The things most people are interested in discussing are frowned upon/banned from discussion on LW. That’s why they go to SSC. The world has changed in the past 10 years, and the conversational rules and restrictions of 2009 no longer make sense today.
The rationalsphere, if you expand it to include blogs like Marginal Revolution, is one of the few intellectual mechanisms left to disentangle complex information from the clusterf* of modern politics. Not talking about it here through a clear rationalist framework is a tragedy.
One important difference between LW and SSC: Everyone knows that SSC is Scott’s blog. Scott is a dictator, and if he wants to announce his own opinions visibly, he can post them in a separate article, in a way no one else can compete with. It would be difficult to misrepresent Scott’s opinions by posting on SSC.
LW is a group blog (Eliezer is no longer active here). So in addition to talk about individual users who post here, it also makes sense to ask what does the “hive mind” think, i.e. what is the general consensus here. Especially because we talk here about Aumann agreement theorem, wisdom of crowds, etc. So people can be curious about the “wisdom of the LW crowd”.
Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious. But it is quite easy to cherry-pick some LW comments and say “this is what the LW community actually believes”.
There were repeated attempts to create a fake image of what the LW community believes, coming as far as I know from two sources. First, various “SJWs” were offended that some opinions were not banned here, and that some topics were allowed to be discussed calmly. (It doesn’t matter whether the problematic opinion was a minority opinion, or even whether it was downvoted. The fact that it wasn’t immediately censored is enough to cause outrage.)
Second, the neoreactionary community decided to use these accusations as a recruitment tool, and they started spreading a rumor that the rationalist community indeed supports them. There was a time when they tried to make LW about neoreaction, by repeatedly creating discussion threads about themselves. Such as: “Political thread: neoreactionaries, tell me what do you find most rational about neoreaction”; obviously fishing for positive opinions. Then they used such threads as a “proof” that rationalists indeed find neoreaction very rational, etc. -- After some time they gave up and disappeared. Only Eugine remained here, creating endless sockpuppets for downvoting anti-nr comments, and upvoting pro-nr comments, persistently maintaining the illusion of neoreaction being overrepresented (or even represented) in the rationalist comminity.
tl;dr—on LW people can play astroturfing games about “what the rationalist community actually believes”, and it regularly happens, and it is very annoying for those who recognize they are being manipulated; on SSC such games don’t make sense, because Scott can make his opinion quite clear
Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious.
They can accuse Scott of being the sort of fascist who would have a [cherry-picking two or three comments that aren’t completely in approval of the latest Salon thinkpiece] far-right extremist commentariat. And they do.
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next comes the one who is feared. The worst one is the leader that is despised
To allow the clusterfuck of politics inside you need robust filters against torrents of foam, spittle, and incoherent rage. Generally speaking, this means either wise and active moderation or a full-featured set of tools for the users to curate their own feed/timeline. At the moment LW has neither.
Sincere question: Do you think the SSC comments section accomplishes politics while filtering out foam, spittle etc? (or perhaps the comments section there is more robust to simply ignoring bad comments, which isn’t the same on a forum?)
Having no moderator experience, I guess there is probably a lot on that end that I don’t know.
FWIW, I was linked to a SSC post today about “race and criminal justice in America”—so, five-alarm hot button topic—and I quickly read through about half of a super-long comments section, and it was great. Plenty of debate, minimal spittle, collaborative and civil, fact-based and in good faith.
SSC does quite well with politics. I would guess that some of it is because discussion is high-brow, some of it is because other users don’t have problems pointing out that someone is an idiot, but mostly because Scott has little compunctions about banning. For example, at some point he basically banned all vocal NRx people because he didn’t want SSC to be primarily seen as a neoreactionary forum.
SSC also has a fairly user-hostile UI which by now I think is deliberate as Scott doesn’t want to shepherd a large community.
I get the impression that SSC comments have managed to do rational debate better than LW does. People who do bad things there are reliably purged by Scott. The topics are interesting which keeps smart people coming.
Take a population of smart people and regularly cull the most dark-arts/mudslinging/anti-epistemology few %.
I don’t like the SSC comments much because I feel like most of what I say there gets ignored and buried, but I definitely think that SSC is very good at dealing with politics.
I don’t think LW is, in fact, capable of talking about politics rationally; if it did, it wouldn’t have much influence; and trying will harm its core interests through divisiveness, distraction, drawing bad users, and further reputational damage.
Agreed. I think avoiding politics on LW does more harm than good overall these days, and that people get mindkilled in plenty of other ways even without it. (I personally don’t want to talk about politics on LW, but I’m in favor of other people doing so, especially to the extent that it results in political action.)
This would be a problem with an obvious solution if Discussion was structured anything like a normal forum.
Main is one thing. The “community blog” structure works there. But Discussion in reality functions like a forum and it suffers from the lack of basic, common forum-features like sticky threads, posts bumping based on activity, and the ability to create sub-fora.
If politics had its own sub-forum, people could choose to enter it or not, simple as that. Nothing fancy about it—political discussion available, but cordoned off behind one more click. Same feature could help organize the subject matter more effectively in other areas too. No need to slice it too fine. Say you have a main area for all the general rationality and logic stuff, as well as site-business things like a welcome thread and site-related posts like this one. Then you have a few—two or three, no more than five—sub-fora split into “Science”, “Politics”, “AI” etc.
Now one could argue that the creation of a politics section of any sort would attract a different type of member and that could impact the discourse in other areas. Not saying that’s not a possibility but heck, LW attracts a fair few cranks anyway.
Mind, I don’t know how possible any of these changes are—I’m only arguing their desirability.
There is additionally the point that the ban leads to people compartmentalizing rationalist thought practices from politics. How do you become a rationalist political being if you aren’t able to practice rationalist politics in the supportive company of other rationalists?
I’m not steven0461, but I’m pretty sure the intended meaning is: Asking for a “rationalist political being” is like asking for a “clean sewer”; it’s a contradiction in terms because politics is fundamentally anti-rational. So when you say “How do you become a rationalist political being if …” you have already made a mistake.
(I don’t think I agree; politics is part of the real world and I see no reason to think that rationalists should never find sufficient reason to become involved. I might agree with the more modest claim that most of us most of the time would do well to pay much less attention to politics than we do.)
There is the obvious counterargument of “Try ignoring your sewer system for a few years and see where it gets you”. I suspect that drowning in shit is not a pleasant experience.
Maybe. But most of us get to influence government policy mostly via involvement in politics, and if (in someone’s opinion) politics is fundamentally anti-rational then they may conclude that almost all rationalists should try to minimize the time and effort and emotional investment they give to government policy.
But I’m engaging in the usually-futile activity of defending the position of someone else with whom I don’t entirely agree, and who is in fact (I assume) here and able to defend himself. So I’ll stop.
How do you become a rationalist political being if you aren’t able to practice rationalist politics in the supportive company of other rationalists?
I don’t think LW qualifies as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists for at least two major reasons: (1) Eugine and his army of sockpuppets, (2) anyone can join, rationalist or not, and talking about politics would most likely attract the wrong kind people, so even if LW would qualify as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists now, that could easily change overnight.
I imagine that if we could solve the problem of sockpuppets and/or create a system of “trusted users” who could moderate the debate, we would have a chance to debate politics rationally. But I suspect that a rational political debate would be quite boring for most people.
To give an example of “boring politics”, when Trump was elected, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s great, now Americal will be great again”, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s horrible, now racists and sexist will be everywhere, and we are all doomed”… and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like “having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money”. You didn’t have to tell these people that rationalists are supposed to bet on their beliefs, because they already did.
and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like “having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money”.
Funnily enough, I heard rumors that George Soros placed a big bet on the markets going down after the election and lost very very badly.
I think it is a rather unsympathetic strawman characterization of what they rationalist political debate would be. Even if one could make money off of purely thinking—and I don’t want to debate the efficient market hypothesis here—I would hope that the purpose of the debate would be over rational government policies that address the underlying concerns of all sides. For example, what underlying fears and insecurities lead to support for trumps anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position? What legitimate basis exists, charitably, for these fears? What potential policy could both address these underlying concerns, and be supported by both parties and independents? More to the point, what additional data would be useful to have, in the form of polls that are not currently being conducted or some such?
Nate Silver’s 538 blog is an example of such a rationalist resource, but he only covers politics during election season and there isn’t much community building going on.
The things most people are interested in discussing are frowned upon/banned from discussion on LW. That’s why they go to SSC. The world has changed in the past 10 years, and the conversational rules and restrictions of 2009 no longer make sense today.
The rationalsphere, if you expand it to include blogs like Marginal Revolution, is one of the few intellectual mechanisms left to disentangle complex information from the clusterf* of modern politics. Not talking about it here through a clear rationalist framework is a tragedy.
One important difference between LW and SSC: Everyone knows that SSC is Scott’s blog. Scott is a dictator, and if he wants to announce his own opinions visibly, he can post them in a separate article, in a way no one else can compete with. It would be difficult to misrepresent Scott’s opinions by posting on SSC.
LW is a group blog (Eliezer is no longer active here). So in addition to talk about individual users who post here, it also makes sense to ask what does the “hive mind” think, i.e. what is the general consensus here. Especially because we talk here about Aumann agreement theorem, wisdom of crowds, etc. So people can be curious about the “wisdom of the LW crowd”.
Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious. But it is quite easy to cherry-pick some LW comments and say “this is what the LW community actually believes”.
There were repeated attempts to create a fake image of what the LW community believes, coming as far as I know from two sources. First, various “SJWs” were offended that some opinions were not banned here, and that some topics were allowed to be discussed calmly. (It doesn’t matter whether the problematic opinion was a minority opinion, or even whether it was downvoted. The fact that it wasn’t immediately censored is enough to cause outrage.)
Second, the neoreactionary community decided to use these accusations as a recruitment tool, and they started spreading a rumor that the rationalist community indeed supports them. There was a time when they tried to make LW about neoreaction, by repeatedly creating discussion threads about themselves. Such as: “Political thread: neoreactionaries, tell me what do you find most rational about neoreaction”; obviously fishing for positive opinions. Then they used such threads as a “proof” that rationalists indeed find neoreaction very rational, etc. -- After some time they gave up and disappeared. Only Eugine remained here, creating endless sockpuppets for downvoting anti-nr comments, and upvoting pro-nr comments, persistently maintaining the illusion of neoreaction being overrepresented (or even represented) in the rationalist comminity.
tl;dr—on LW people can play astroturfing games about “what the rationalist community actually believes”, and it regularly happens, and it is very annoying for those who recognize they are being manipulated; on SSC such games don’t make sense, because Scott can make his opinion quite clear
They can accuse Scott of being the sort of fascist who would have a [cherry-picking two or three comments that aren’t completely in approval of the latest Salon thinkpiece] far-right extremist commentariat. And they do.
Yep, here is an example.
Can we elect a dictator?
I think we did.
This is the first I heard of that… I’m not sure the legitimacy of that in the eyes of long-time users.
-- Tao Te Ching
To allow the clusterfuck of politics inside you need robust filters against torrents of foam, spittle, and incoherent rage. Generally speaking, this means either wise and active moderation or a full-featured set of tools for the users to curate their own feed/timeline. At the moment LW has neither.
Sincere question: Do you think the SSC comments section accomplishes politics while filtering out foam, spittle etc? (or perhaps the comments section there is more robust to simply ignoring bad comments, which isn’t the same on a forum?)
Having no moderator experience, I guess there is probably a lot on that end that I don’t know.
I think the SSC comments are pretty bad, but I’m not sure they’re any worse on politics than other topics.
FWIW, I was linked to a SSC post today about “race and criminal justice in America”—so, five-alarm hot button topic—and I quickly read through about half of a super-long comments section, and it was great. Plenty of debate, minimal spittle, collaborative and civil, fact-based and in good faith.
SSC does quite well with politics. I would guess that some of it is because discussion is high-brow, some of it is because other users don’t have problems pointing out that someone is an idiot, but mostly because Scott has little compunctions about banning. For example, at some point he basically banned all vocal NRx people because he didn’t want SSC to be primarily seen as a neoreactionary forum.
SSC also has a fairly user-hostile UI which by now I think is deliberate as Scott doesn’t want to shepherd a large community.
I get the impression that SSC comments have managed to do rational debate better than LW does. People who do bad things there are reliably purged by Scott. The topics are interesting which keeps smart people coming.
Take a population of smart people and regularly cull the most dark-arts/mudslinging/anti-epistemology few %.
I don’t like the SSC comments much because I feel like most of what I say there gets ignored and buried, but I definitely think that SSC is very good at dealing with politics.
I don’t think LW is, in fact, capable of talking about politics rationally; if it did, it wouldn’t have much influence; and trying will harm its core interests through divisiveness, distraction, drawing bad users, and further reputational damage.
Agreed. I think avoiding politics on LW does more harm than good overall these days, and that people get mindkilled in plenty of other ways even without it. (I personally don’t want to talk about politics on LW, but I’m in favor of other people doing so, especially to the extent that it results in political action.)
This would be a problem with an obvious solution if Discussion was structured anything like a normal forum.
Main is one thing. The “community blog” structure works there. But Discussion in reality functions like a forum and it suffers from the lack of basic, common forum-features like sticky threads, posts bumping based on activity, and the ability to create sub-fora.
If politics had its own sub-forum, people could choose to enter it or not, simple as that. Nothing fancy about it—political discussion available, but cordoned off behind one more click. Same feature could help organize the subject matter more effectively in other areas too. No need to slice it too fine. Say you have a main area for all the general rationality and logic stuff, as well as site-business things like a welcome thread and site-related posts like this one. Then you have a few—two or three, no more than five—sub-fora split into “Science”, “Politics”, “AI” etc.
Now one could argue that the creation of a politics section of any sort would attract a different type of member and that could impact the discourse in other areas. Not saying that’s not a possibility but heck, LW attracts a fair few cranks anyway.
Mind, I don’t know how possible any of these changes are—I’m only arguing their desirability.
Yeah, I agree that it would be really great if Discussion had subreddits.
There is additionally the point that the ban leads to people compartmentalizing rationalist thought practices from politics. How do you become a rationalist political being if you aren’t able to practice rationalist politics in the supportive company of other rationalists?
“How do you get a clean sewer system if you insist on separating it from the rest of the city?”
I’m having trouble parsing the intended meaning. Can you clarify?
I’m not steven0461, but I’m pretty sure the intended meaning is: Asking for a “rationalist political being” is like asking for a “clean sewer”; it’s a contradiction in terms because politics is fundamentally anti-rational. So when you say “How do you become a rationalist political being if …” you have already made a mistake.
(I don’t think I agree; politics is part of the real world and I see no reason to think that rationalists should never find sufficient reason to become involved. I might agree with the more modest claim that most of us most of the time would do well to pay much less attention to politics than we do.)
There is the obvious counterargument of “Try ignoring your sewer system for a few years and see where it gets you”. I suspect that drowning in shit is not a pleasant experience.
Then steven0461 should taboo “politics” and perhaps for the purposes of this thread replace it with “government policy.”
Maybe. But most of us get to influence government policy mostly via involvement in politics, and if (in someone’s opinion) politics is fundamentally anti-rational then they may conclude that almost all rationalists should try to minimize the time and effort and emotional investment they give to government policy.
But I’m engaging in the usually-futile activity of defending the position of someone else with whom I don’t entirely agree, and who is in fact (I assume) here and able to defend himself. So I’ll stop.
I don’t think LW qualifies as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists for at least two major reasons: (1) Eugine and his army of sockpuppets, (2) anyone can join, rationalist or not, and talking about politics would most likely attract the wrong kind people, so even if LW would qualify as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists now, that could easily change overnight.
I imagine that if we could solve the problem of sockpuppets and/or create a system of “trusted users” who could moderate the debate, we would have a chance to debate politics rationally. But I suspect that a rational political debate would be quite boring for most people.
To give an example of “boring politics”, when Trump was elected, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s great, now Americal will be great again”, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s horrible, now racists and sexist will be everywhere, and we are all doomed”… and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like “having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money”. You didn’t have to tell these people that rationalists are supposed to bet on their beliefs, because they already did.
Funnily enough, I heard rumors that George Soros placed a big bet on the markets going down after the election and lost very very badly.
I think it is a rather unsympathetic strawman characterization of what they rationalist political debate would be. Even if one could make money off of purely thinking—and I don’t want to debate the efficient market hypothesis here—I would hope that the purpose of the debate would be over rational government policies that address the underlying concerns of all sides. For example, what underlying fears and insecurities lead to support for trumps anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position? What legitimate basis exists, charitably, for these fears? What potential policy could both address these underlying concerns, and be supported by both parties and independents? More to the point, what additional data would be useful to have, in the form of polls that are not currently being conducted or some such?
Nate Silver’s 538 blog is an example of such a rationalist resource, but he only covers politics during election season and there isn’t much community building going on.