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.
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.