I liked this post, but I don’t think it belongs in the review. It’s very long, it needs Zoe’s also-very-long post for context, and almost everything you’ll learn is about Leverage specifically, with few generalizable insights. There are some exceptions (“What to do when society is wrong about something?” would work as a standalone post, for example), but they’re mostly just interesting questions without any work toward a solution. I think the relatively weak engagement that it got, relative to its length and quality, reflects that: Less Wrong wasn’t up for another long discussion about Leverage, and there wasn’t anything else to talk about.
Those things aren’t flaws relative to Cathleen’s goals, I don’t think, but they make this post a poor fit for the review: a didn’t make a lot of intellectual progress, and the narrow subfield it did contribute to isn’t relevant to most people.
My take was “It’d be quite weird for this post to show up in the Best of LessWrong books, but I think part of the point of the review is to reflect on things that had some kind of impact on your worldmodels, even if the posts aren’t directly optimized for that.”
Sure, I just don’t expect that it did impact peoples’ models very much*. If I’m wrong, I hope this review or the other one will pull those people out of the woodwork to explain what they learned.
*Except about Leverage, maybe, but even there...did LW-as-a-community ever come to any kind of consensus on the Leverage questions? If Geoff comes to me and asks for money to support a research project he’s in charge of, is there a standard LW answer about whether or not I should give it to him? My sense is that the discussion fizzled out unresolved, at least on LW.
A non-obvious thing here: last year, Lightcone put a fair amount of effort into doing lots of interviews, orienting on the Leverage situation, and attempting to publish a blogpost that offered a pretty clear and comprehensive set of information. We were specifically thinking of this from the standpoint of “it doesn’t seem like there are very good community justice institutions or practices around, beyond random discussions”, and thinking maybe we could contribute something useful.
And then, well, a lot of stuff came up and we didn’t get the piece over the finish-line of publishing.
So I’m coming at this from the perspective, partly “how valuable would it have been to get that across the finish line?”. And I see both this piece and the Zoe piece as representing the collective situation.
I also do just agree some of the claims in this piece (implicit and explicit) that many of the cult-looking-behaviors of leverage are red herrings and are reasonable things I want to defend.
I liked this post, but I don’t think it belongs in the review. It’s very long, it needs Zoe’s also-very-long post for context, and almost everything you’ll learn is about Leverage specifically, with few generalizable insights. There are some exceptions (“What to do when society is wrong about something?” would work as a standalone post, for example), but they’re mostly just interesting questions without any work toward a solution. I think the relatively weak engagement that it got, relative to its length and quality, reflects that: Less Wrong wasn’t up for another long discussion about Leverage, and there wasn’t anything else to talk about.
Those things aren’t flaws relative to Cathleen’s goals, I don’t think, but they make this post a poor fit for the review: a didn’t make a lot of intellectual progress, and the narrow subfield it did contribute to isn’t relevant to most people.
My take was “It’d be quite weird for this post to show up in the Best of LessWrong books, but I think part of the point of the review is to reflect on things that had some kind of impact on your worldmodels, even if the posts aren’t directly optimized for that.”
Sure, I just don’t expect that it did impact peoples’ models very much*. If I’m wrong, I hope this review or the other one will pull those people out of the woodwork to explain what they learned.
*Except about Leverage, maybe, but even there...did LW-as-a-community ever come to any kind of consensus on the Leverage questions? If Geoff comes to me and asks for money to support a research project he’s in charge of, is there a standard LW answer about whether or not I should give it to him? My sense is that the discussion fizzled out unresolved, at least on LW.
A non-obvious thing here: last year, Lightcone put a fair amount of effort into doing lots of interviews, orienting on the Leverage situation, and attempting to publish a blogpost that offered a pretty clear and comprehensive set of information. We were specifically thinking of this from the standpoint of “it doesn’t seem like there are very good community justice institutions or practices around, beyond random discussions”, and thinking maybe we could contribute something useful.
And then, well, a lot of stuff came up and we didn’t get the piece over the finish-line of publishing.
So I’m coming at this from the perspective, partly “how valuable would it have been to get that across the finish line?”. And I see both this piece and the Zoe piece as representing the collective situation.
I also do just agree some of the claims in this piece (implicit and explicit) that many of the cult-looking-behaviors of leverage are red herrings and are reasonable things I want to defend.
That post sounds useful, I would have liked to read it.