I suppose it would be interesting to see if there is anyone left who does approve of how the basilisk was handled.
As opposed to which other specific possible way of handling it?
For example I may think that there were both better choices and worse choices, and the Eliezer’s choice wasn’t optimal, but also wasn’t obviously bad. Now do I agree or disagree?
That’s more approval than I was expecting anyone to still have. But it seems like it would be easy to offer a range of choices that would cover most of the possibilities (“was handled perfectly”, “was handled fine”, “was handled badly but not especially so”, “was handled badly enough that it should lead to policy changes”).
That said I think the question I’m most interested in is how many people think the current approach is better than the “null option”: no special treatment, discuss it normally the way we discuss anything else, and apply the usual up- and downvotes to basilisk-related content.
Saying “I disagree” does not say what the person would prefer instead. It creates a non-natural cluster of people preferring various kinds of alternative solutions. A list of choices would give more information. For example “moderator should ignore it completely”, “moderator should use a private message to suggest retracting the comment”, “moderator should move all related comments to a separate discussion”, etc.
In that way the people who think there should be a specific basilisk-related thread with trigger warnings don’t end up in the same set as e.g. the people who think the site should be completely unmoderated. (And maybe we could get a result that most people think Eliezer should have done something else, but there is no general consensus about what specifically it should be, so it is likely that if Eliezer had actually done something else, he would still get a lot of criticism. You can’t get this information by posing a dilemma of “I agree” and “I disagree”.)
Alternatively, I’d like to have an answer: “I don’t fucking care. Forever obsessing over a one-time event that happened years ago is more harmful than the event itself.” Which is connotationally completely different from both “I agree” and “I disagree”.
As opposed to which other specific possible way of handling it?
For example I may think that there were both better choices and worse choices, and the Eliezer’s choice wasn’t optimal, but also wasn’t obviously bad. Now do I agree or disagree?
That’s more approval than I was expecting anyone to still have. But it seems like it would be easy to offer a range of choices that would cover most of the possibilities (“was handled perfectly”, “was handled fine”, “was handled badly but not especially so”, “was handled badly enough that it should lead to policy changes”).
That said I think the question I’m most interested in is how many people think the current approach is better than the “null option”: no special treatment, discuss it normally the way we discuss anything else, and apply the usual up- and downvotes to basilisk-related content.
Saying “I disagree” does not say what the person would prefer instead. It creates a non-natural cluster of people preferring various kinds of alternative solutions. A list of choices would give more information. For example “moderator should ignore it completely”, “moderator should use a private message to suggest retracting the comment”, “moderator should move all related comments to a separate discussion”, etc.
In that way the people who think there should be a specific basilisk-related thread with trigger warnings don’t end up in the same set as e.g. the people who think the site should be completely unmoderated. (And maybe we could get a result that most people think Eliezer should have done something else, but there is no general consensus about what specifically it should be, so it is likely that if Eliezer had actually done something else, he would still get a lot of criticism. You can’t get this information by posing a dilemma of “I agree” and “I disagree”.)
Alternatively, I’d like to have an answer: “I don’t fucking care. Forever obsessing over a one-time event that happened years ago is more harmful than the event itself.” Which is connotationally completely different from both “I agree” and “I disagree”.
Yup, this is a very good comment,