For context, the two core principles for the frontpage guidelines are:
1. The content should be understandable without being deeply intertwined in the social fabric of the community
The goal of this is to allow LessWrong to grow as an intellectual community, in a way that isn’t constrained by people making social commitments to the more in-person and localized parts of the community. It seems very bad if a requirement for participating in LessWrong discussion necessarily becomes that you know what all the different organizational acronyms are, and that you know the social history of all the ideas, and that you have pledged allegiance in some kind of social contract, etc.
2. The content should be written with the intention of explaining, not persuading
The goal of this rule is to prevent the weaponization of posts on LessWrong and to maintain a certain form of epistemic trust between the participants on LessWrong. Obviously the separation between explaining something and persuading someone of something is quite nuanced and hard to clearly define, but I think it’s a valuable guidelines for maintaining a high quality of discussion on the site.
(There are also some other guidelines, like not being about topics that reliably attract discussions that violate the above two principles, or just attract people to LessWrong that will cause the site culture to get destroyed, but for this case these are the core ones)
Now to this post:
I think this post is a bit at the edge of the first principle, with a variety of references to the Berkeley local community that I don’t really want to be a prerequisite to participation on LessWrong, but it overall only makes up a small part of the post and so I think is overall fine.
I think it does pretty well on the second part, because it’s just a transcript between the author and another person, which prevents the content from being optimized to persuade this specific audience (though there are complicated incentives and selection effects here that make this not a fully clear call).
Overall I think the post is a decent fit for the frontpage, but it seemed like a good time to clarify the frontpage guidelines and illustrate precisely where this post fits, since I think it’s a bit of an edge-case and deserves further explanation.
On 2, for the specific dimension you mentioned, this seems massively better (as a dialogue between two actual people) than e.g. the dialogue in Moloch’s Toolbox, in which all sides were written by the same person, with a clear prior persuasive agenda, so if this isn’t fully a clear call, what should we think of that?
What are the “complicated incentives and selection effects” here?
Overall I’m pretty confused by this comment, and don’t really understand what the “edge case” reasoning is. The reference to Berkeley—which I take to be what you’re saying makes this an edge case—doesn’t reference any specifics that require insider knowledge to understand. It’s literally an account of how I explained it to a few people who are not part of the Berkeley local community (most of whom seemed to find it perfectly intelligible). A friend on Twitter commented that he might as well have swapped the city names and titled it “why I left DC and what St Louis was like.” Pretty much the only thing I can imagine requiring local knowledge is the subsequent unexplained reference to “the Bay,” which is unnecessary so I’ll fix it.
I think it would be a bit confusing to an outsider, but I agree that it wouldn’t be any significant obstacle to understanding, which was my whole point.
The edge-case-ness does not come from it being not a good fit, but more from the dimension of “there are common misunderstandings of our rules that might cause someone to think this post should not be on the frontpage”. You should think of the comment above being written to help people understand what our guidelines are and why this post is a good fit for the frontpage, not as something that tries to indicate the post is only barely a good fit.
Promoted to frontpage, with some caveats:
For context, the two core principles for the frontpage guidelines are:
1. The content should be understandable without being deeply intertwined in the social fabric of the community
The goal of this is to allow LessWrong to grow as an intellectual community, in a way that isn’t constrained by people making social commitments to the more in-person and localized parts of the community. It seems very bad if a requirement for participating in LessWrong discussion necessarily becomes that you know what all the different organizational acronyms are, and that you know the social history of all the ideas, and that you have pledged allegiance in some kind of social contract, etc.
2. The content should be written with the intention of explaining, not persuading
The goal of this rule is to prevent the weaponization of posts on LessWrong and to maintain a certain form of epistemic trust between the participants on LessWrong. Obviously the separation between explaining something and persuading someone of something is quite nuanced and hard to clearly define, but I think it’s a valuable guidelines for maintaining a high quality of discussion on the site.
(There are also some other guidelines, like not being about topics that reliably attract discussions that violate the above two principles, or just attract people to LessWrong that will cause the site culture to get destroyed, but for this case these are the core ones)
Now to this post:
I think this post is a bit at the edge of the first principle, with a variety of references to the Berkeley local community that I don’t really want to be a prerequisite to participation on LessWrong, but it overall only makes up a small part of the post and so I think is overall fine.
I think it does pretty well on the second part, because it’s just a transcript between the author and another person, which prevents the content from being optimized to persuade this specific audience (though there are complicated incentives and selection effects here that make this not a fully clear call).
Overall I think the post is a decent fit for the frontpage, but it seemed like a good time to clarify the frontpage guidelines and illustrate precisely where this post fits, since I think it’s a bit of an edge-case and deserves further explanation.
On 2, for the specific dimension you mentioned, this seems massively better (as a dialogue between two actual people) than e.g. the dialogue in Moloch’s Toolbox, in which all sides were written by the same person, with a clear prior persuasive agenda, so if this isn’t fully a clear call, what should we think of that?
What are the “complicated incentives and selection effects” here?
Overall I’m pretty confused by this comment, and don’t really understand what the “edge case” reasoning is. The reference to Berkeley—which I take to be what you’re saying makes this an edge case—doesn’t reference any specifics that require insider knowledge to understand. It’s literally an account of how I explained it to a few people who are not part of the Berkeley local community (most of whom seemed to find it perfectly intelligible). A friend on Twitter commented that he might as well have swapped the city names and titled it “why I left DC and what St Louis was like.” Pretty much the only thing I can imagine requiring local knowledge is the subsequent unexplained reference to “the Bay,” which is unnecessary so I’ll fix it.
I think it would be a bit confusing to an outsider, but I agree that it wouldn’t be any significant obstacle to understanding, which was my whole point.
The edge-case-ness does not come from it being not a good fit, but more from the dimension of “there are common misunderstandings of our rules that might cause someone to think this post should not be on the frontpage”. You should think of the comment above being written to help people understand what our guidelines are and why this post is a good fit for the frontpage, not as something that tries to indicate the post is only barely a good fit.
Thanks for explaining, makes sense to me now.