More in neat/scary things Ray noticed about himself.
I set aside this week to learn about Machine Learning, because it seemed like an important thing to understand. One thing I knew, going in, is that I had a self-image as a “non technical person.” (Or at least, non-technical relative to rationality-folk). I’m the community/ritual guy, who happens to have specialized in web development as my day job but that’s something I did out of necessity rather than a deep love.
So part of the point of this week was to “get over myself, and start being the sort of person who can learn technical things in domains I’m not already familiar with.”
And that went pretty fine.
As it turned out, after talking to some folk I ended up deciding that re-learning Calculus was the right thing to do this week. I’d learned in college, but not in a way that connected to anything and gave me a sense of it’s usefulness.
And it turned out I had a separate image of myself as a “person who doesn’t know Calculus”, in addition to “not a technical person”. This was fairly easy to overcome since I had already given myself a bunch of space to explore and change this week, and I’d spent the past few months transitioning into being ready for it. But if this had been at an earlier stage of my life and if I hadn’t carved out a week for it, it would have been harder to overcome.
Also important to note that learn Calculus this week is a thing a person can do fairly easily without being some sort of math savant.
(Presumably not the full ‘know how to do all the particular integrals and be able to ace the final’ perhaps, but definitely ‘grok what the hell this is about and know how to do most problems that one encounters in the wild, and where to look if you find one that’s harder than that.’ To ace the final you’ll need two weeks.)
Maybe someone thinks that the meme of “everyone can learn calculus” is a really bad one? I remember you being similarly frustrated at the “everyone can be a programmer” meme.
I didn’t downvote, but I agree that this is a suboptimal meme – though the prevailing mindset of “almost nobody can learn Calculus” is much worse.
As a datapoint, it took me about two weeks of obsessive, 15 hour/day study to learn Calculus to a point where I tested out of the first two courses when I was 16. And I think it’s fair to say I was unusually talented and unusually motivated. I would not expect the vast majority of people to be able to grok Calculus within a week, though obviously people on this site are not a representative sample.
Quite fair. I had read Zvi as speaking to typical LessWrong readership. Also, the standard you seem to be describing here is much higher than the standard Zvi was describing.
I don’t believe you as a moderator, who can see who’s voted, should ever have the right to make the comment that solicits a user to justify their voting behaviour in the way you’ve done.
Let alone on your own short form feed. Seems a bit selfish, with asymmetric information here.
What’s it like for you to be very confused? How’s that for you? How did the (confusion) comment add to the discussion?
(Admins have the power to look at who’s voted, but it happens very rarely, and typically* only after checking with another team member that the situation is important enough to warrant it [the most common case being ’someone looks like they’re probably a Eugine_Nier sockpuppet])
I think it’s bad form for a person who wrote a post to complain about it getting downvoted. It seems less obviously bad to me for a different person to express confusion about it.
*when I say “typically” I mean “we talked about this being the norm, and everyone agreed to it. Later we onboarded a new person and forgot to initially talk to them about that norm, so they may have looked at some of the votes, but we have since talked about the norm with them. So I can’t promise it happens never but it’s definitely not a thing that casually happens by default.
If Ray’s talking about me as the newly onboarded member, I can say I didn’t examine any individual votes outside of due process. (I recall one such case of due process where multiple users were reporting losing karma on multiple posts and comments—we traced it back to a specific cause.)
I do a lot of the analytics, so when I first joined I was delving into the data, but mostly at the aggregate metrics level. Since I was creating new ways to query the data, Ray correctly initiated a conversation to determine our data handling norms. I believe this was last September.
For further reassurance, I can say that vote data is stored only with inscrutable ID numbers for comments, posts, and users. We have to do multiple lookups/queries if we want to figure who voted on something, which is more than enough friction to ensure we don’t ever accidentally see individual votes.
We do look at aggregate vote data that isn’t about a user voting on a specific thing, e.g. overall number of votes, whether a post is getting a very large proportion of downvotes (anyone can approximately infer this by comparing karma and number of votes via the hover-over).
I’d appreciate this information (about looking at votes) being published in meta.
The difference between “confusion” and “complain” is a grey area. I’ve heard people exclaim, “I’m so confused. This is exciting!” and other times people exclaim, “I’m so confused, this is frustrating”.
I suspect you weren’t sharing your confusion because you had a fun and jolly sentiment behind it. But being text, it’s very hard to tell. (hence the follow up question, “how was that confusion for you?”—which I assume you weren’t taking seriously and weren’t going to answer, particularly because I put you on the defensive about mod culture and powers)
Two separate comments here:
If users knew more about what the mods were or were not doing, there would be less to bring up in my original comment.
Unclear about why you shared your confusion. What are your motives and in having those motives from a mod-power position, how does that shape the culture around here?
My intent was “I’d be interested in knowing what the reasoning was, but also it’s important for downvoters to not feel obligation to share their reasoning if they don’t feel like it.” That’s a bit of a handful to type out every single time I experience it.
I updated the FAQ. But an important note about how I think about all of this is it’s *not* actually possible or tractable for everyone to have read everything there is to know about the LW moderation team, nor is it possible/tractable for the LW team to keep everyone on the site fully informed about all of our philosophical and ethical positions.
We’ve been trying recently to publicly post our most important positions, promises, deliberate-not-promises, etc. But we can’t cover everything.
I went on a 4-month Buddhist retreat, and one week covered “Self-images”. We received homework that week to journal our self-images—all of them. Every time I felt some sense of self, like “The self that prides itself on being clean” or “The self that’s playful and giggly”, I’d write it down in my journal. I ended up filling 20 pages over a month period, and learning so much about the many selves my mind/body were trying to convey to the world. I also discovered how often two self-images would compete with each other. Observing the self-images helped them to be less strongly attached.
It sounds like you discovered that yourself this week. You might find such an exercise useful for discovering more of that.
More in neat/scary things Ray noticed about himself.
I set aside this week to learn about Machine Learning, because it seemed like an important thing to understand. One thing I knew, going in, is that I had a self-image as a “non technical person.” (Or at least, non-technical relative to rationality-folk). I’m the community/ritual guy, who happens to have specialized in web development as my day job but that’s something I did out of necessity rather than a deep love.
So part of the point of this week was to “get over myself, and start being the sort of person who can learn technical things in domains I’m not already familiar with.”
And that went pretty fine.
As it turned out, after talking to some folk I ended up deciding that re-learning Calculus was the right thing to do this week. I’d learned in college, but not in a way that connected to anything and gave me a sense of it’s usefulness.
And it turned out I had a separate image of myself as a “person who doesn’t know Calculus”, in addition to “not a technical person”. This was fairly easy to overcome since I had already given myself a bunch of space to explore and change this week, and I’d spent the past few months transitioning into being ready for it. But if this had been at an earlier stage of my life and if I hadn’t carved out a week for it, it would have been harder to overcome.
Man. Identities. Keep that shit small yo.
Also important to note that learn Calculus this week is a thing a person can do fairly easily without being some sort of math savant.
(Presumably not the full ‘know how to do all the particular integrals and be able to ace the final’ perhaps, but definitely ‘grok what the hell this is about and know how to do most problems that one encounters in the wild, and where to look if you find one that’s harder than that.’ To ace the final you’ll need two weeks.)
Very confused about why this was downvoted.
Maybe someone thinks that the meme of “everyone can learn calculus” is a really bad one? I remember you being similarly frustrated at the “everyone can be a programmer” meme.
I didn’t downvote, but I agree that this is a suboptimal meme – though the prevailing mindset of “almost nobody can learn Calculus” is much worse.
As a datapoint, it took me about two weeks of obsessive, 15 hour/day study to learn Calculus to a point where I tested out of the first two courses when I was 16. And I think it’s fair to say I was unusually talented and unusually motivated. I would not expect the vast majority of people to be able to grok Calculus within a week, though obviously people on this site are not a representative sample.
Quite fair. I had read Zvi as speaking to typical LessWrong readership. Also, the standard you seem to be describing here is much higher than the standard Zvi was describing.
That’s not fair.
I don’t believe you as a moderator, who can see who’s voted, should ever have the right to make the comment that solicits a user to justify their voting behaviour in the way you’ve done.
Let alone on your own short form feed. Seems a bit selfish, with asymmetric information here.
What’s it like for you to be very confused? How’s that for you? How did the (confusion) comment add to the discussion?
I can’t see whose voted.
(Admins have the power to look at who’s voted, but it happens very rarely, and typically* only after checking with another team member that the situation is important enough to warrant it [the most common case being ’someone looks like they’re probably a Eugine_Nier sockpuppet])
I think it’s bad form for a person who wrote a post to complain about it getting downvoted. It seems less obviously bad to me for a different person to express confusion about it.
*when I say “typically” I mean “we talked about this being the norm, and everyone agreed to it. Later we onboarded a new person and forgot to initially talk to them about that norm, so they may have looked at some of the votes, but we have since talked about the norm with them. So I can’t promise it happens never but it’s definitely not a thing that casually happens by default.
If Ray’s talking about me as the newly onboarded member, I can say I didn’t examine any individual votes outside of due process. (I recall one such case of due process where multiple users were reporting losing karma on multiple posts and comments—we traced it back to a specific cause.)
I do a lot of the analytics, so when I first joined I was delving into the data, but mostly at the aggregate metrics level. Since I was creating new ways to query the data, Ray correctly initiated a conversation to determine our data handling norms. I believe this was last September.
For further reassurance, I can say that vote data is stored only with inscrutable ID numbers for comments, posts, and users. We have to do multiple lookups/queries if we want to figure who voted on something, which is more than enough friction to ensure we don’t ever accidentally see individual votes.
We do look at aggregate vote data that isn’t about a user voting on a specific thing, e.g. overall number of votes, whether a post is getting a very large proportion of downvotes (anyone can approximately infer this by comparing karma and number of votes via the hover-over).
I’d appreciate this information (about looking at votes) being published in meta.
The difference between “confusion” and “complain” is a grey area. I’ve heard people exclaim, “I’m so confused. This is exciting!” and other times people exclaim, “I’m so confused, this is frustrating”.
I suspect you weren’t sharing your confusion because you had a fun and jolly sentiment behind it. But being text, it’s very hard to tell. (hence the follow up question, “how was that confusion for you?”—which I assume you weren’t taking seriously and weren’t going to answer, particularly because I put you on the defensive about mod culture and powers)
Two separate comments here:
If users knew more about what the mods were or were not doing, there would be less to bring up in my original comment.
Unclear about why you shared your confusion. What are your motives and in having those motives from a mod-power position, how does that shape the culture around here?
My intent was “I’d be interested in knowing what the reasoning was, but also it’s important for downvoters to not feel obligation to share their reasoning if they don’t feel like it.” That’s a bit of a handful to type out every single time I experience it.
I updated the FAQ. But an important note about how I think about all of this is it’s *not* actually possible or tractable for everyone to have read everything there is to know about the LW moderation team, nor is it possible/tractable for the LW team to keep everyone on the site fully informed about all of our philosophical and ethical positions.
We’ve been trying recently to publicly post our most important positions, promises, deliberate-not-promises, etc. But we can’t cover everything.
I went on a 4-month Buddhist retreat, and one week covered “Self-images”. We received homework that week to journal our self-images—all of them. Every time I felt some sense of self, like “The self that prides itself on being clean” or “The self that’s playful and giggly”, I’d write it down in my journal. I ended up filling 20 pages over a month period, and learning so much about the many selves my mind/body were trying to convey to the world. I also discovered how often two self-images would compete with each other. Observing the self-images helped them to be less strongly attached.
It sounds like you discovered that yourself this week. You might find such an exercise useful for discovering more of that.