I decided that Zvi’s content is bypassing the usual frontpage guidelines for now, in an effort strike a balance between informing people of important and urgent developments, while not overwhelming the whole site with political and coronavirus-related content again.
Given rising case counts and the importance of keeping everyone up-to-date with COVID stuff given the holiday season, I am making an exception to our usual frontpage guidelines and promoting this to the frontpage (as well as subsequent update posts in the coming weeks). This does not apply to other COVID content, and is only temporary until case counts either drop substantially again, or we decide for some other reason that these should no longer be on the frontpage. Zvi still has dictatorial control over moderation. Feel free to comment on this decision here, happy to talk about it and pretty open to changing my mind. This really wasn’t an obvious call.
After some reflection, I still do not understand the reasoning why the new rule is that Covid-19 content is forbidden except for Zvi’s? Why are more level-headed posts banned from the frontpage, making spicing up articles with a certain rhetorics a necessary condition for Covid-19 frontpage posts?
I am pretty confident we don’t want the vast majority of news-driven COVID content on the frontpage. Happy to hear alternative proposals for a relatively simple and clear rule. Since Zvi does these weekly and they tend to be by far the most popular, consistent and comprehensive content, having just these weekly updates and associated posts on the frontpage seems like a reasonable and simple rule to me. If you have a different suggested one, happy to consider that one instead.
I guess I can’t suggest a rule here; I seem to misunderstand the rules that are valid on LessWrong. With respect to the more-or-less explicit ones (“unusually high standards of discourse” etc, and “explain not persuade”), my understanding seems to be different from yours. There are also implicit rules which I thought existed as a standard or as an ideal, but they would not fit the preferences revealed by frontpaging or by popularity.
Sorry, just to be clear, Zvi’s posts are definitely violating the frontpage guidelines, as are basically all news-driven COVID posts. But we are making an explicit exception to our guidelines in order to make sure that people who follow LessWrong have at least basic guidance and advice during the most crucial phases of this whole coronavirus pandemic. Having the rule of frontpaging Zvi’s updates in particular seems like a decent middle-ground of not completely breaking our guidelines while also giving people basic orientation during these critical periods.
FYI I don’t think this distinction makes sense here, or at least it doesn’t feel like the cruxy bit explaining the current disagreement. (I’d say that’s more “being rigidly rule based” vs “making tradeoffs sometimes on rule flexibility.”)
There is something we can frame in two different ways, either “What is it that the mods make exceptions for?” or “What are the real rules?” I assume this comes down to the same question, but the second version is more explicit.
I think the implicit rule that I perceived was, more or less: “Posts should be about important/useful insights (whatever that means). They should try to explain, be based on and provide evidence when talking about the real world, be written in a level-headed way, avoid sneery comments about outgroups (and be timeless, even though that’s sometimes a vague concept). Because the things we want to avoid correlate with politics, we discourage politics in posts.”
Now, steelmanning, one could argue that the new rule is the same is before but augmented by “However, if a post contains expectionally important/useful insights (e.g. emergency information), all other criteria can be overruled. If the mods find the main points of a post convincing, other statements in the post then do not have to be rigorously argued for or be backed up by evidence, rants can take the place of level-headed writing, sneery comments about outgroups are ok (timelessness is not a criterion in an emergency anyway), and politics in general is not a problem anymore, including if that essentially means that LessWrong effectively endorses political demands that are not implied by being a rationality community.” (I am not saying Zvi’s posts are completely like that; instead I am trying to describe a potential rule that would potentially put them in the set of posts allowed for the frontpage, without saying that they are at the extreme border of that set.)
Is that the reasoning?
If so, I’ll note that I think it still damages the culture of the forum, but of course that may be justified. But then only the net effect is the justification. And the posts would therefore have to be really exceptionally important. Another possibility would be that the true rule should better be thought of as some function of the listed criteria? Then the more the other criteria are violated the more exceptional the main contant would have to be. However, that would not fit the “exception” reasoning. In any case, I think that it damages the culture more if it’s just left as a vague “We’ll make an exception”, combined with the implicit claim that Zvi’s post are very similar to other COVID posts (like this?).
Moreover, I am a bit suspicious of the claims about the unique value of these posts (“to make sure that people who follow LessWrong have at least basic guidance and advice during the most crucial phases of this whole coronavirus pandemic”, as habryka wrote above), which would fit the first dimension of the “exception criteria”. But as I am not in the US and do follow a different country’s media (including social media), it is of course possible that all other sources of information in the US are basically useless.
What I also don’t see is why this is “a decent middle-ground of not completely breaking our guidelines”; exceptions do break rules, otherwise they would not be exceptions, right?
I still don’t fully understand what you are saying, so: 1) What does the word “utilitarian” add to this explanation? 2) What would LessWrong run by “consequentialist calculus” look like, in contrast to “run by utilitarian calculus”? 3) Do you equate “habryka thinks” with the utilitarian calculus that is supposed to run LW?
We got a lot of complaints about it, and one of the first things we did was to add ways to filter out coronavirus related stuff from the frontpage. Of course not everyone minded, but I very distinctly had a sense that it was difficult to talk about anything else. It was also all very news-focused, which is something I care a lot about avoiding with LessWrong, because I think becoming news-focused is a very strong attractor for online communities that usually has pretty bad effects on overall intellectual progress.
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.)
Those are the reference category of counter-examples to the current system and some of us are uncomfortable with them as-is. (I’m mostly fine with them overall, all things considered.)
Calling for the “delenda” of the WHO, or the FDA, seem obviously different than the ‘original’ usage, e.g. “Carthago delenda est!”. Zvi is calling for radical reform, or possibly (?) abolishment, of government organizations – not the literal destruction of their leaders or employees.
Referring to DeBlasio as a “worst person” is also pretty narrowly restricted to his pandemic-related actions.
On second thought – you’re right that there’s pretty overt politicization, but maybe not in the ‘standard’ (prototypical) U.S. left-versus-right – it’s more a ‘pandemic-emergency versus business-as-usual’ pair of coalitions (as I understand it). This seems – to me – pretty orthogonal to the standard left-versus-right conflicts. But they are overtly political.
I’m still inclined to give those posts a pass on that kind of thing given the enormous value those posts otherwise have. (I also share the general ‘delenda est’ sentiment towards the referenced organizations and administrations – as organizations and administrations, not as groups of individual people. So I’m definitely biased.)
I did not interpret Zvi’s delenda calls as calls for killing people. However, the usage of historical phrases is not innocuous. When you do that, you explicitly refer to the context, including the modern usage. I think it’s not useful to make up new interpretations of words on the fly, otherwise we might end up in a Humpty-Dumpty usage of language.
Moreover, I know that the LW community, like every community, likes to use a lot of insider language (which may be signalling, which I explicitly note here also to include an example). But then you should expect that outsiders do not understand it, and give it a different interpretation.
This is kind of reasonable, but I think it should be rounded-off to ignored – in this case.
In general, language is ‘merely reasonable’ – it’s always a bit Humpty-Dumpty.
I don’t think the use of any phrase, historical or not, could be considered explicit reference of its “context”.
Even words like ‘family’, historically, sometimes referred to the ‘servants’ (and slaves) of a household. But it seems reasonable to continue using ‘family’ – the common agreement of English speakers/listeners/writers/readers is that’s perfectly okay and unobjectionable.
Or maybe you’re right? ‘delenda est’ is very different from ‘family’. There really aren’t any other uses or interpretations beyond, at most, metaphorical violence. I certainly don’t like (some) other violent words or phrases (sometimes), even when they’re obviously metaphorical. And it’s not obviously wrong to think that avoiding ‘violent’ language might be net-good anyways.
But this post was cross-posted from the author’s personal blog and is a (mildly) contentious exception to the kinds of posts that are normally considered worth listing on the ‘front page’ of the site. Because of that, I’m still inclined to let this pass.
But I’ve definitely changed my mind about the phrase being entirely innocuous.
Would you please briefly define what you consider to be politics? I would assume that posts calling for the “delenda” of the WHO or using wordings like “Second-worst person New York Mayor DeBlasio” or affirmatively citing this tweet are political. And these posts seem to be frontpaged.
I decided that Zvi’s content is bypassing the usual frontpage guidelines for now, in an effort strike a balance between informing people of important and urgent developments, while not overwhelming the whole site with political and coronavirus-related content again.
Here is the relevant comment where I announced this policy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vkvaAXHN2zPXhDjJC/covid-12-3-land-of-confusion?commentId=dR8FYiztgL4pzwpCs
To make it easier to read, the full text:
After some reflection, I still do not understand the reasoning why the new rule is that Covid-19 content is forbidden except for Zvi’s? Why are more level-headed posts banned from the frontpage, making spicing up articles with a certain rhetorics a necessary condition for Covid-19 frontpage posts?
I am pretty confident we don’t want the vast majority of news-driven COVID content on the frontpage. Happy to hear alternative proposals for a relatively simple and clear rule. Since Zvi does these weekly and they tend to be by far the most popular, consistent and comprehensive content, having just these weekly updates and associated posts on the frontpage seems like a reasonable and simple rule to me. If you have a different suggested one, happy to consider that one instead.
I guess I can’t suggest a rule here; I seem to misunderstand the rules that are valid on LessWrong. With respect to the more-or-less explicit ones (“unusually high standards of discourse” etc, and “explain not persuade”), my understanding seems to be different from yours. There are also implicit rules which I thought existed as a standard or as an ideal, but they would not fit the preferences revealed by frontpaging or by popularity.
Sorry, just to be clear, Zvi’s posts are definitely violating the frontpage guidelines, as are basically all news-driven COVID posts. But we are making an explicit exception to our guidelines in order to make sure that people who follow LessWrong have at least basic guidance and advice during the most crucial phases of this whole coronavirus pandemic. Having the rule of frontpaging Zvi’s updates in particular seems like a decent middle-ground of not completely breaking our guidelines while also giving people basic orientation during these critical periods.
I like the idea of front-paging Zvi’s weekly updates. (No opinion on whether other COVID-19 content should be barred from the frontpage.)
LessWrong isn’t run by consequentialist calculus but by utilitarian calculus.
FYI I don’t think this distinction makes sense here, or at least it doesn’t feel like the cruxy bit explaining the current disagreement. (I’d say that’s more “being rigidly rule based” vs “making tradeoffs sometimes on rule flexibility.”)
There is something we can frame in two different ways, either “What is it that the mods make exceptions for?” or “What are the real rules?” I assume this comes down to the same question, but the second version is more explicit.
I think the implicit rule that I perceived was, more or less: “Posts should be about important/useful insights (whatever that means). They should try to explain, be based on and provide evidence when talking about the real world, be written in a level-headed way, avoid sneery comments about outgroups (and be timeless, even though that’s sometimes a vague concept). Because the things we want to avoid correlate with politics, we discourage politics in posts.”
Now, steelmanning, one could argue that the new rule is the same is before but augmented by “However, if a post contains expectionally important/useful insights (e.g. emergency information), all other criteria can be overruled. If the mods find the main points of a post convincing, other statements in the post then do not have to be rigorously argued for or be backed up by evidence, rants can take the place of level-headed writing, sneery comments about outgroups are ok (timelessness is not a criterion in an emergency anyway), and politics in general is not a problem anymore, including if that essentially means that LessWrong effectively endorses political demands that are not implied by being a rationality community.” (I am not saying Zvi’s posts are completely like that; instead I am trying to describe a potential rule that would potentially put them in the set of posts allowed for the frontpage, without saying that they are at the extreme border of that set.)
Is that the reasoning?
If so, I’ll note that I think it still damages the culture of the forum, but of course that may be justified. But then only the net effect is the justification. And the posts would therefore have to be really exceptionally important. Another possibility would be that the true rule should better be thought of as some function of the listed criteria? Then the more the other criteria are violated the more exceptional the main contant would have to be. However, that would not fit the “exception” reasoning. In any case, I think that it damages the culture more if it’s just left as a vague “We’ll make an exception”, combined with the implicit claim that Zvi’s post are very similar to other COVID posts (like this?).
Moreover, I am a bit suspicious of the claims about the unique value of these posts (“to make sure that people who follow LessWrong have at least basic guidance and advice during the most crucial phases of this whole coronavirus pandemic”, as habryka wrote above), which would fit the first dimension of the “exception criteria”. But as I am not in the US and do follow a different country’s media (including social media), it is of course possible that all other sources of information in the US are basically useless.
What I also don’t see is why this is “a decent middle-ground of not completely breaking our guidelines”; exceptions do break rules, otherwise they would not be exceptions, right?
Please explain.
habryka thinks that the value that Zvi’s post provide means that utilitarian value of making an expection for them from the general rules is positive.
I still don’t fully understand what you are saying, so: 1) What does the word “utilitarian” add to this explanation? 2) What would LessWrong run by “consequentialist calculus” look like, in contrast to “run by utilitarian calculus”? 3) Do you equate “habryka thinks” with the utilitarian calculus that is supposed to run LW?
I did not mind the amount of “coronavirus-related content” in April, and I do not remember the site being overwhelmed with political content.
We got a lot of complaints about it, and one of the first things we did was to add ways to filter out coronavirus related stuff from the frontpage. Of course not everyone minded, but I very distinctly had a sense that it was difficult to talk about anything else. It was also all very news-focused, which is something I care a lot about avoiding with LessWrong, because I think becoming news-focused is a very strong attractor for online communities that usually has pretty bad effects on overall intellectual progress.
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.)
Those are the reference category of counter-examples to the current system and some of us are uncomfortable with them as-is. (I’m mostly fine with them overall, all things considered.)
Calling for the “delenda” of the WHO, or the FDA, seem obviously different than the ‘original’ usage, e.g. “Carthago delenda est!”. Zvi is calling for radical reform, or possibly (?) abolishment, of government organizations – not the literal destruction of their leaders or employees.
Referring to DeBlasio as a “worst person” is also pretty narrowly restricted to his pandemic-related actions.
On second thought – you’re right that there’s pretty overt politicization, but maybe not in the ‘standard’ (prototypical) U.S. left-versus-right – it’s more a ‘pandemic-emergency versus business-as-usual’ pair of coalitions (as I understand it). This seems – to me – pretty orthogonal to the standard left-versus-right conflicts. But they are overtly political.
I’m still inclined to give those posts a pass on that kind of thing given the enormous value those posts otherwise have. (I also share the general ‘delenda est’ sentiment towards the referenced organizations and administrations – as organizations and administrations, not as groups of individual people. So I’m definitely biased.)
I did not interpret Zvi’s delenda calls as calls for killing people. However, the usage of historical phrases is not innocuous. When you do that, you explicitly refer to the context, including the modern usage. I think it’s not useful to make up new interpretations of words on the fly, otherwise we might end up in a Humpty-Dumpty usage of language.
Moreover, I know that the LW community, like every community, likes to use a lot of insider language (which may be signalling, which I explicitly note here also to include an example). But then you should expect that outsiders do not understand it, and give it a different interpretation.
This is kind of reasonable, but I think it should be rounded-off to ignored – in this case.
In general, language is ‘merely reasonable’ – it’s always a bit Humpty-Dumpty.
I don’t think the use of any phrase, historical or not, could be considered explicit reference of its “context”.
Even words like ‘family’, historically, sometimes referred to the ‘servants’ (and slaves) of a household. But it seems reasonable to continue using ‘family’ – the common agreement of English speakers/listeners/writers/readers is that’s perfectly okay and unobjectionable.
Or maybe you’re right? ‘delenda est’ is very different from ‘family’. There really aren’t any other uses or interpretations beyond, at most, metaphorical violence. I certainly don’t like (some) other violent words or phrases (sometimes), even when they’re obviously metaphorical. And it’s not obviously wrong to think that avoiding ‘violent’ language might be net-good anyways.
But this post was cross-posted from the author’s personal blog and is a (mildly) contentious exception to the kinds of posts that are normally considered worth listing on the ‘front page’ of the site. Because of that, I’m still inclined to let this pass.
But I’ve definitely changed my mind about the phrase being entirely innocuous.