I suppose I should’ve used my free will to ignore the negative conditioning being applied to me? I’ll go do that as soon as I acquire free will.
This isn’t a goal you automatically succeed at; responding appropriately to criticism is a skill that takes development. I’ve put quite a bit of effort into training my skill at this, and am pleased with how far I have gotten, but recognize I still have a ways to go. In particular, I’m afraid I haven’t put much effort into developing my ability to train others; I’d recommend talking to Val about it; he should be able to teach you much more effectively than I can.
The primary technique that I use that’s communicable is to try and use defensiveness as a trigger for curiosity. That association is very useful, but I’m not sure what sort of practice would help teach it. Perhaps a helpful visualization is to try and ‘slide’ down from combativeness into curiosity.
Perspective alteration is also useful. People aren’t responding to you, but to what you created; Julia has a neat visualization trick of seeing people’s positions (including her own) as somewhat displaced from them during arguments. If Caledonian has something mean to say about one of your posts, well, it’s attacking your post, not you. (And even if he says something along the lines of “Eliezer is a big meanie head,” well, it could easily be the case that the Eliezer model in Caledonian’s mind is a big meanie head, but you don’t have to interpret that as an attack.)
And once you have distance from it, you can remove the tone and focus on the substance, and see whether or not you can use the substance to make yourself stronger.
Been there. Done that. Got tired. Try being a D-level Internet celebrity sometime. It will rapidly exceed reserves of patience you didn’t know you had.
I empathize. Looking back, I also realize I was unclear; in the grandparent I talked mostly about how to respond positively to criticism, when my original comment of responding appropriately to criticism was closer to the mark.
I don’t expect you to respond positively to all criticism; one of the benefits of being a celebrity is that there are other people who will do that for you. But if it takes patience for you to be indifferent to criticism, then I think you would see significant gains from further skill development. Deleting critical comments reduces your public effectiveness, and putting emotional satisfaction above that is not something I recommend. This is especially important for you, because you have pinned your public image so closely to rationality.
I don’t think you understand the concept here. I’m not deleting comments because it gives me a satisfying feeling. I deleted Caledonian’s comments because he was successfully shifting OB to troll comments and discussion of troll comments, and this was giving me an ‘ouch’ feeling each time I posted. I tried talking myself out of the ouch feeling but it didn’t actually work. I asked people to stop feeding the troll and that also didn’t work. So I started deleting comments because I don’t live in a world of things that ought to work.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
/r/science occasionally vaporizes half the comments in their threads now and it hasn’t seemed to hurt them any. I don’t think censorship actually hurts reputation very much, certainly not enough to make up for the degree to which meta blather hurts community.
I don’t think censorship actually hurts reputation very much, certainly not enough to make up for the degree to which meta blather hurts community.
Censorship of offtopic and idiots is very much appreciated and not usually regarded as the squicky kind of censorship, except on places like r/anarchism, which I wouldn’t worry about.
As always, I encourage you to do more public executions. (keyword “public”. The masses must know that there is a benevolent moderator delivering them from evil trolls).
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
+1. Even those of us who participate in meta discussions don’t necessarily appreciate their existence. Start with this thread.
I’m not deleting comments because it gives me a satisfying feeling.
What would it look like if you were?
I deleted Caledonian’s comments because he was successfully shifting OB to troll comments and discussion of troll comments, and this was giving me an ‘ouch’ feeling each time I posted. I tried talking myself out of the ouch feeling but it didn’t actually work, so there you go.
It’s not clear to me how to interpret this “and.” If he were successfully shifting OB to troll comments, and this was giving you a pleasant feeling every time you posted, you wouldn’t have deleted his comments? If lowering the discourse was reason enough to delete his comments, why not just list that as your primary reason, rather than your internal emotional response to him lowering the discourse?
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
It seems to me that there are several kinds of healthy meta discussions. I am worried that a ban on meta discussion will accelerate the departure of dissatisfied members of the community, because they have no outlet to process their dissatisfactions, and that this will decrease the quality and intellectual breadth of the community.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
Just voicing support for this, together with an outlet in terms of a periodic meta thread or that LW subreddit.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
It is a good idea, provided you also give people an explicit outlet to blow off steam, like http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong. Seems to have worked for the basilisk discussions. Alternatively, a periodic “Rules and Regulations” meta thread could help keep meta discussions away from other threads. Anyway, something like this works great for a few of subject-specific IRC channels I frequent or moderate.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealth
Have you considered having a separate “place” for it?
I haven’t seen anything to say that is for meta discussion, it mostly isn’t de facto, and I haven’t seen a “take it elsewhere” notice anywhere as an aternative to downvote and delete.
Nope; I only saw his comments when reading through the sequences, and thought they were often sharp (in both senses of the word). There are no doubt selection effects at play in which ones still existed for me to read them.
Caledonian was attacking posts because it knew it was getting under people’s skin.
To which the obvious response is to not let it get under your skin, and if you lack that level of control over your skin, to deliberately develop it.
But being able to handle criticism properly is a very important rational skill. Those who feel they cannot do it need to adjust their levels of self-advertisement as rationalists accordingly.
being able to handle criticism properly is a very important rational skill
You are absolutely right. Some parts of this very important rational skill are: properly discerning genuine criticism from trolling; properly discerning whether the person posting it is a useful or a harmful presence in the forum; properly deciding a useful course of action.
I think that Eliezer has indeed demonstrated possession of this very important rational skill in his handling of V_V’s criticism.
It’s not just yours; it’s also negative for the people trying to put together these events. Vaniver was wrong to single your reaction out in this instance.
For what it’s worth, I agree with your moderation decision in this circumstance.
Vaniver was wrong to single your reaction out in this instance.
I am also opposed to deleting comments because they cause antihedons for community organizers. In general, I am opposed to the exercise of institutional power to achieve hedons or avoid antihedons instead of to achieve institutional goals, and am particularly opposed in the case that doing so damages institutional goals.
It seems to me that the deletion of criticism, even ill-intended criticism, damages several key goals of the LW community.
Seems to me you misunderstand this aspect of trolling: someone systematically working to create an ugh field about some topic, person, or a blog. Pavlovian conditioning through online communication.
Imagine a situation where every time you speak about a topic X, someone kicks you in a foot. Not too painfully, but unpleasantly enough. Imagine that there is no way for you to avoid this feeling (except for not speaking about X ever again). Do you expect that in a long term it would influence your emotions about X, and your ability to think about X clearly? If yes, why would you want to give anyone this kind of power over you?
This is an art some people are very successful at. I don’t know why exactly they do that; maybe it is deliberate on their part, or maybe they have some bad emotions related with the topic or person, and they can’t resist sharing the emotions with a larger audience.
In the past I have left one website I participated on for a few years, just because one crazy person got angry at me for some specific disagreement (I criticized their favorite politician once), and then for the following months, wherever I posted a comment about whatever topic, that person made sure to reply to me, negatively. Each specific instance, viewed individually, could be interpreted as a honest disagreement. The problem was the pattern. After a few months, I was perfectly conditioned… I merely thought about writing a comment, and immediately I saw myself reading another negative response by the given person, other people reacting to that negative response, and… I stopped writing comments, because it felt bad.
I am not the only person who left that specific website because of this specific person. I tried to have a meta conversation about this kind of behavior, but the administrators made their values obvious: censorship is evil and completely unacceptable (unless swear words or personal threats are used). Recently they have acquired another website, whose previous owner agreed to work as a moderator for them. I happen to know the moderator personally, and a few days ago he said to me he is considering quitting the job he used to love, because in a similar way most of his valuable contributors were driven away by a single dedicated person, whom the site owners refuse to censor.
If you have a sufficiently persistent person and inflexible moderation policy, one person really is enough to destroy a website.
If you have a sufficiently persistent person and inflexible moderation policy, one person really is enough to destroy a website.
I agree that destructive people can do a lot of damage, and that removing them is a good idea. I also agree that destructiveness doesn’t even require maliciousness.
The strategy I’d like to see is “cultivate dissent.” If someone is being critical in an unproductive way, then show them the productive way to be critical, and if they fail to shape up, then remove them from the community, through a ban or deletion/hiding of comments. Documenting the steps along the way, and linking to previous warnings, makes it clear to observers that dissent is carefully managed, not suppressed.
Tying the moderator reaction to whether or not the criticism is fun to receive, rather than if it is useful to receive, is a recipe for receiving fun but useless criticisms and not receiving unfun but useful criticisms.
Receiving and processing unfun but useful criticisms is a core part of rationality, to the point that there are litanies about it.
The most unsuccessful thing about the message deletion is that now I am insatiable curious about what the message said and am thinking way more about that, and having to spend cognitive effort worrying about whether Eliezer overstepped his bounds or not, in a way that (I suspect) is at least as bad as whatever the original comment was. (This remains the case whether or not the message was truly awful)
If someone is being critical in an unproductive way, then show them the productive way to be critical, and if they fail to shape up, then remove them from the community, through a ban or deletion/hiding of comments.
How specifically? I imagine it would be good to tell certain people: “you have already written twenty comments with almost the same content, so either write a full article about it, or shut up”.
The idea is that writing an article requires more work, better thinking, and now you are a person who must defend an idea instead of just attacking people who have different ideas. Also an article focuses the discussion of one topic on one place.
Even if someone e.g. thinks that the whole LessWrong community is Eliezer’s suicidal cult, I would prefer if the person collected all their best evidence at one place, so people can focus on one topic and discuss it thoroughly, instead of posting dozens of sarcastic remarks in various, often unrelated places.
I imagine it would be good to tell certain people: “you have already written twenty comments with almost the same content, so either write a full article about it, or shut up”.
I like this idea quite a bit, though I would word it more politely.
I also imagine that many posters would benefit from suggestions on how to alter their commenting style in general, as well as specific suggestions about how to apply those communication principles to this situation.
Tying the moderator reaction to whether or not the criticism is fun to receive, rather than if it is useful to receive, is a recipe for receiving fun but useless criticisms and not receiving unfun but useful criticisms.
Retaliatory sniping like the one you described is common, both online and IRL, and is not easy to moderate against. It is present on this forum, as well, to some degree, and occasionally complained about. The problem is that it is hard to prevent, since each specific instance usually does not break the usual ground rules. A couple of places I know have an informal “no sniping” rule, but it is quite subjective and the violations are hard to prove, except in extreme cases. An enforcement attempt by the mods is often costly, as it often evokes the ire of the egalitarian rank and file, who only see the tip of the iceberg.
Interestingly, on karma-supporting forums it often takes the form of downvoting with impunity everything (or almost everything) written by a poster you don’t like. Because of its zero cost it is hard to resist, and because of its anonymity it is hard to guard against. Fortunately, it is not as destructive as explicit sniping, since the hate-on downvotes tend to get overwhelmed by the relevant feedback, whether positive or negative.
I suppose I should’ve used my free will to ignore the negative conditioning being applied to me? I’ll go do that as soon as I acquire free will.
This isn’t a goal you automatically succeed at; responding appropriately to criticism is a skill that takes development. I’ve put quite a bit of effort into training my skill at this, and am pleased with how far I have gotten, but recognize I still have a ways to go. In particular, I’m afraid I haven’t put much effort into developing my ability to train others; I’d recommend talking to Val about it; he should be able to teach you much more effectively than I can.
The primary technique that I use that’s communicable is to try and use defensiveness as a trigger for curiosity. That association is very useful, but I’m not sure what sort of practice would help teach it. Perhaps a helpful visualization is to try and ‘slide’ down from combativeness into curiosity.
Perspective alteration is also useful. People aren’t responding to you, but to what you created; Julia has a neat visualization trick of seeing people’s positions (including her own) as somewhat displaced from them during arguments. If Caledonian has something mean to say about one of your posts, well, it’s attacking your post, not you. (And even if he says something along the lines of “Eliezer is a big meanie head,” well, it could easily be the case that the Eliezer model in Caledonian’s mind is a big meanie head, but you don’t have to interpret that as an attack.)
And once you have distance from it, you can remove the tone and focus on the substance, and see whether or not you can use the substance to make yourself stronger.
Been there. Done that. Got tired. Try being a D-level Internet celebrity sometime. It will rapidly exceed reserves of patience you didn’t know you had.
I continue to support your decisions on heavier moderation, and once again thank you for your efforts to keep Less Wrong a well-tended garden.
I empathize. Looking back, I also realize I was unclear; in the grandparent I talked mostly about how to respond positively to criticism, when my original comment of responding appropriately to criticism was closer to the mark.
I don’t expect you to respond positively to all criticism; one of the benefits of being a celebrity is that there are other people who will do that for you. But if it takes patience for you to be indifferent to criticism, then I think you would see significant gains from further skill development. Deleting critical comments reduces your public effectiveness, and putting emotional satisfaction above that is not something I recommend. This is especially important for you, because you have pinned your public image so closely to rationality.
I don’t think you understand the concept here. I’m not deleting comments because it gives me a satisfying feeling. I deleted Caledonian’s comments because he was successfully shifting OB to troll comments and discussion of troll comments, and this was giving me an ‘ouch’ feeling each time I posted. I tried talking myself out of the ouch feeling but it didn’t actually work. I asked people to stop feeding the troll and that also didn’t work. So I started deleting comments because I don’t live in a world of things that ought to work.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea—in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
/r/science occasionally vaporizes half the comments in their threads now and it hasn’t seemed to hurt them any. I don’t think censorship actually hurts reputation very much, certainly not enough to make up for the degree to which meta blather hurts community.
Censorship of offtopic and idiots is very much appreciated and not usually regarded as the squicky kind of censorship, except on places like r/anarchism, which I wouldn’t worry about.
As always, I encourage you to do more public executions. (keyword “public”. The masses must know that there is a benevolent moderator delivering them from evil trolls).
+1. Even those of us who participate in meta discussions don’t necessarily appreciate their existence. Start with this thread.
What would it look like if you were?
It’s not clear to me how to interpret this “and.” If he were successfully shifting OB to troll comments, and this was giving you a pleasant feeling every time you posted, you wouldn’t have deleted his comments? If lowering the discourse was reason enough to delete his comments, why not just list that as your primary reason, rather than your internal emotional response to him lowering the discourse?
It seems to me that there are several kinds of healthy meta discussions. I am worried that a ban on meta discussion will accelerate the departure of dissatisfied members of the community, because they have no outlet to process their dissatisfactions, and that this will decrease the quality and intellectual breadth of the community.
SMITE!
Just voicing support for this, together with an outlet in terms of a periodic meta thread or that LW subreddit.
It is a good idea, provided you also give people an explicit outlet to blow off steam, like http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong. Seems to have worked for the basilisk discussions. Alternatively, a periodic “Rules and Regulations” meta thread could help keep meta discussions away from other threads. Anyway, something like this works great for a few of subject-specific IRC channels I frequent or moderate.
Have you considered having a separate “place” for it?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/
I haven’t seen anything to say that is for meta discussion, it mostly isn’t de facto, and I haven’t seen a “take it elsewhere” notice anywhere as an aternative to downvote and delete.
Were you around back then? Caledonian was attacking posts because it knew it was getting under people’s skin.
Nope; I only saw his comments when reading through the sequences, and thought they were often sharp (in both senses of the word). There are no doubt selection effects at play in which ones still existed for me to read them.
To which the obvious response is to not let it get under your skin, and if you lack that level of control over your skin, to deliberately develop it.
To quote ShannonFriedman from another post:
(Replacing ‘write bylaws’, of course, with ‘respond positively to criticism.’)
Willpower isn’t an infinite resource.
But being able to handle criticism properly is a very important rational skill. Those who feel they cannot do it need to adjust their levels of self-advertisement as rationalists accordingly.
You are absolutely right. Some parts of this very important rational skill are: properly discerning genuine criticism from trolling; properly discerning whether the person posting it is a useful or a harmful presence in the forum; properly deciding a useful course of action.
I think that Eliezer has indeed demonstrated possession of this very important rational skill in his handling of V_V’s criticism.
It’s not just yours; it’s also negative for the people trying to put together these events. Vaniver was wrong to single your reaction out in this instance.
For what it’s worth, I agree with your moderation decision in this circumstance.
I am also opposed to deleting comments because they cause antihedons for community organizers. In general, I am opposed to the exercise of institutional power to achieve hedons or avoid antihedons instead of to achieve institutional goals, and am particularly opposed in the case that doing so damages institutional goals.
It seems to me that the deletion of criticism, even ill-intended criticism, damages several key goals of the LW community.
Seems to me you misunderstand this aspect of trolling: someone systematically working to create an ugh field about some topic, person, or a blog. Pavlovian conditioning through online communication.
Imagine a situation where every time you speak about a topic X, someone kicks you in a foot. Not too painfully, but unpleasantly enough. Imagine that there is no way for you to avoid this feeling (except for not speaking about X ever again). Do you expect that in a long term it would influence your emotions about X, and your ability to think about X clearly? If yes, why would you want to give anyone this kind of power over you?
This is an art some people are very successful at. I don’t know why exactly they do that; maybe it is deliberate on their part, or maybe they have some bad emotions related with the topic or person, and they can’t resist sharing the emotions with a larger audience.
In the past I have left one website I participated on for a few years, just because one crazy person got angry at me for some specific disagreement (I criticized their favorite politician once), and then for the following months, wherever I posted a comment about whatever topic, that person made sure to reply to me, negatively. Each specific instance, viewed individually, could be interpreted as a honest disagreement. The problem was the pattern. After a few months, I was perfectly conditioned… I merely thought about writing a comment, and immediately I saw myself reading another negative response by the given person, other people reacting to that negative response, and… I stopped writing comments, because it felt bad.
I am not the only person who left that specific website because of this specific person. I tried to have a meta conversation about this kind of behavior, but the administrators made their values obvious: censorship is evil and completely unacceptable (unless swear words or personal threats are used). Recently they have acquired another website, whose previous owner agreed to work as a moderator for them. I happen to know the moderator personally, and a few days ago he said to me he is considering quitting the job he used to love, because in a similar way most of his valuable contributors were driven away by a single dedicated person, whom the site owners refuse to censor.
If you have a sufficiently persistent person and inflexible moderation policy, one person really is enough to destroy a website.
I agree that destructive people can do a lot of damage, and that removing them is a good idea. I also agree that destructiveness doesn’t even require maliciousness.
The strategy I’d like to see is “cultivate dissent.” If someone is being critical in an unproductive way, then show them the productive way to be critical, and if they fail to shape up, then remove them from the community, through a ban or deletion/hiding of comments. Documenting the steps along the way, and linking to previous warnings, makes it clear to observers that dissent is carefully managed, not suppressed.
Tying the moderator reaction to whether or not the criticism is fun to receive, rather than if it is useful to receive, is a recipe for receiving fun but useless criticisms and not receiving unfun but useful criticisms.
Receiving and processing unfun but useful criticisms is a core part of rationality, to the point that there are litanies about it.
Very much agree with this.
The most unsuccessful thing about the message deletion is that now I am insatiable curious about what the message said and am thinking way more about that, and having to spend cognitive effort worrying about whether Eliezer overstepped his bounds or not, in a way that (I suspect) is at least as bad as whatever the original comment was. (This remains the case whether or not the message was truly awful)
How specifically? I imagine it would be good to tell certain people: “you have already written twenty comments with almost the same content, so either write a full article about it, or shut up”.
The idea is that writing an article requires more work, better thinking, and now you are a person who must defend an idea instead of just attacking people who have different ideas. Also an article focuses the discussion of one topic on one place.
Even if someone e.g. thinks that the whole LessWrong community is Eliezer’s suicidal cult, I would prefer if the person collected all their best evidence at one place, so people can focus on one topic and discuss it thoroughly, instead of posting dozens of sarcastic remarks in various, often unrelated places.
I like this idea quite a bit, though I would word it more politely.
I also imagine that many posters would benefit from suggestions on how to alter their commenting style in general, as well as specific suggestions about how to apply those communication principles to this situation.
Useless criticisms are no fun at all.
Retaliatory sniping like the one you described is common, both online and IRL, and is not easy to moderate against. It is present on this forum, as well, to some degree, and occasionally complained about. The problem is that it is hard to prevent, since each specific instance usually does not break the usual ground rules. A couple of places I know have an informal “no sniping” rule, but it is quite subjective and the violations are hard to prove, except in extreme cases. An enforcement attempt by the mods is often costly, as it often evokes the ire of the egalitarian rank and file, who only see the tip of the iceberg.
Interestingly, on karma-supporting forums it often takes the form of downvoting with impunity everything (or almost everything) written by a poster you don’t like. Because of its zero cost it is hard to resist, and because of its anonymity it is hard to guard against. Fortunately, it is not as destructive as explicit sniping, since the hate-on downvotes tend to get overwhelmed by the relevant feedback, whether positive or negative.