I think the last three months are a pretty definitive demonstration that talking about “norms” is toxic and we should almost never do it. I’m not interested, at all, in “norms.” (The twoposts I wrote about them were “defensive” in nature, arguing that one proposed norm was bad as stated, and expressing skepticism about the project of norms lists.)
I’m intested in probability theory, decision theory, psychology, math, and AI. Let’s talk about those things, not “norms.” If anyone dislikes a comment about probability theory, decision theory, psychology, math, or AI, you can just downvote it and move on with your day! I think that will make everyone much happier than any more time devoted to prosecuting or defending against claims of violations of supposed “norms”!
I also think it makes sense to have a pretty strong bias against talking about what the “norms” of a space are, instead of asking about what thing is true, or what thing is optimal under various game-theoretic considerations.
That said, there is definitely a real thing that the “norms” of a space are talking about. Different spaces share different assumptions. There is value in coordinating on shared meaning of words and shared meaning of gestures of social punishment and reward. It seems quite important to help people orient around how people in a space communicate.
When Ruby asked me for feedback on this stuff yesterday, the thing that I said was something like: “There is clearly an art of discourse that LessWrong as a collective should aim to get better at. I think a core part of what is important to communicate to new users are the lessons of the art of discourse that LessWrong (and the LessWrong moderators) have figured out so far. But the ultimate attitude towards the art of discourse should be one of looking out together at reality, not the existing userbase telling other people confidently what the true art of discourse is.”
Of course, similarly to how I don’t think it makes sense to relitigate whether the christian god exists on this website, I also think there are certain aspects of the art of discourse that I would like to mostly assume as true, and put the onus on the individual to overcome a pretty high burden of proof before we go into discussions on that topic. Two things I feel pretty confident in here are:
Subjective probabilities make sense, and are useful for communicating things to each other
Politics is the mindkiller and tribal dynamics around insulting the outgroup are worth putting substantial effort into avoiding
And many others that don’t seem super worth going into right now.
Separately from this, it is actually helpful for moderators to set concrete and specific rules about behavior, when possible. Moderators need to be able to concretely limit, incentivize and disincentivize behavior based on their current best model of the art of discourse (which sometimes will be wrong, and they will incentivize things wrongly, and that’s the cost of doing business, though hopefully we can notice when they are wrong and they can correct their models over time).
Sometimes the only way to define a rule is to talk about fuzzy lines, and this will sometimes require talking about what kind of intentions are commonly associated with bad outcomes, or other correlations that are signs of harm, without being able to point to the harm itself directly (in the same way as my best model of Magnus Carlsson is to just say that he is aiming to win a chess game, it should not be surprising that many social situations also only really have a short description in the space of intentions). It makes sense to be consistent with them, and these do form a canon of rules that seem important to communicate to people, though where possible it should be made clear how these rules derive from the moderator’s model of the art of discourse.
This does result in something kind of similar to a set of norms, though this framing on it at least feels more grounded, and tries to communicate more clearly that there is a ground truth here, and hopefully some way to have productive conversations about whether any given rule and incentive structure will help or hurt.
I think the last three months are a pretty definitive demonstration that talking about “norms” is toxic and we should almost never do it. I’m not interested, at all, in “norms.” (The two posts I wrote about them were “defensive” in nature, arguing that one proposed norm was bad as stated, and expressing skepticism about the project of norms lists.)
I’m intested in probability theory, decision theory, psychology, math, and AI. Let’s talk about those things, not “norms.” If anyone dislikes a comment about probability theory, decision theory, psychology, math, or AI, you can just downvote it and move on with your day! I think that will make everyone much happier than any more time devoted to prosecuting or defending against claims of violations of supposed “norms”!
I also think it makes sense to have a pretty strong bias against talking about what the “norms” of a space are, instead of asking about what thing is true, or what thing is optimal under various game-theoretic considerations.
That said, there is definitely a real thing that the “norms” of a space are talking about. Different spaces share different assumptions. There is value in coordinating on shared meaning of words and shared meaning of gestures of social punishment and reward. It seems quite important to help people orient around how people in a space communicate.
When Ruby asked me for feedback on this stuff yesterday, the thing that I said was something like: “There is clearly an art of discourse that LessWrong as a collective should aim to get better at. I think a core part of what is important to communicate to new users are the lessons of the art of discourse that LessWrong (and the LessWrong moderators) have figured out so far. But the ultimate attitude towards the art of discourse should be one of looking out together at reality, not the existing userbase telling other people confidently what the true art of discourse is.”
Of course, similarly to how I don’t think it makes sense to relitigate whether the christian god exists on this website, I also think there are certain aspects of the art of discourse that I would like to mostly assume as true, and put the onus on the individual to overcome a pretty high burden of proof before we go into discussions on that topic. Two things I feel pretty confident in here are:
Subjective probabilities make sense, and are useful for communicating things to each other
Politics is the mindkiller and tribal dynamics around insulting the outgroup are worth putting substantial effort into avoiding
And many others that don’t seem super worth going into right now.
Separately from this, it is actually helpful for moderators to set concrete and specific rules about behavior, when possible. Moderators need to be able to concretely limit, incentivize and disincentivize behavior based on their current best model of the art of discourse (which sometimes will be wrong, and they will incentivize things wrongly, and that’s the cost of doing business, though hopefully we can notice when they are wrong and they can correct their models over time).
Sometimes the only way to define a rule is to talk about fuzzy lines, and this will sometimes require talking about what kind of intentions are commonly associated with bad outcomes, or other correlations that are signs of harm, without being able to point to the harm itself directly (in the same way as my best model of Magnus Carlsson is to just say that he is aiming to win a chess game, it should not be surprising that many social situations also only really have a short description in the space of intentions). It makes sense to be consistent with them, and these do form a canon of rules that seem important to communicate to people, though where possible it should be made clear how these rules derive from the moderator’s model of the art of discourse.
This does result in something kind of similar to a set of norms, though this framing on it at least feels more grounded, and tries to communicate more clearly that there is a ground truth here, and hopefully some way to have productive conversations about whether any given rule and incentive structure will help or hurt.
I’m afraid I don’t have the time for a full writeup, but the Stack Exchange community went through a similar problem: should the site have a place to discuss the site? Jeff Atwood, cofounder, said [no](https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/) initially, but the community wanted a site-to-discuss-the-site so badly, they considered even a lowly phpBB instance. Atwood eventually [realized he was wrong](https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do/) and endorsed the concept of Meta StackExchange.