Hm, in writing out a response to your comment, I noticed that we’ve not written up the reasoning for frontpaging Zvi’s covid updates when we’ve done it (because it is an exception to the rules). Habryka wrote in March about why we were going to encourage a lot of covid content, and when we’ve curated Zvi’s covid posts (twice) we’ve written about why we’re making the exception in the curation notice. But not for frontpaging. [Edit: I stand corrected, see Habryka’s reply to your comment, he did write it.]
For the record, the history of frontpaging here is that we largely stopped frontpaging covid content in May, including Zvi’s content. Since then, we frontpaged one of his updates in October, and have consistently been frontpaging them since December. We also curated two of his posts, a general update on safety and precautions in May, and the piece about the new strain in December.
Briefly, I want to do this because I think many in the LessWrong community do not have good information sources during this crisis, and I am concerned about their health and safety, and because I think Zvi’s updates are high-quality, honest, readable, and trustworthy. It’s a judgment call, and it’s costly to the norms around politics. I recognize once you make enough exceptions then the rule is lost. I don’t think we’re close to that, and I think that especially the covid model curation and the new strain curation were worth it.
Edit: Cut out a paragraph about planning to write an account of why frontpaging Zvi’s stuff. Though I still would like to address some of the political stuff.
If I recall the old days and my memory does not fail me, back in the era of the first wave, LessWrong had a a lot of useful Covid-19 content, a bit like an wiki and newsfeed for understanding the situation and getting some tips for self-care. In the comment by Habryka you link to, he explains that it’s “Player vs. Environment” and therefore seemingly not as political; in any case, I would understand that description as a normative call. (Of course, putting it in a World War 2 / Manhattan Project context is a bit risky, and at some point some historic explanations for the desire to take action may also be used to summon, say, a taskforce against certain anti-American foreign powers; but I think as of now that is hypothetical.)
At some (relatively early) point of time, the systematiccovid-19coverage was discontinued. Among some other posts, there were Zvi’s (personal blog) posts. For these, Habryka’s explanations are not valid because they are to a large degree political in the ordinary sense; nonetheless, as you note, one was curated. In my opinion, there would not be much of a need for explaining the reasons for frontpaging if the reasons for curating were clear.
In the linked comment by Habryka and the comments around it, it is claimed that LW’s corona coverage has a lot of influence. If that is correct, then calling for the dissolution of the WHO may have had an impact, who knows. But in any case, it seemed and seems to me that LessWrong as a website/community/brand or whatever you may call it embraces the political conclusions when such posts are curated.
I would like to note that the justification for encouraging/frontpaging covid content and the discussion about whether political texts should be encouraged and frontpaged are two very different animals. I welcome covid posts (e.g. this, this, this). I don’t even mind politics-related posts very much if they try to be factual, objective, neutral, explanatory, open and avoid to be one-sided, straw-manning, sarcastic, and pandering to insider opinion and requiring club knowledge. I do not say that I never enjoy one-sided, sarcastic essays, or that Zvi’s posts are all like that and not useful; and this is not statement about the extent to which I agree with Zvi. But I feel discomfort when rules are applied to everybody except the gold-star club members. I’m not sure I agree with the claim that “once you make enough exceptions then the rule is lost”; I’d rather say “once you make an exception then the understanding of the word ‘rule’ changes”. The previous behavior may have been compatible with a strict understanding of the word, but once you make an exception the meaning changes. I would have preferred a regime of “topics that may have political implications: yes; gray tribe op-eds on American politics: no”. (After all, AI safety stuff is also politics-related.)
And let me note that those “in the LessWrong community” who “do not have good information sources during this crisis” and agree that “Zvi’s updates are high-quality, honest, readable, and trustworthy” usually see them whether they are frontpaged or not, and whether they are curated or not. I assume frontpaging and curation is more about presentation of the website to the outside. (Though currently, this display window is constituted by curated and shortform posts...)
So, I am in fact pretty wary of the fact that we’ve been frontpaging these. They do pretty clearly violate our frontpage guidelines (even after chatting with Zvi a bunch and toning down the most obvious stuff). I think we at least should have written up an explanation that we re-link to each time.
But I feel discomfort when rules are applied to everybody except the gold-star club members. I’m not sure I agree with the claim that “once you make enough exceptions then the rule is lost”; I’d rather say “once you make an exception then the understanding of the word ‘rule’ changes”. The previous behavior may have been compatible with a strict understanding of the word, but once you make an exception the meaning changes. I would have preferred a regime of “topics that may have political implications: yes; gray tribe op-eds on American politics: no”. (After all, AI safety stuff is also politics-related.)
I share this discomfort, and think we’re currently trying to make some tradeoffs given the (current) implementation of the site, but I think this situation is pretty strong evidence to me that we just need a better system that is less reliant on judgment.
The current problem is that even many longterm members don’t realize there’s a bunch of non-frontpaged content that they might want to see. We got complaints about people not having known about the Zvi covid posts, and wishing they had seen it.
We’ve chatted with Zvi about this a bunch, and he’s toned down / removed some of the more overt/extreme politicization. But, it’s like 10x easier for him to write the essays the way they currently are than to translate them into non-gray-tribe-op-eds that nonetheless make the points he thinks are important. (I think this is a fairly common problem among writers – they have a natural way of thinking/writing and enforcing rules too rigidly ends up killing the golden goose).
I am currently thinking about a couple possible solutions to all this.
We change the homepage rules to “personal blogposts are completely hidden” to “personal blogposts get a −50 karma filter penalty.” Then we enforce the stated rules more consistently, and the deal is “well, if your posts can reliably attract 75+ karma, they’ll show up for everyone. If not, they only show up for users who’ve explicitly opted into it.”
We just make the “show personal blogposts” button way more noticeable. It’s had different degrees of noticeability over the years, and I think it got less visible when we switched to the tag-filter UI. If the problem is people not noticing they can show personal blogposts, we should just make sure they actually notice that.
...come up with some weirder thing that rebuilds the entire system from scratch.
I’m interested in what people think about those options (and in any third ideas people have)
I’d go with number 2, because my snap reaction was “ooh, there’s a “show personal blogposts” button?”
EDIT: Ok, I found the button. The problem with that button is that it looks identical to the other tags, and is at the right side of the screen when the structure of “Latest” draws your eyes to the left side of the screen. I’d make it a bit bigger and on the left side of the screen.
Another way you can follow the new posts of all kinds is the RSS button on the frontpage (together with an RSS feed reader). You can also select to see all kinds of posts above a certain threshold of “karma”, e.g. this. (I think that is independent of whether it’s just a personal blogpost, but I currently have a technical problem and cannot really check that.)
Hm, in writing out a response to your comment, I noticed that we’ve not written up the reasoning for frontpaging Zvi’s covid updates when we’ve done it (because it is an exception to the rules). Habryka wrote in March about why we were going to encourage a lot of covid content, and when we’ve curated Zvi’s covid posts (twice) we’ve written about why we’re making the exception in the curation notice. But not for frontpaging. [Edit: I stand corrected, see Habryka’s reply to your comment, he did write it.]
For the record, the history of frontpaging here is that we largely stopped frontpaging covid content in May, including Zvi’s content. Since then, we frontpaged one of his updates in October, and have consistently been frontpaging them since December. We also curated two of his posts, a general update on safety and precautions in May, and the piece about the new strain in December.
Briefly, I want to do this because I think many in the LessWrong community do not have good information sources during this crisis, and I am concerned about their health and safety, and because I think Zvi’s updates are high-quality, honest, readable, and trustworthy. It’s a judgment call, and it’s costly to the norms around politics. I recognize once you make enough exceptions then the rule is lost. I don’t think we’re close to that, and I think that especially the covid model curation and the new strain curation were worth it.
Edit: Cut out a paragraph about planning to write an account of why frontpaging Zvi’s stuff. Though I still would like to address some of the political stuff.
If I recall the old days and my memory does not fail me, back in the era of the first wave, LessWrong had a a lot of useful Covid-19 content, a bit like an wiki and newsfeed for understanding the situation and getting some tips for self-care. In the comment by Habryka you link to, he explains that it’s “Player vs. Environment” and therefore seemingly not as political; in any case, I would understand that description as a normative call. (Of course, putting it in a World War 2 / Manhattan Project context is a bit risky, and at some point some historic explanations for the desire to take action may also be used to summon, say, a taskforce against certain anti-American foreign powers; but I think as of now that is hypothetical.)
At some (relatively early) point of time, the systematic covid-19 coverage was discontinued. Among some other posts, there were Zvi’s (personal blog) posts. For these, Habryka’s explanations are not valid because they are to a large degree political in the ordinary sense; nonetheless, as you note, one was curated. In my opinion, there would not be much of a need for explaining the reasons for frontpaging if the reasons for curating were clear.
In the linked comment by Habryka and the comments around it, it is claimed that LW’s corona coverage has a lot of influence. If that is correct, then calling for the dissolution of the WHO may have had an impact, who knows. But in any case, it seemed and seems to me that LessWrong as a website/community/brand or whatever you may call it embraces the political conclusions when such posts are curated.
For the record, when the first Zvi covid-post curation took place, the explanation was this. I noted my discomfort with the curation. Zvi shrugged. Rob seems to have agreed that Zvi’s post was full of “heated rhetoric” but stated that it would probably be fine to people with a lot of insider knowledge and/or deeper insights. At this point, it seemed to me that the criteria for what constitutes an exemplary lesswrong post are applied in a somewhat subjective manner. Rob then said that in a utopian world, politics would be standard LW content; I had no idea what to do with that. The discussion ended. Meanwhile, jacobjacob also saw long-run costs even if he explicitly felt the need to note that he somehow disagreed with me.
I would like to note that the justification for encouraging/frontpaging covid content and the discussion about whether political texts should be encouraged and frontpaged are two very different animals. I welcome covid posts (e.g. this, this, this). I don’t even mind politics-related posts very much if they try to be factual, objective, neutral, explanatory, open and avoid to be one-sided, straw-manning, sarcastic, and pandering to insider opinion and requiring club knowledge. I do not say that I never enjoy one-sided, sarcastic essays, or that Zvi’s posts are all like that and not useful; and this is not statement about the extent to which I agree with Zvi. But I feel discomfort when rules are applied to everybody except the gold-star club members. I’m not sure I agree with the claim that “once you make enough exceptions then the rule is lost”; I’d rather say “once you make an exception then the understanding of the word ‘rule’ changes”. The previous behavior may have been compatible with a strict understanding of the word, but once you make an exception the meaning changes. I would have preferred a regime of “topics that may have political implications: yes; gray tribe op-eds on American politics: no”. (After all, AI safety stuff is also politics-related.)
And let me note that those “in the LessWrong community” who “do not have good information sources during this crisis” and agree that “Zvi’s updates are high-quality, honest, readable, and trustworthy” usually see them whether they are frontpaged or not, and whether they are curated or not. I assume frontpaging and curation is more about presentation of the website to the outside. (Though currently, this display window is constituted by curated and shortform posts...)
So, I am in fact pretty wary of the fact that we’ve been frontpaging these. They do pretty clearly violate our frontpage guidelines (even after chatting with Zvi a bunch and toning down the most obvious stuff). I think we at least should have written up an explanation that we re-link to each time.
I share this discomfort, and think we’re currently trying to make some tradeoffs given the (current) implementation of the site, but I think this situation is pretty strong evidence to me that we just need a better system that is less reliant on judgment.
The current problem is that even many longterm members don’t realize there’s a bunch of non-frontpaged content that they might want to see. We got complaints about people not having known about the Zvi covid posts, and wishing they had seen it.
We’ve chatted with Zvi about this a bunch, and he’s toned down / removed some of the more overt/extreme politicization. But, it’s like 10x easier for him to write the essays the way they currently are than to translate them into non-gray-tribe-op-eds that nonetheless make the points he thinks are important. (I think this is a fairly common problem among writers – they have a natural way of thinking/writing and enforcing rules too rigidly ends up killing the golden goose).
I am currently thinking about a couple possible solutions to all this.
We change the homepage rules to “personal blogposts are completely hidden” to “personal blogposts get a −50 karma filter penalty.” Then we enforce the stated rules more consistently, and the deal is “well, if your posts can reliably attract 75+ karma, they’ll show up for everyone. If not, they only show up for users who’ve explicitly opted into it.”
We just make the “show personal blogposts” button way more noticeable. It’s had different degrees of noticeability over the years, and I think it got less visible when we switched to the tag-filter UI. If the problem is people not noticing they can show personal blogposts, we should just make sure they actually notice that.
...come up with some weirder thing that rebuilds the entire system from scratch.
I’m interested in what people think about those options (and in any third ideas people have)
I’d go with number 2, because my snap reaction was “ooh, there’s a “show personal blogposts” button?”
EDIT: Ok, I found the button. The problem with that button is that it looks identical to the other tags, and is at the right side of the screen when the structure of “Latest” draws your eyes to the left side of the screen. I’d make it a bit bigger and on the left side of the screen.
Another way you can follow the new posts of all kinds is the RSS button on the frontpage (together with an RSS feed reader). You can also select to see all kinds of posts above a certain threshold of “karma”, e.g. this. (I think that is independent of whether it’s just a personal blogpost, but I currently have a technical problem and cannot really check that.)