it was in a case where someone who really shouldn’t have been a moderator was made one: he rarely posted, but had developed a relevant site and was friends with the admin, so he was made another admin—whereas the moderators were everyone who had over 50 posts a few months after the forum had started, and the moderator position was initially created only to deal with spambots.
to be fair, bounded rationality is very reasonable, since rationality takes mental effort bothering to apply it to contexts that don’t really matter to you is probably not worth it. I doubt Eliezer gives much of a shit about how Lesswrong.com is going these days, and his ban was almost certainly because that post annoyed him (as it did me).
Moderation is microgovernment. If a politician doesn’t care about governing anymore, he should resign; if the emperor doesn’t care about governing anymore, he should appoint regents. Neither should run around passing laws if they don’t take the problem of governing seriously.
I miss when he cared. People give Yudkowsky a lot of flak these days, which may or may not be warranted, but when he was on form, he really produced a lot of engagingly written material. I worry that there is a feedback loop between people giving him a hard time because he hasn’t produced anything to excite us recently and him not wanting to write because he only ever gets a hard time.
I think he’s also just busy. Between a rabid fanbase clamoring for new HPMoR chapters and his actual MIRI work, I imagine that dicking around on LW has pretty diminished marginal returns for him (especially now that the core Sequences stuff is all written).
Given the way the situation with Kaj banning Eugine Nier played out with you staying completely silent and not saying anything do you think that’s the right time to delete stuff silently in the background? To the extend that calls for moderator attention on the issue of mass downvoting get ignored for month it feels very iffy to do use power to delete criticism.
Maybe not everybody agrees that a ban was reasonable, but a unified front is the higher value, so rather than speak against a heavy handed response silence is just good etiquette.
The silence started even before the ban was made. Kaj asked for community input and at that point Eliezer could have simply said: “Kaj, I trust you to do what’s right on the issue.” That would have made Kaj’s job easier. Especially given what Kaj wrote on facebook over his own emotional state, that would have been a nice thing to do.
I don’t think silence means that there’s a unified front. To the extend that a unified front is high value, Eliezer could have said: “Hey, I like it that Kaj has taken action on this issue.”
Not counting months of silence while people whined about mass downvoting in open threads.
I like it that Kaj took action on this issue. The trouble was that there was nothing obvious for me to do that didn’t require programmer actions; I didn’t know how to reverse Nier’s downvotes or prevent him from downvoting further. I have not been putting heavy attention into moderating LW and I don’t personally know how to use the more complicated moderation tools.
I do however know how to click “Ban” when Will Newsome tests the limits of LW’s tolerance for crap, and it’s upvoted to 7 points and I don’t trust that Newsome isn’t using sockpuppets to upvote.
I didn’t know how to reverse Nier’s downvotes or prevent him from downvoting further.
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
Because if it is, the mechanism to stop further downvoting, stop further posting, and reverse unwanted downvotes is to
1) have administrator log on as Nier
2) administrator then changes password of account to something Nier doesn’t know
3) administrator then goes to list of comments of mass-downvote victims and undownvotes all the comments
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
I didn’t think it was possible to suggest something that I would think was “too much power for admins”, but congratulations, that strikes me as too much power for admins.
I didn’t think it was possible to suggest something that I would think was “too much power for admins”, but congratulations, that strikes me as too much power for admins.
Well it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a question.
I have had accounts on many systems (and still do) where if I forget my password, sysadmins reset my password. Since sysadmins can reset my password, they could if they wanted to then log on as me, set my password to something I didn’t know and then own my account.
Whether or not this is too much power for them is besides the point that this is how it works on systems that I use. In the naivete of my limited experience, I asked if it worked that way here. The closest to an answer to my question I have gotten was on another thread where I thought the answer I got was “yes its possible.”
All the other responses I’ve gotten to my question were to be voted down or congratulated for suggesting something negative as if asking a question was somehow a suggestion.
Afaik, the usual state of affairs is that admins can set a new password, but they can’t view the current password, so they couldn’t change it back and you would know that your password was changed.
so they couldn’t change it back and you would know that your password was changed.
Which of course in the case that you are trying to shut down account access for someone and to reverse downvotes for that someone without deleting their account, is absolutely perfect.
Is it not possible for an administrator to reset a user’s password? Would that be insane? If not, what happens when somebody forgets their password, is the account just dead in the water?
Because if it is possible for an administrator to reset a password, then it is possible for an administrator to log on to a particular account.
SO we can state that we do not have the technology to stop a banned user from downvoting posts, and we don’t have the technology to reverse banned downvotes.
But we do actually have the technology, it is just considered a “severe breach of privacy” to employ it?
And so we have to pretend that accomplishing the identical result by some hacky code into the database to get the same effect on the database is any more or less a breach of privacy, even though it is (potentially) bit-wise identical to just using the simple technology of logging on as the user who’s account needsd adjusting, and changing the banned user’s password so he can’t use the account he is banned from?
Is this some wierd signalling thing, where the appearance that something is really something else is more important than the actuality of it?
Does it seem irrational to anyone else here to say
“We don’t know how to prevent this person from using his account to post new downvotes and we don’t know how to reverse the downvotes already posted”
when the actual situation is
“We could stop this account from posting new downvotes with 5 minutes of admin-effort and we could reverse the effects of the mass-downvoting with about an hour of admin-effort without having to write a line of new code, but we won’t.”
This is somewhat tangential, but neatly links the two recent dramas: I was actually one of the first people subjected to campaigns of mass downvoting, having had hundreds of my comments downvoted in bunches on multiple occasions. Although there are exceptions, from what I’ve seen the well-intentioned extremists who unscrupulously abuse the karma system have generally done so in defense of your well-kept garden.
I think someone in a position of power ought to be particularly wary of appearing to censor things which are (apparently) critical of themselves. If something is truly terrible it will get heavily downvoted.
That’s not the question to ask when deleting posts. The question to ask when deleting posts is whether there’s a reason to delete and hopefully whether that reason is based in rules that can be understood.
The karma system exists for punishing low quality content.
Your decision seems very obviously wrong to me. I don’t want to overrule you directly without further conversation, but I don’t understand at all why you unbanned the post. There’s a forum for ridiculously terribly written fanfiction, and it’s fanfiction.net which is famous for taking everything. The post is of quality less than zero. Why should it be here?
Because you underestimate how off-putting it is to people when things are deleted with no clear accountability or visibility. It’s way worse than having an off-topic lousy post sitting on the page for a few days. It is like a hundred times worse.
You have to provide transparency (e.g. a “see deleted” section or a list of moderator actions) or rationale (e.g. Metafilter’s deletion reasons and MetaTalk) or people get paranoid that there is weird, self-interested censorship and that the moderators aren’t acting in the interests of the community. This is an Ancient Internet Feeling.
It predates the internet by hundreds of years, FWIW
I don’t think it’s a good idea to write things expressing opinions like this as if you’re presenting the majority view, even when you think it is. I for one completely disagree with the first paragraph, and would only like transparency wrt deletions if it was unobtrusive.
If it’s not actually the majority view then people will downvote it or at least upvote it less. I don’t think you understand how karma systems work.
I agree that it’s better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don’t like it when moderators do surprising things. In particular, the post didn’t have more serious pathologies sometimes present in other posts (that are usually still not banned), such as hosting a bad prolific discussion or getting downvoted to minus 20.
(If I were to ban posts on the grounds that I consider them bad for LW, I would ban maybe a quarter of Discussion posts. I don’t have authority to do that, and don’t expect good consequences unless the procedure is accepted by the community on some level. This doesn’t seem likely or even desirable in the sense that there are better alternative procedures such as weighted votes, which would have less blind spots.)
For what it’s worth I would love if LessWrong stuck to only decision theory, microeconomics, cognitive science, &c; I’d lurk and do what I could to maintain the relatively high standards of quality that LessWrong used to have. But look at how User:badger’s excellent sequence on mechanism design went basically ignored compared to all the stupid shit that gets upvoted. I posted what I did because LessWrong has mostly been a signaling and self-help cesspit for years now and I thought my post would quietly attract a few readers who enjoyed it while those who didn’t would just downvote and move on. Pissing in a swimming pool is immoral, but I’m pissing in an ocean here.
So, now that you know the reason why your post was removed, do you agree with the decision? It seems that you’re generally in favor of removing “stupid shit that gets upvoted”. (And your post wouldn’t even have been needed to be removed if you had hosted it at fanfiction.net and posted the link in an open thread.)
This isn’t the should-world. LessWrong is irrevocably a cesspit. The stupid shit will continue to flow. So no, I do not agree with the decision, unless someone like Vladimir_Nesov gets to ban all the stupid shit, which will never happen. Arbitrarily banning my stupid shit in particular just means Eliezer making a fool of himself. There is no sympathetic magic to it that will change the equilibrium.
I would be interested in a month-long experiment to see how the quality of Discussion changes with you banning whatever you felt like.
Seems a good test to reactivate LW dynamics.
Widespread and capricious banning of posts earns a million Phyg points.
shrug. At this point MIRI is already doing workshops with relatively well-known mathematicians so I don’t think anyone who is a candidate to seriously help is going to be turned off by the cultish forum moderation. And it would only be for a month anyway, unless it resulted in a drastic improvement in quality of posts
I suspect Nesov in particular would put forth and uphold relatively fair-minded, non-ideological, and straightforward rules for deletion, and so Phyg points would be held to an acceptable level. But Nesov is somewhat singular in that regard. If Eliezer or other similarly ideological moderators tried to ride Nesov’s coattails then Phyg points would naturally shoot through the roof.
I vote Nesov for LessWrong Dictator.
I’d be interested to see what would happen if that quarter of banned posts went into a Trash section. Would it be boring stuff barely distinguishable from Markoff chains? Probably so, by my standards. Would it end up generating some weird and lively stuff? Probably also true, but I’d be letting other people curate the Trash section.
Or possibly, considering how bad it might get, LW-Trash could be on reddit.
I’m not sure it would be a bad idea if you started banning posts on this level of super-obvious crap. I’m also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I’m a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.
It is not clear to me that this should be an important consideration in restraining moderation. If some people, including some good posters, who don’t like “surprising moderation” leave and what’s left gets more surprisingly moderated because moderators are less worried about consistency, then it’s not clear to me that this is net worse. There’s a startup cost to more vigorous and less consistent moderation, I think it’s already mostly been paid, and then once that cost is paid, maybe things decline more slowly. Maybe they don’t. It does not feel to me like leaving absolute obvious crap on Discussion because I’m worried about someone reacting poorly to a surprising moderation, is really much of a net improvement to the expected future.
I think your personal sense of offense is over-writing your judgement of how actually horrible will’s post is. It was poorly written but contained a lot of good fragments of criticism, to the point where I couldn’t decide how to vote on it. Your reiteration of how much of an obvious pile of crap it was isn’t helping you out here either.
Name one.
“Harry James Potter-Yudkowsky was half Potter, half Yudkowsky. Harry just didn’t fit in. It wasn’t that he lacked humanity. It was just that no one else knew (P)Many_Worlds, (P)singularity, or (P)their_special_insight_into_the_true_beautiful_Bayesian_fractally_recursive_nature_of_reality. ”
is a nigh perfect send-up, combining over-harsh but accurate criticism of HJPEV with a meta-story dig at the author’s motivations.
This was a concrete estimate made by looking at the most recent 35 posts, with quality threshold that happens to be close to how I perceive Will’s post. (It doesn’t appear to me exceptionally horrible, and I expect there are other posts that appear exceptionally horrible to me, but not to you. So if I only deleted the posts that seem to me exceptionally horrible, Will’s post in particular wouldn’t be deleted.)
To clarify, the “surprising things” I consider dangerous are decisions that ignore policy, not decisions that follow a policy that’s unusual. With a policy of unrestrained moderation, individual acts of moderation won’t be as surprising in the sense I intended, for example they won’t provoke big discussions focused on them, especially if those too are against the rules.
As a constructive suggestion, I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000, or something along those lines (maybe in some form that doesn’t have as much impact on poster’s Karma, to minimize trauma). This at least would require multiple people to agree that something is horrible for it to be effectively removed.
Or an x10 downvote hammer granted by admins to community members they know personally and reasonably well, regardless of karma—an automatic karma threshold rewards volume of commenting, rather than average sanity of comments.
Unfortunately, this suggestion, like so many other good ideas, requires programming resources.
It doesn’t in a strict sense, establishing a protocol for this decisions to be enacted in comments is sufficient. Given a wiki page that describes the protocol and lists people authorized to vote, any of them can create a top-level comment with words “Vote to hide”, link to the wiki page, and possibly an argument. Others can reply to the comment to second/third the suggestion. A rule such as ((Post Karma - (number of votes to hide) * 10) < −20, and Post Karma is less than 10) then decides whether a moderator bans the post. The whole voting thing can even be made invisible to non-moderators, if all comments in it are hidden right after being posted.
I don’t think anyone would use a system that cumbersome in real life.
I currently have 8,448 karma. I could reach 10,000 in a few weeks if I so desired. I don’t imagine many here would want me to have a downvote hammer. Still, this general category of solutions is good.
Part of me wants to just glimpse that world for a little while.
Alternatively, let people choose to make their votes public, then provide a way for people to provide an algorithm based on that data to filter/mark posts.
Already supported; for example: http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/liked/ and http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/disliked/ (there’s even RSS feeds for those pages! like http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/liked/.rss Nothing stops one from grabbing RSS feeds and doing any processing they please on them.) That, over the past 5 or so years LW has had this feature, no one has noticed or made use of it...
Note that I think the relevant preference controls whether that page is public, so you can’t check whether you enabled it just by looking at your own; you need to look in a logged-out browser.
You are so fascinating. I can’t tell if you simply fail to understand simple ideas out of some insanely strong self-deceptive defensiveness, or if you’re just consciously choosing to be a pathetic piece of shit. Given your reasoning the solution is simple. Ban me, idiot.
The concern has frequently been voiced on LW that rationality needs obvious wins in order to demonstrate its utility. If LW can’t even get moderation right...
One of the many reasons I left academic philosophy was that I saw how academic philosophy was run. No one liked it, and it seemed that very few people liked how colleges in general were run, but still I saw nothing being done about it. If people who basically get paid to think can’t even sort out the internal affairs of their own field, there’s no reason to assume they’re particularly good at thinking. If some of the most prominent practitioners of rationality can’t even come up with a sane moderation policy for a rationality site, either their brand of rationality is flawed or they aren’t applying it correctly.
You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “why should it be here?”; it’s “should it be deleted?”. It’s not necessarily the case that every post you think ought not to be here should be deleted. You may not always be right—and the positive karma of the original post suggests that you weren’t generally agreed with in this case—but even if you are, unannounced, unexplained arbitrary rule is decidedly suboptimal. The indirect consequences of moderating actions must be considered.
Vladimir_Nesov is right: people don’t like it when moderators do surprising things. I’ve seen this happen before: on a forum I’m on, the admin demodded one of the moderators for questioning some of his actions, and then banned four of the regulars because he decided he didn’t like them. A lot of people left after that.
Arbitrary, muddled personal rule without concerns of the indirect consequences of actions seems to be the default mode of human organization. That doesn’t mean it’s at all justified. Rationalists should be able to do better than Hastings Banda.
This is the second time this week that an administrative action has been taken that was obviously not thought through. Either LW’s brand of rationality is flawed or—more likely—LW’s moderators aren’t applying it well enough.
What does getting moderation right look like? Are there sites you recommend as well-moderated?
There are sites where the moderation isn’t bad enough for me to notice it, sure. SSC and Xenosystems come to mind.
The only non-blog sites I pay attention to anymore are this and a few forums, and the only forum that’s big enough to need moderation is the one where the admin is incompetent.
The most common strategy I’ve seen besides the Hastings Banda one is the one where moderator action is only taken to enforce near-unanimous user opinion—though often this isn’t an explicit policy, but instead an artifact of most of the old regulars being moderators. If the mods are active enough with this strategy, this brings protection against the eternal September, but with the potential cost of exclusivity. Another failure mode I’ve seen is conflict between moderators, but I’ve only seen this happen once, and it was in a case where someone who really shouldn’t have been a moderator was made one: he rarely posted, but had developed a relevant site and was friends with the admin, so he was made another admin—whereas the moderators were everyone who had over 50 posts a few months after the forum had started, and the moderator position was initially created only to deal with spambots.
to be fair, bounded rationality is very reasonable, since rationality takes mental effort bothering to apply it to contexts that don’t really matter to you is probably not worth it. I doubt Eliezer gives much of a shit about how Lesswrong.com is going these days, and his ban was almost certainly because that post annoyed him (as it did me).
Moderation is microgovernment. If a politician doesn’t care about governing anymore, he should resign; if the emperor doesn’t care about governing anymore, he should appoint regents. Neither should run around passing laws if they don’t take the problem of governing seriously.
I miss when he cared. People give Yudkowsky a lot of flak these days, which may or may not be warranted, but when he was on form, he really produced a lot of engagingly written material. I worry that there is a feedback loop between people giving him a hard time because he hasn’t produced anything to excite us recently and him not wanting to write because he only ever gets a hard time.
I think he’s also just busy. Between a rabid fanbase clamoring for new HPMoR chapters and his actual MIRI work, I imagine that dicking around on LW has pretty diminished marginal returns for him (especially now that the core Sequences stuff is all written).
Given the way the situation with Kaj banning Eugine Nier played out with you staying completely silent and not saying anything do you think that’s the right time to delete stuff silently in the background? To the extend that calls for moderator attention on the issue of mass downvoting get ignored for month it feels very iffy to do use power to delete criticism.
Maybe not everybody agrees that a ban was reasonable, but a unified front is the higher value, so rather than speak against a heavy handed response silence is just good etiquette.
The silence started even before the ban was made. Kaj asked for community input and at that point Eliezer could have simply said: “Kaj, I trust you to do what’s right on the issue.” That would have made Kaj’s job easier. Especially given what Kaj wrote on facebook over his own emotional state, that would have been a nice thing to do.
I don’t think silence means that there’s a unified front. To the extend that a unified front is high value, Eliezer could have said: “Hey, I like it that Kaj has taken action on this issue.”
Not counting months of silence while people whined about mass downvoting in open threads.
I like it that Kaj took action on this issue. The trouble was that there was nothing obvious for me to do that didn’t require programmer actions; I didn’t know how to reverse Nier’s downvotes or prevent him from downvoting further. I have not been putting heavy attention into moderating LW and I don’t personally know how to use the more complicated moderation tools.
I do however know how to click “Ban” when Will Newsome tests the limits of LW’s tolerance for crap, and it’s upvoted to 7 points and I don’t trust that Newsome isn’t using sockpuppets to upvote.
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
Because if it is, the mechanism to stop further downvoting, stop further posting, and reverse unwanted downvotes is to
1) have administrator log on as Nier 2) administrator then changes password of account to something Nier doesn’t know 3) administrator then goes to list of comments of mass-downvote victims and undownvotes all the comments
I didn’t think it was possible to suggest something that I would think was “too much power for admins”, but congratulations, that strikes me as too much power for admins.
Well it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a question.
I have had accounts on many systems (and still do) where if I forget my password, sysadmins reset my password. Since sysadmins can reset my password, they could if they wanted to then log on as me, set my password to something I didn’t know and then own my account.
Whether or not this is too much power for them is besides the point that this is how it works on systems that I use. In the naivete of my limited experience, I asked if it worked that way here. The closest to an answer to my question I have gotten was on another thread where I thought the answer I got was “yes its possible.”
All the other responses I’ve gotten to my question were to be voted down or congratulated for suggesting something negative as if asking a question was somehow a suggestion.
Afaik, the usual state of affairs is that admins can set a new password, but they can’t view the current password, so they couldn’t change it back and you would know that your password was changed.
Which of course in the case that you are trying to shut down account access for someone and to reverse downvotes for that someone without deleting their account, is absolutely perfect.
That would be insane.
Is it not possible for an administrator to reset a user’s password? Would that be insane? If not, what happens when somebody forgets their password, is the account just dead in the water?
Because if it is possible for an administrator to reset a password, then it is possible for an administrator to log on to a particular account.
Yes, it’s technically possible, but actually doing it would be a rather severe breach of privacy...
SO we can state that we do not have the technology to stop a banned user from downvoting posts, and we don’t have the technology to reverse banned downvotes.
But we do actually have the technology, it is just considered a “severe breach of privacy” to employ it?
And so we have to pretend that accomplishing the identical result by some hacky code into the database to get the same effect on the database is any more or less a breach of privacy, even though it is (potentially) bit-wise identical to just using the simple technology of logging on as the user who’s account needsd adjusting, and changing the banned user’s password so he can’t use the account he is banned from?
Is this some wierd signalling thing, where the appearance that something is really something else is more important than the actuality of it?
It’s a Schelling point. If you can log on as a user you can do a lot of nasty things and we would rather that admins not do those other things.
Does it seem irrational to anyone else here to say
“We don’t know how to prevent this person from using his account to post new downvotes and we don’t know how to reverse the downvotes already posted”
when the actual situation is
“We could stop this account from posting new downvotes with 5 minutes of admin-effort and we could reverse the effects of the mass-downvoting with about an hour of admin-effort without having to write a line of new code, but we won’t.”
I think so, yeah. I don’t know whether it’s reasonable or not but that’s what it is. I might be wrong.
This is somewhat tangential, but neatly links the two recent dramas: I was actually one of the first people subjected to campaigns of mass downvoting, having had hundreds of my comments downvoted in bunches on multiple occasions. Although there are exceptions, from what I’ve seen the well-intentioned extremists who unscrupulously abuse the karma system have generally done so in defense of your well-kept garden.
Good point. That makes more sense.
I think someone in a position of power ought to be particularly wary of appearing to censor things which are (apparently) critical of themselves. If something is truly terrible it will get heavily downvoted.
I believe there are well-known human biases involving humans trying to evaluate things which mention them by name.
Could you be subject to that kind of thing?
You aren’t the judge of that, Herr Yudkowsky. LessWrong is the judge of that.
That’s not the question to ask when deleting posts. The question to ask when deleting posts is whether there’s a reason to delete and hopefully whether that reason is based in rules that can be understood.
The karma system exists for punishing low quality content.
To be fair, the karma system failed in this case.
(Not to say I agree with the deletion of the post, but it sat safely at positive karma when it got taken down.)
It shouldn’t. But what should be here when this happens is an indication that it has been deleted and why.