This is a response to Zack Davis in the comments on his recent post. It was getting increasingly meta, and I wasn’t very confident in my own take, so I’m replying over on my shortform.
I would have thought you’d prefer that I avoid trying to apply the philosophy idea to a detailed object-level special case (specifically, that of this website) in the comment section of a Frontpaged post (as a opposed to a lower-visibility meta post or private conversation)?? (Maybe this is another illustration of Wei’s point that our traditional norms just end up encouraging hidden agendas.)
I’m legitimately unsure what the correct norm here is at this point. (I was recently also writing a post that made a more general point, but all my examples were from working on LessWrong, and not sure about the best approach because, years from now, I do still want to be able to link to the post regardless of whether the object-examples are still salient)
One thing that I think clearly fits the currently implemented norms (albeit is higher effort), is to write two posts, one focusing on the crisp abstraction and one on the object-level politics. I think doing both in close proximity is both more honest and more helpful (since no one has to second guess if there’s a hidden agenda, but you can also be putting forth what is hopefully a good abstraction that will apply in future situations)
I think, when followed, the above norm produces better writing, in part because forcing yourself to look for 1-2 examples other than the current object-level-situation forces you to check if it’s a real pattern. (Although, another problem is it may be “all the examples” are from some variety of local politics, if those are the places one actually has clear enough knowledge)
The main counterpoint is that this all makes writing a lot harder, and I’m not confident it’s worth that extra effort. (And I think there are then downstream effects on what gets written and where people bother writing things up that are potentially bad)
Within the current normset (which I think is important to stick to for now, so that law can be predictable), another option is to go ahead and write the more opinionated post and leave it on Personal Blog (which does tend to end up getting seen by the people who actually have context on the local political situation)
Making this explicit would allow the important discussion of how widely applicable this model is. Things that are primarily about an extremely weird subgroup are interesting, but some participants tend to claim a more fundamental truth to their models than is really supported.
I think mostly to the writers. There’s a bit too much editorial control being used if the site enforces some tag like “bay-area rationalist culture related”. The hidden agenda norm (where authors seem to try to generalize without reference to the reasons they believe the model is useful) is something I’d like to see changed, but I think it needs to come from the authors and readers, not from the mods or site owners.
This is a response to Zack Davis in the comments on his recent post. It was getting increasingly meta, and I wasn’t very confident in my own take, so I’m replying over on my shortform.
I’m legitimately unsure what the correct norm here is at this point. (I was recently also writing a post that made a more general point, but all my examples were from working on LessWrong, and not sure about the best approach because, years from now, I do still want to be able to link to the post regardless of whether the object-examples are still salient)
One thing that I think clearly fits the currently implemented norms (albeit is higher effort), is to write two posts, one focusing on the crisp abstraction and one on the object-level politics. I think doing both in close proximity is both more honest and more helpful (since no one has to second guess if there’s a hidden agenda, but you can also be putting forth what is hopefully a good abstraction that will apply in future situations)
I think, when followed, the above norm produces better writing, in part because forcing yourself to look for 1-2 examples other than the current object-level-situation forces you to check if it’s a real pattern. (Although, another problem is it may be “all the examples” are from some variety of local politics, if those are the places one actually has clear enough knowledge)
The main counterpoint is that this all makes writing a lot harder, and I’m not confident it’s worth that extra effort. (And I think there are then downstream effects on what gets written and where people bother writing things up that are potentially bad)
Within the current normset (which I think is important to stick to for now, so that law can be predictable), another option is to go ahead and write the more opinionated post and leave it on Personal Blog (which does tend to end up getting seen by the people who actually have context on the local political situation)
Making this explicit would allow the important discussion of how widely applicable this model is. Things that are primarily about an extremely weird subgroup are interesting, but some participants tend to claim a more fundamental truth to their models than is really supported.
‘Make this explicit’ is a suggestion to writers, or to the LW mod team?
I think mostly to the writers. There’s a bit too much editorial control being used if the site enforces some tag like “bay-area rationalist culture related”. The hidden agenda norm (where authors seem to try to generalize without reference to the reasons they believe the model is useful) is something I’d like to see changed, but I think it needs to come from the authors and readers, not from the mods or site owners.