Keep in mind that it’s not “more people” it’s more “people who participate in meta threads on Less Wrong”. I’ve observed a tremendous divergence between the latter set, and “what LWers seem to think during real-life conversations” (e.g. July Minicamp private discussions of LW which is where the anti-troll-thread ideas were discussed, asking what people thought about recent changes at Alicorn’s most recent dinner party). I’m guessing there’s some sort of effect where only people who disagree bother to keep looking at the thread, hence bother to comment.
Some “people” were claiming that we ought to fix things by moderation instead of making code changes, which does seem worth trying; so I’ve said to Alicorn to open fire with all weapons free, and am trying this myself while code work is indefinitely in progress. I confess I did anticipate that this would also be downvoted even though IIRC the request to do that was upvoted last time, because at this point I’ve formed the generalization “all moderator actions are downvoted”, either because only some people participate in meta threads, and/or the much more horrifying hypothesis “everyone who doesn’t like the status quo has already stopped regularly checking LessWrong”.
I’m diligently continuing to accept feedback from RL contact and attending carefully to this non-filtered source of impressions and suggestions, but I’m afraid I’ve pretty much written-off trying to figure out what the community-as-a-whole wants by looking at “the set of people who vigorously participate in meta discussions on LW” because it’s so much unlike the reactions I got when ideas for improving LW were being discussed at the July Minicamp, or the distribution of opinions at Alicorn’s last dinner party, and I presume that any other unfiltered source of reactions would find this conversation similarly unrepresentative.
Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong—least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run (“meta threads”). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn’s dinner parties.
Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong—least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run (“meta threads”). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn’s dinner parties.
I don’t see what this has to do with “loss aversion” (the phenomenon where people think losing a dollar is worse than failing to gain a dollar they could have gained), though that’s of course a tangential matter.
The point here is—and I say this with all due respect—it looks to me like you’re rationalizing a decision made for other reasons. What’s really going on here, it seems to me, is that, since you’re lucky enough to be part of a physical community of “similar” people (in which, of course, you happen to have high status), your brain thinks they are the ones who “really matter”—as opposed to abstract characters on the internet who weren’t part of the ancestral environment (and who never fail to critique you whenever they can).
That doesn’t change the fact that this is is an online community, and as such, is for us abstract characters, not your real-life dinner companions. You should be taking advice from the latter about running this site to about the same extent that Alicorn should be taking advice from this site about how to run her dinner parties.
Consider eating Roman-style to increase the intimacy / as a novel experience. Unfortunately, this is made way easier with specialized furniture- but you should be able to improvise with pillows. As well, it is a radically different way to eat that predates the invention of the fork (and so will work fine with hands or chopsticks, but not modern implements).
Consider seating logistics, and experiment with having different people decide who sits where (or next to whom). Dinner parties tend to turn out differently with different arrangements, but different subcultures will have different algorithms for establishing optimal seating, so the experimentation is usually necessary (and having different people decide serves both as a form of blinding and as a way to turn up evidence to isolate the algorithm faster).
Huh, I haven’t been assigning seats at all except for reserving the one with easiest kitchen access for myself. I’ve just been herding people towards the dining table.
since you’re lucky enough to be part of a physical community of “similar” people (in which, of course, you happen to have high status), your brain thinks they are the ones who “really matter”—as opposed to abstract characters on the internet who weren’t part of the ancestral environment (and who never fail to critique you whenever they can).
Was Eliezer “lucky” to have cofounded the Singularity Institute and Overcoming Bias? “Lucky” to have written the Sequences? “Lucky” to have founded LessWrong? “Lucky” to have found kindred minds, both online and in meatspace? Does he just “happen” to be among them?
Or has he, rather, searched them out and created communities for them to come together?
That doesn’t change the fact that this is is an online community, and as such, is for us abstract characters, not your real-life dinner companions. You should be taking advice from the latter about running this site to about the same extent that Alicorn should be taking advice from this site about how to run her dinner parties.
The online community of LessWrong does not own LessWrong. EY owns LessWrong, or some combination of EY, the SI, and whatever small number of other people they choose to share the running of the place with. To a limited extent it is for us, but its governance is not at all by us, and it wouldn’t be LessWrong if it was. The system of government here is enlightened absolutism.
since you’re lucky enough to be part of a physical community of “similar” people
Was Eliezer “lucky” to have cofounded the Singularity Institute and Overcoming Bias?
The causes of his being in such a happy situation (is that better?) were clearly not the point here, and, quite frankly, I think you knew that.
But if you insist on an answer to this irrelevant rhetorical question, the answer is yes. Eliezer_2012 is indeed quite fortunate to have been preceded by all those previous Eliezers who did those things.
EY owns LessWrong
Then, like I implied, he should just admit to making a decision on the basis of his own personal preference (if indeed that’s what’s going on), instead of constructing a rationalization about the opinions of offline folks being somehow more important or “appropriately” filtered.
Eliezer_2012 is indeed quite fortunate to have been preceded by all those previous Eliezers who did those things.
Eliezer only got to be Eliezer_2012 by doing all those things. Now, maybe Eliezer_201209120 did wake up this morning, as every morning, and think, “how extraordinarily, astoundingly lucky I am to be me!”, and there is some point to that thought—but not one that is relevant to this conversation.
Then, like I implied, he should just admit to making a decision on the basis of his own personal preference (if indeed that’s what’s going on), instead of constructing a rationalization about the opinions of offline folks being somehow more important or “appropriately” filtered.
It is tautologically his preference. I see no reason to think he is being dishonest in his stated reasons for that preference.
I’m afraid the above comment does not contribute any additional information to this discussion, and so I have downvoted it accordingly. Any substantive reply would consist of the repetition of points already made.
It’s easier to leave a forum than a country. Forum-dictators who abuse their power end up with empty forums.
Real world dictators who abuse their power often end up dead. (But perhaps not as much as real world dictators who do not abuse their power enough to secure it.)
Perhaps I misunderstood what ArisKatsaris was saying. I thought he meant something like this:
Dictators in countries tend to make living conditions in those countries less desirable. Dictators in forums tend to make posting in those forums (and/or reading them) more desirable.
If this is true, your objection is somewhat tangential to the topic (though an empty forum is less desirable than an active one). But perhaps he meant something else ?
Just my own personal experience of how moderated vs non-moderated forums tend to go, and as for countries, likewise my impression of what countries seem nice to live in.
You’re probably right about modern countries; however, as far as I understand, historically some countries did reasonably well under a dictatorship. Life under Hammurabi was far from being all peaches and cream, but it was still relatively prosperous, compared to the surrounding nations. A few Caesars did a pretty good job of administering Rome; of course, their successors royally screwed the whole thing up. Likewise, life in Tzarist Russia went through its ups and downs (mostly downs, to be fair).
Unfortunately, the kind of a person who seeks (and is able to achieve) absolute power is usually exactly the kind of person who should be kept away from power if at all possible. I’ve seen this happen in forums, where the unofficial grounds for banning a user inevitably devolve into “he doesn’t agree with me”, and “I don’t like his face, virtually speaking”.
Right, but that doesn’t mean they tend to be beneficial, either. We’re not arguing over which dictator is the worst, but whether dictators in forums are diametrically opposed to their real-world cousins.
I’d like to point out that Overcoming Bias, back in the day, was a dictatorship: Robin and Eliezer were explicitly in total control. Whereas Less Wrong was explictly set up to be community-moderated, with voting taking the place of moderator censorship. And the general consensus has always been that LW was an improvement over OB.
Freedom is never a terminal value. If you dig a bit, you should be able to explain why freedom is important/essential in particular circumstances.
Ironically, the appearance of freedom can be a default terminal value for humans and some other animals, if you take evolutionary psychology seriously. Or, to be more accurate, the appearance of absence of imposed restrictions can be a default terminal value that receives positive reinforcement cookies in the brain of humans and some other animals. Claustrophobia seems to be a particular subset of this that automates the jump from certain types of restrictions through the whole mental process that leads to panic-mode.
The abstract concept of freedom and its reality referent pattern, however, would be extremely unlikely to end up as a terminal value, if only even for its sheer mathematical complexity.
I’d be cautious about saying something’s never a terminal value. Given my model of the EEA, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to me if some set of people did have poor reactions to certain types of external constraint independently of their physical consequences, though “freedom” and its various antonyms seem too broad to capture the way I’d expect this to work.
Someone’s probably studied this, although I can’t dig up anything offhand.
I take back the “never” part, it is way too strong. What I meant to say is that the probability of someone proclaiming that freedom is her terminal value not having dug deep enough to find her true terminal values is extremely high.
(...) it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to me if some set of people did have poor reactions to certain types of external constraint independently of their physical consequences, (...)
Yes, I was commenting on this at the same time. The mental perception of restrictions, or the mental perception of absence of restrictions, can become a direct brainwired value through evolution, and is a simple step enough from other things already in there AFAICT. Freedom itself, however, independent of perception/observation and as a pattern of real interactions and decision choices and so on, seems far too complex to be something the brain would just randomly stumble upon in one go, especially only in some humans and not others.
See if you can replace “freedom” with its substance, and then evaluate whether that substance is something the human brain would be likely to just happen to, once in a while, find as a terminal, worth-in-itself value for some humans but not others, considering the complexity of this substance.
Yes, the mental node/label “freedom” can become a terminal value (a single mental node is certainly simple enough for evolution to stumble upon once in a while), but that’s directly related to a perception of absence of constraints or restrictions within a situation or context.
More complex values will not spontaneously form as terminal, built-in-brain values for animals that came into being through evolution. Evolution just doesn’t do that. Humans don’t rewire their brains and don’t reach into the Great Void of Light from the Beyond to randomly pick their terminal values.
Basically, the systematic absence of conceptual incentives and punishment-threats organized such as to funnel the possible decisions of a mind or set of minds towards a specific subset of possible actions (this is a simplified reduction of “freedom” which is still full of giant paintbrush handles) is not something a human mind would just accidentally happen to form a terminal value around (barring astronomical odds on the order of sun-explodes-next-second) without first developing terminal values around punishment-threats (which not all humans have, if any), decision tree sizes, and various other components of the very complex pattern we call “lack of freedom” (because lack of freedom is much easier to describe than freedom, and freedom is the absence or diminution of lack(s) of freedom).
I don’t see any evidence that a sufficient number of humans happen to have most of the prerequisite terminal values for there to be any specimen which has this complex construct as a terminal value.
As I said in a different comment, though, it’s very possible (and very likely) that the lighting-up of the mental node for freedom could be a terminal value, which feels from inside like freedom itself is a terminal value. However, the terminal value is really just the perception of things that light up the “freedom!” mental node, not the concept of freedom itself.
Once you try to describe “freedom” in terms that a program or algorithm could understand, you realize that it becomes extremely difficult for the program to even know whether there is freedom in something or not, and that it is an abstraction of multiple levels interacting at multiple scales in complex ways far, far above the building blocks of matter and reality, and which requires values and algorithms for a lot of other things. You can value the output of this computation as a terminal value, but not the whole “freedom” business.
A very clever person might be capable of tricking their own brain by abusing an already built-in terminal value on a freedom mental-node by hacking in safety-checks that will force them to shut up and multiply, using best possible algorithms to evaluate “real” freedom-or-no-freedom, and then light up the mental node based on that, but it would require lots of training and mind-hacking.
Hence, I maintain that it’s extremely unlikely that someone really has freedom itself as a terminal value, rather than feeling from inside like they value freedom. A bit of Bayes suggests I shouldn’t even pay attention to it in the space of possible hypotheses, because of the sheer amount of values that get false positives as being terminal due to feeling as such from inside versus the amount of known terminal values that have such a high level of complexity and interconnections between many patterns, reality-referents, indirect valuations, etc.
because lack of freedom is much easier to describe than freedom, and freedom is the absence or diminution of lack(s) of freedom
“Lack of freedom” can’t be significantly easier to describe than freedom—they differ by at most one bit.
No opinion on whether the mental node representing “freedom” or actual freedom is valued—that seems to suffer/benefit from all of the same issues as any other terminal value representing reality.
If someone tries to manacle me in a dungeon, I will perform great violence upon that person. I will give up food, water, shelter, and sleep to avoid it. I will sell prized possessions or great works of art if necessary to buy weapons to attack that person. I can’t think of a better way to describe what a terminal value feels like.
Manacling you in a dungeon also triggers your mental node for freedom and also triggers the appearance of restrictions and constraints, and more so you are the direct subject yourself. It lacks a control group and feels like a confirmation-biased experiment.
If I simply told you (and you have easy means of confirming that I’m telling the truth) that I’m restricting the movements of a dozen people you’ve never heard of, and the restriction of freedom is done in such a way that the “victims” will never even be aware that their freedoms are being restricted (e.g. giving a mental imperative to spend eight hours a day in a certain room with a denial-of-denial clause for it), would you still have the same intense this-is-wrong terminal value for no other reason than that their freedom is taken from them in some manner?
If so, why are employment contracts not making you panic in a constant stream of negative utility? Or compulsive education? Or prison? Or any other form of freedom reduction which you might not consider to be about “freedom” but which certainly fits most reductions of it?
Yes, I meant “freedom for me”—I thought that was implied.
If I simply told you (and you have easy means of confirming that I’m telling the truth) that I’m restricting the movements of a dozen people you’ve never heard of, and the restriction of freedom is done in such a way that the “victims” will never even be aware that their freedoms are being restricted (e.g. giving a mental imperative to vote republican with a denial-of-denial clause for it), would you still have the same intense this-is-wrong terminal value for no other reason than that their freedom is taken from them in some manner?
I would not want to be one of those people. If you convincingly told me that I was one of those people, I’d try to get out of it. If I was concerned about those people and thought they also valued freedom, I’d try to help them.
employment contracts
My employment can be terminated at will by either party. There are some oppressive labor laws that make this less the case, but they mostly favor me and neither myself nor my employer is going to call on them. What’s an “employment contract” and why would I want one?
compulsive education
Compulsory education is horrible. It’s profoundly illiberal and I believe it’s a violation of the constitutional amendment against slavery. I will not send my children to school and “over my dead body” is my response to anyone who intends to take them. I try to convince my friends not to send their children to school either.
prison
I don’t intend to go to prison and would fight to avoid it. If my friends were in prison, I’d do what I could to get them out.
I would not want to be one of those people. If you convincingly told me that I was one of those people, I’d try to get out of it. If I was concerned about those people and thought they also valued freedom, I’d try to help them.
...therefore, if you are never aware of your own lack of freedom, you do not assign value to this. Which loops around back to the appearance of freedom being your true value. This would be the most uncharitable interpretation.
It seems, however, that in general you will be taking the course of action which maximizes the visible freedom that you can perceive, rather than a course of action you know to be optimized in general for widescale freedom. It seems more like a cognitive alert to certain triggers, and a high value being placed on not triggering this particular alert, than valuing the principles.
Edit: Also, thanks for indulging my curiosity and for all your replies on this topic.
Would you sell possessions to buy weapons to attack a person would runs an online voluntary community who changes the rules without consulting anyone?
If the two situations are comparable, I think it’s important to know exactly why.
Also note that manacling you to a dungeon isn’t just eliminating your ability freely choose things arbitrarily, it’s preventing you from having satisfying relationships, access to good food, meaningful life’s work and other pleasures. Would you mind being in a prison that enabled you to do those things?
Would you mind being in a prison that enabled you to do those things?
Yes. If this were many years ago and I weren’t so conversant on the massive differences between the ways different humans see the world, I’d be very confused that you even had to ask that question.
Would you sell possessions to buy weapons to attack a person would runs an online voluntary community who changes the rules without consulting anyone?
No. There are other options. At the moment I’m still vainly hoping that Eliezer will see reason. I’m strongly considering just dropping out.
I feel like asking this question is wrong, but I want the information:
If I know that letting you have freedom will be hurtful (like, say, I tell you you’re going to get run over by a train, and you tell me you won’t, but I know that you’re in denial-of-denial and subconsciously seeking to walk on train tracks, and my only way to prevent your death is to manacle you in a dungeon for a few days), would you still consider the freedom terminally important? More important than the hurt? Which other values can be traded off? Would it be possible to figure out an exchange rate with enough analysis and experiment?
Yes. If this were many years ago and I weren’t so conversant on the massive differences between the ways different humans see the world, I’d be very confused that you even had to ask that question.
Regarding this, what if I told you “Earth was a giant prison all along. We just didn’t know. Also, no one built the prison, and no one is actively working to keep us in here—there never was a jailor in the first place, we were just born inside the prison cell. We’re just incapable of taking off the manacles on our own, since we’re already manacled.”? In fact, I do tell you this. It’s pretty much true that we’ve been prisoners of many, many things. Is your freedom node only triggered at the start of imprisonment, the taking away of a freedom once had? What if someone is born in the prison Raemon proposes? Is it still inherently wrong? Is it inherently wrong that we are stuck on Earth? If no, would it become inherently wrong if you knew that someone is deliberately keeping us here on Earth by actively preventing us from learning how to escape Earth?
The key point being: What is the key principle that triggers your “Freedom” light? The causal action that removes freedoms? The intentions behind the constraints?
It seems logical to me to assume that if you have freedom as a terminal value, then being able to do anything, anywhere, be anything, anyhow, anywhen, control time and space and the whole universe at will better than any god, without any possible restrictions or limitations of any kind, should be the Ultimately Most Supremely Good maximal possible utility optimization, and therefore reality and physics would be your worst possible Enemy, seeing as how it is currently the strongest Jailer than restricts and constrains you the most. I’m quite aware that this is hyperbole and most likely a strawman, but it is, to me, the only plausible prediction for a terminal value of yourself being free.
You’re right, this does answer most of my questions. I had made incorrect assumptions about what you would consider optimal.
After updates based on this, it now appears much more likely for me that you use terminal valuation of your freedom node such that it gets triggered by more rational algorithms that really do attempt to detect restrictions and constraints in more than mere feeling-of-control manner. Is this closer to how you would describe your value?
I’m still having trouble with the idea of considering a universe optimized for one’s own personal freedom as a best thing (I tend to by default think of how to optimize for collective sum utilities of sets of minds, rather than one). It is not what I expected.
True, and I don’t quite see where I implied this. If you’re referring to the optimal universe question, it seems quite trivial that if the universe literally acts according to your every will with no restrictions whatsoever, any other terminal values will instantly be fulfilled to their absolute maximal states (including unbounded values that can increase to infinity) along with adjustment of their referents (if that’s even relevant anymore).
No compromise is needed, since you’re free from the laws of logic and physics and whatever else might prevent you from tiling the entire universe with paperclips AND tiling the entire universe with giant copies of Eliezer’s mind.
So if that sort of freedom is a terminal value, this counterfactual universe trivially becomes the optimal target, since it’s basically whatever you would find to be your optimal universe regardless of any restrictions.
Sometimes freedom is a bother, and sometimes it’s a way to die quickly, and sometimes it’s essential for survival and that “good life” of yours (depending on what you mean by it). You can certainly come up with plenty of examples of each. I recommend you do before pronouncing that freedom is a terminal value for you.
This is a community blog. If your community has a dictator, you should overthrow him.
With the caveats:
If the dictator isn’t particularly noticed to be behaving in that kind of way it is probably not worth enforcing the principle. ie. It is fine for people to have the absolute power to do whatever they want regardless of the will of the people as long as they don’t actually use it. A similar principle would also apply if the President of the United States started issuing pardons for whatever he damn well pleased. If US television informs me correctly (and it may not) then he is technically allowed to do so but I don’t imagine that power would remain if it was used frequently for his own ends. (And I doubt it the reaction against excessive abuse of power would be limited to just not voting for him again.)
The ‘should’ is weak. ie. It applies all else being equal but with a huge “if it is convenient to do so and you haven’t got something else you’d rather do with your time” implied.
“If you see someone about to die and can save them, you should.”
Now, you might agree or disagree with this. But “If you see someone about to die and can save them, you should, if it is convenient to do so and you haven’t got something else you’d rather do with your time” seems more like disagreement to me.
I don’t think so. I agree with that statement, with the same caveats. If there are also 100 people about to die and I can save them instead, I should probably do so. I suppose it depends how morally-informed you think “something else you’d rather do with your time” is supposed to be.
it’s subject to the Loss Aversion effect where the dissatisfied speak up in much greater numbers
But Eliezer Yudkowsky, too, is subject to the loss aversion effect. Just as those dissatisfied with changes overweight change’s negative consequences, so does Eliezer Yudkowsky overweight his dissatisfaction with changes initiated by the “community.” (For example, increased tolerance of responding to “trolling.”)
Moreover, if you discount the result of votes on rules, why do you assume votes on other matters are more rational? The “community” uses votes on substantive postings to discern a group consensus. These votes are subject to the same misdirection through loss aversion as are procedural issues. If the community has taken a mistaken philosophical or scientific position, people who agree with that position will be biased to vote down postings that challenge that position, a change away from a favored position being a loss. (Those who agree with the newly espoused position will be less energized, since they weight their potential gain less than their opponents weigh their potential loss.)
If you think “voting” is so highly distorted that it fails to represent opinion, you should probably abolish it entirely.
True. For that to be an effective communication channel, there would need to be a control group. As for how to create that control group or run any sort of blind (let alone double-blind) testing… yeah, I have no idea. Definitely a problem.
ETA: By “I have no idea”, I mean “Let me find my five-minute clock and I’ll get back to you on this if anything comes up”.
So I thought for five minutes, then looked at what’s been done in other websites before.
The best I have is monthly surveys with randomized questions from a pool of stuff that matters for LessWrong (according to the current or then-current staff, I would presume) with a few community suggestions, and then possibly later implementation of a weighing algorithm for diminishing returns when multiple users with similar thread participation (e.g. two people that always post in the same thread) give similar feedback.
The second part is full of holes and horribly prone to “Death by Poking With Stick”, but an ideal implementation of this seems like it would get a lot more quality feedback than what little gets through low-bandwidth in-person conversations.
There are other, less practical (but possibly more accurate) alternatives, of course. Like picking random LW users every so often, appearing at their front door, giving them a brain-scan headset (e.g. an Emotiv Epoc), and having them wear the headset while being on LW so you can collect tons of data.
I’d stick with live feedback and simple surveys to begin with.
I’ve moderated a few forums before, and with that experience in mind I’d have to agree that there’s a huge, and generally hugely negative, selection bias at play in online response to moderator decisions. It’d be foolish to take those responses as representative of the entire userbase, and I’ve seen more than one forum suffer as a result of such a misconception.
That being said, though, I think it’s risky to write off online user feedback in favor of physical. The people you encounter privately are just as much a filtered set as those who post feedback here, though the filters point in different directions: you’re selecting people involved in the LW interpersonal community, for one thing, which filters out new and casual users right off the bat, and since they’re probably more likely to be personally friendly to you we can also expect affect heuristics to come into play. Skepticism toward certain LW norms may also be selected against, which could lead people to favor new policies reinforcing those norms. Moreover, I’ve noticed a trend in the Bay Area group—not necessarily an irrational one, but a noticeable one—toward treating the online community as low-quality relative to local groups, which we might expect to translate into antipathy towards its status quo.
I don’t know what the weightings should be, but if you’re looking for a representative measure of user preferences I think it’d be wise to take both groups into account to some extent.
I will be starting another Less Wrong Census/Survey in about three weeks; in accordance with the tradition I will first start a thread asking for question ideas. If you can think of a good list of opinions you want polled in the next few weeks, consider posting them there and I’ll stick them in.
You… know I don’t optimize dinner parties as focus groups, right? The people who showed up that night were people who like chili (I had to swap in backup guests for some people who don’t) and who hadn’t been over too recently. A couple of the attendees from that party barely even post on LW.
You… know I don’t optimize dinner parties as focus groups, right?
It is perhaps more importantly dinner parties are optimised for status and social comfort. Actually giving honest feedback rather than guessing passwords would be a gross faux pas.
Getting feedback at dinner parties is a good way to optimise the social experience of getting feedback and translate one’s own status into the agreement of others.
If I were to guess, I’d guess that the main filter criteria for your dinner parties is geographical; when you have a dinner party in the Bay area, you invite people who can be reasonably expected to be in the Bay area. This is not entirely independant of viewpoint—memes which are more common local to the Bay area will be magnified in such a group—but the effect of that filter on moderation viewpoints is probably pretty random (similarly, the effect of the filter of ‘people who like chili’ on moderation viewpoints is probably also pretty random).
So the dinner party filter exists, but it less likely to pertain to the issue at hand than the online self-selection filter.
The problem with the dinner party filter is not that it is too strong, but that it is too weak: it will for example let through people who aren’t even regular users of the site.
That’s fair, and your strategy makes sense. I also agree with DaFranker, below, regarding meta-threads.
This said, however, at the time when I joined Less Wrong, my model of the site was something like, “a place where smart people hold well-reasoned discussions on a wide range of interesting topics” (*). TheOtherDave’s comment, in conjunction with yours, paints a different picture of what you’d like Less Wrong to be; let’s call it Less Wrong 2.0. It’s something akin to, “a place where Eliezer and a few of his real-life friends give lectures on topics they think are important, with Q&A afterwards”.
Both models have merit, IMO, but I probably wouldn’t have joined Less Wrong 2.0. I don’t mean that as any kind of an indictment; if I were in your shoes, I would definitely want to exclude people like this Bugmaster guy from Less Wrong 2.0, as well.
Still, hopefully this one data point was useful in some way; if not, please downvote me !
EY has always seemed to me to want LW to be a mechanism for “raising the sanity waterline”. To the extent that wide-ranging discussion leads to that, I’d expect him to endorse it; to the extent that wide-ranging discussion leads away from that, I’d expect him to reject it. This ought not be a surprise.
Nor ought it be surprising that much of the discussion here does not noticeably progress this goal.
That said, there does seem to be a certain amount of non-apple selling going on here; I don’t think there’s a cogent model of what activity on LW would raise the sanity waterline, so attention is focused instead on trying to eliminate the more blatant failures: troll-baiting, for example, or repetitive meta-threads.
Which is not a criticism; it is what it is. If I don’t know the cause, that’s no reason not to treat the symptoms.
This said, however, at the time when I joined Less Wrong, my model of the site was something like, “a place where smart people hold well-reasoned discussions on a wide range of interesting topics” (*). TheOtherDave’s comment, in conjunction with yours, paints a different picture of what you’d like Less Wrong to be; let’s call it Less Wrong 2.0. It’s something akin to, “a place where Eliezer and a few of his real-life friends give lectures on topics they think are important, with Q&A afterwards”.
No; you’re conflating “Eliezer considers he should have the last word on moderation policy” and “Eliezer considers LessWrong’s content should be mostly about what he has to say”.
The changes of policy Eliezer is pushing have no effect on the “main” content of the site, i.e. posts that are well-received, and upvoted. The only disagreement seems to be about sprawling threads and reactions to problem users. I don’t know where you’re getting “Eliezer and a few of his real-life friends give lectures on topics they think are important” out of that, it’s not as if Eliezer has been posting many “lectures” recently.
I was under the impression that Eliezer agreed with TheOtherDave’s comment upthread:
Mostly [Eliezer is] coming across to me as having lost patience with the community not being what he wants it to be...
Combined with Eliezer’s rather aggressive approach to moderation (f.ex. deleting downvoted comments outright), this did create the impression that Eliezer wants to restrict LessWrong’s content to a narrow list of specific topics.
Me too. Troll posts and really wrong people are too distracting without some form of intervention. Not sure the current solution is optimal (but this point has been extensively argued elsewhere), but I applaud the effort to actually stick one’s neck out and try something.
People who agree are more likely to keep quiet than people who disagree. Rewarding them for speaking up reduces that effect, which means comments get closer to accurately representing consensus.
It’s the impression I’ve got from informal observation, and it’s true when talking about myself specifically. (If I disagree, I presumably have something to say that has not yet been said. If I agree, that’s less likely to be true. I don’t know if that’s the whole reason, but it feels like a substantial part of it.)
My own experience is that while people are more likely to express immediate disagreement than agreement in contexts where disagreement is expressed at all, they are also more likely to express disagreement with expressed disagreement in such forums, from which agreement can be inferred (much as I can infer your agreement with EY’s behavior from your disagreement with Will_Newsome). The idea that they are more likely to keep quiet in general, or that people are more likely to anonymously downvote what they disagree with than upvote what they agree with, doesn’t jive with my experience.
And in contexts where disagreement is not expressed, I find the Asch results align pretty well with my informal expectations of group behavior.
I am confused by your confusion. The claim wasn’t that content people whine less, it was that they’re more likely to keep quiet. The only way I can make sense of your comments is if you’re equating the two—that is, if you assume that the only options are “keep quiet” or “whine”—but that seems an uncharitable reading. Still, if that is what you mean, I simply disagree.
if you assume that the only options are “keep quiet” or “whine”
Yeah, I phrased it quite poorly. Should have been “speak up less”. The point I was (unsuccessfully) making is that both groups have an option of acting (expensive) or not acting (cheap). Acting is what people generally do when they want to change the current state of the world, and non-acting when they are happy with it. Thus any expensive reaction is skewed toward negative. I should probably look up some sources on that, but I will just tap out instead, due to rapidly waning interest.
Sometimes AKA the “Forum Whiners” effect, well known in the PC games domain:
When new PC games are released, almost inevitably the main forums for the game will become flooded with a large surge of complaints, negative reviews, rage, rants, and other negative stuff. This is fully expected and the absence of such is actually a bad sign. People that are happy with the product are playing the game, not wasting their time looking for forums and posting comments there—while people who have a problem or are really unhappy often look for an outlet or a solution to their issues (though the former in much greater numbers, usually). If no one is bothering to post on the forums, then that’s evidence that no one cares about the game in the first place.
I see a lot of similarities here, so perhaps that’s one thing worth looking into? I’d expect some people somewhere to have done the math already on this feedback (possibly by comparing to overall sales, survey results and propagation data), though I may be overestimating the mathematical propensity of the people involved.
Regarding the stop-watching-threads thing, I’ve noticed that I pretty much always stop paying attention to a thread once I’ve gotten the information I wanted out of it, and will only come back to it if someone directly replies to one of my comments (since it shows up in the inbox). This has probably been suggested before, but maybe a “watchlist” to mark some threads to show up new comments visibly somewhere and/or a way to have grandchildren comments to one of your own show up somehow could help? I often miss it when someone replies to a reply to my comment.
In case you need assurance from the online sector. I wholeheartedly welcome any increase in the prevalence of the banhammer, and the “pay 5 karma” thing seems good too.
During that Eridu fiasco, I kept hoping a moderator would do something like “this thread is locked until Eridu taboos all those nebulous affect-laden words.”
Benevolent dictators who aren’t afraid of dissent are a huge win, IMO.
At risk of failing to JFGI: can someone quickly summarize what remaining code work we’d like done? I’ve started wading into the LW code, and am not finding it quite as impenetrable as last time, so concrete goals would be good to have.
Fair enough. All I see is the vote-counts and online comments, but the real-life commenters are of course also people, and I can understand deciding to attend more to them.
Yeah, exactly. Which is why I took it to mean a simple preference for considering the community of IRL folks. Which is not meant as a criticism; after all, I also take more seriously input from folks in my real life than folks on the internet.
Well, I don’t do that, clearly, since I don’t run such an Internet forum.
Less trivially, though… yeah, I suspect I would do so. The tendency to take more seriously people whose faces I can see is pretty strong. Especially if it were a case like this one, where what the RL people are telling me synchronizes better with what I want to do in the first place, and thus gives me a plausible-feeling justification for doing it.
I suspect you’re not really asking me what I do, though, so much as implicitly suggesting that what EY is doing is the wrong thing to do… that the admins ought to attend more to commenters and voters who are actually participating on the thread, rather than attending primarily to the folks who attend the minicamp or Alicorn’s dinner parties.
If so, I don’t think it’s that simple. Fundamentally it depends on whether LW’s sponsors want it to be a forum that demonstrates and teaches superior Internet discourse or whether it wants to be a forum for people interested in rational thinking to discuss stuff they like to discuss. If it’s the latter, then democracy is appropriate. If it’s the former, then purging stuff that fails to demonstrate superior Internet discourse is appropriate.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
Yes, that’s certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it’s currently being done, there’s too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.
Keep in mind that it’s not “more people” it’s more “people who participate in meta threads on Less Wrong”. I’ve observed a tremendous divergence between the latter set, and “what LWers seem to think during real-life conversations” (e.g. July Minicamp private discussions of LW which is where the anti-troll-thread ideas were discussed, asking what people thought about recent changes at Alicorn’s most recent dinner party). I’m guessing there’s some sort of effect where only people who disagree bother to keep looking at the thread, hence bother to comment.
Some “people” were claiming that we ought to fix things by moderation instead of making code changes, which does seem worth trying; so I’ve said to Alicorn to open fire with all weapons free, and am trying this myself while code work is indefinitely in progress. I confess I did anticipate that this would also be downvoted even though IIRC the request to do that was upvoted last time, because at this point I’ve formed the generalization “all moderator actions are downvoted”, either because only some people participate in meta threads, and/or the much more horrifying hypothesis “everyone who doesn’t like the status quo has already stopped regularly checking LessWrong”.
I’m diligently continuing to accept feedback from RL contact and attending carefully to this non-filtered source of impressions and suggestions, but I’m afraid I’ve pretty much written-off trying to figure out what the community-as-a-whole wants by looking at “the set of people who vigorously participate in meta discussions on LW” because it’s so much unlike the reactions I got when ideas for improving LW were being discussed at the July Minicamp, or the distribution of opinions at Alicorn’s last dinner party, and I presume that any other unfiltered source of reactions would find this conversation similarly unrepresentative.
Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong—least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run (“meta threads”). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn’s dinner parties.
Have I got that right?
That’s how politics usually works, yes.
Can we call this the social availability heuristic?
Also, you have to attend dinner parties on a day when Eliezer is invited and doesn’t decline due to being on a weird diet that week.
Don’t worry, I’m sure that venue’s attendees are selected neutrally.
All you have to do is run into me in any venue whatsoever where the attendees weren’t filtered by their interest in meta threads. :)
But now that you’ve stated this, you have the ability to rationalize any future IRL meta discussion...
Can “Direct email, skype or text-chat communications to E.Y.” count as a venue? Purely out of curiosity.
The problem is that if you initiate it, it’s subject to the Loss Aversion effect where the dissatisfied speak up in much greater numbers.
I don’t see what this has to do with “loss aversion” (the phenomenon where people think losing a dollar is worse than failing to gain a dollar they could have gained), though that’s of course a tangential matter.
The point here is—and I say this with all due respect—it looks to me like you’re rationalizing a decision made for other reasons. What’s really going on here, it seems to me, is that, since you’re lucky enough to be part of a physical community of “similar” people (in which, of course, you happen to have high status), your brain thinks they are the ones who “really matter”—as opposed to abstract characters on the internet who weren’t part of the ancestral environment (and who never fail to critique you whenever they can).
That doesn’t change the fact that this is is an online community, and as such, is for us abstract characters, not your real-life dinner companions. You should be taking advice from the latter about running this site to about the same extent that Alicorn should be taking advice from this site about how to run her dinner parties.
Do you have advice on how to run my dinner parties?
Vaniver and DaFranker have both offered sensible, practical, down-to-earth advice. I, on the other hand, have one word for you: Airship.
Not plastics?
Consider eating Roman-style to increase the intimacy / as a novel experience. Unfortunately, this is made way easier with specialized furniture- but you should be able to improvise with pillows. As well, it is a radically different way to eat that predates the invention of the fork (and so will work fine with hands or chopsticks, but not modern implements).
Consider seating logistics, and experiment with having different people decide who sits where (or next to whom). Dinner parties tend to turn out differently with different arrangements, but different subcultures will have different algorithms for establishing optimal seating, so the experimentation is usually necessary (and having different people decide serves both as a form of blinding and as a way to turn up evidence to isolate the algorithm faster).
Huh, I haven’t been assigning seats at all except for reserving the one with easiest kitchen access for myself. I’ve just been herding people towards the dining table.
Was Eliezer “lucky” to have cofounded the Singularity Institute and Overcoming Bias? “Lucky” to have written the Sequences? “Lucky” to have founded LessWrong? “Lucky” to have found kindred minds, both online and in meatspace? Does he just “happen” to be among them?
Or has he, rather, searched them out and created communities for them to come together?
The online community of LessWrong does not own LessWrong. EY owns LessWrong, or some combination of EY, the SI, and whatever small number of other people they choose to share the running of the place with. To a limited extent it is for us, but its governance is not at all by us, and it wouldn’t be LessWrong if it was. The system of government here is enlightened absolutism.
The causes of his being in such a happy situation (is that better?) were clearly not the point here, and, quite frankly, I think you knew that.
But if you insist on an answer to this irrelevant rhetorical question, the answer is yes. Eliezer_2012 is indeed quite fortunate to have been preceded by all those previous Eliezers who did those things.
Then, like I implied, he should just admit to making a decision on the basis of his own personal preference (if indeed that’s what’s going on), instead of constructing a rationalization about the opinions of offline folks being somehow more important or “appropriately” filtered.
I would replace preference with hypothesis of what constitutes the optimal rationality-refining community.
They are sensibly the same, but I find the latter to be a more useful reduction that is more open to being refined in turn.
Eliezer only got to be Eliezer_2012 by doing all those things. Now, maybe Eliezer_201209120 did wake up this morning, as every morning, and think, “how extraordinarily, astoundingly lucky I am to be me!”, and there is some point to that thought—but not one that is relevant to this conversation.
It is tautologically his preference. I see no reason to think he is being dishonest in his stated reasons for that preference.
I’m afraid the above comment does not contribute any additional information to this discussion, and so I have downvoted it accordingly. Any substantive reply would consist of the repetition of points already made.
You’re welcome.
This is a community blog. If your community has a dictator, you should overthrow him.
Is the overthrowing of dictators a terminal value to you, or is it that you associate it with good consequences?
A little of both. Freedom is a terminal value, and heuristically dictators cause bad consequences.
My own view: Dictators in countries tend to cause bad consequences. Dictators in forums tend to cause good consequences.
Do you have any evidence for that ? In my experience, it all depends on the dictator, not on the venue.
It’s easier to leave a forum than a country. Forum-dictators who abuse their power end up with empty forums.
Real world dictators who abuse their power often end up dead. (But perhaps not as much as real world dictators who do not abuse their power enough to secure it.)
Not as often as you seem to think.
Perhaps I misunderstood what ArisKatsaris was saying. I thought he meant something like this:
If this is true, your objection is somewhat tangential to the topic (though an empty forum is less desirable than an active one). But perhaps he meant something else ?
Since it’s easier to leave, a dictator in a forum has more motivation not to abuse his power.
Just my own personal experience of how moderated vs non-moderated forums tend to go, and as for countries, likewise my impression of what countries seem nice to live in.
You’re probably right about modern countries; however, as far as I understand, historically some countries did reasonably well under a dictatorship. Life under Hammurabi was far from being all peaches and cream, but it was still relatively prosperous, compared to the surrounding nations. A few Caesars did a pretty good job of administering Rome; of course, their successors royally screwed the whole thing up. Likewise, life in Tzarist Russia went through its ups and downs (mostly downs, to be fair).
Unfortunately, the kind of a person who seeks (and is able to achieve) absolute power is usually exactly the kind of person who should be kept away from power if at all possible. I’ve seen this happen in forums, where the unofficial grounds for banning a user inevitably devolve into “he doesn’t agree with me”, and “I don’t like his face, virtually speaking”.
“Dictators” in forums can’t kill people or hold them hostage.
Right, but that doesn’t mean they tend to be beneficial, either. We’re not arguing over which dictator is the worst, but whether dictators in forums are diametrically opposed to their real-world cousins.
I’d like to point out that Overcoming Bias, back in the day, was a dictatorship: Robin and Eliezer were explicitly in total control. Whereas Less Wrong was explictly set up to be community-moderated, with voting taking the place of moderator censorship. And the general consensus has always been that LW was an improvement over OB.
Freedom is never a terminal value. If you dig a bit, you should be able to explain why freedom is important/essential in particular circumstances.
Ironically, the appearance of freedom can be a default terminal value for humans and some other animals, if you take evolutionary psychology seriously. Or, to be more accurate, the appearance of absence of imposed restrictions can be a default terminal value that receives positive reinforcement cookies in the brain of humans and some other animals. Claustrophobia seems to be a particular subset of this that automates the jump from certain types of restrictions through the whole mental process that leads to panic-mode.
The abstract concept of freedom and its reality referent pattern, however, would be extremely unlikely to end up as a terminal value, if only even for its sheer mathematical complexity.
I agree with this.
I’d be cautious about saying something’s never a terminal value. Given my model of the EEA, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to me if some set of people did have poor reactions to certain types of external constraint independently of their physical consequences, though “freedom” and its various antonyms seem too broad to capture the way I’d expect this to work.
Someone’s probably studied this, although I can’t dig up anything offhand.
I take back the “never” part, it is way too strong. What I meant to say is that the probability of someone proclaiming that freedom is her terminal value not having dug deep enough to find her true terminal values is extremely high.
That seems reasonable. Especially given how often freedom gets used as an applause light.
Yes, I was commenting on this at the same time. The mental perception of restrictions, or the mental perception of absence of restrictions, can become a direct brainwired value through evolution, and is a simple step enough from other things already in there AFAICT. Freedom itself, however, independent of perception/observation and as a pattern of real interactions and decision choices and so on, seems far too complex to be something the brain would just randomly stumble upon in one go, especially only in some humans and not others.
I agree that freedom is an instrumental value. I disagree that it is never a terminal value. It is constitutive of the good life.
See if you can replace “freedom” with its substance, and then evaluate whether that substance is something the human brain would be likely to just happen to, once in a while, find as a terminal, worth-in-itself value for some humans but not others, considering the complexity of this substance.
Yes, the mental node/label “freedom” can become a terminal value (a single mental node is certainly simple enough for evolution to stumble upon once in a while), but that’s directly related to a perception of absence of constraints or restrictions within a situation or context.
I don’t see what you’re getting at here. All terminal values are agent-specific.
More complex values will not spontaneously form as terminal, built-in-brain values for animals that came into being through evolution. Evolution just doesn’t do that. Humans don’t rewire their brains and don’t reach into the Great Void of Light from the Beyond to randomly pick their terminal values.
Basically, the systematic absence of conceptual incentives and punishment-threats organized such as to funnel the possible decisions of a mind or set of minds towards a specific subset of possible actions (this is a simplified reduction of “freedom” which is still full of giant paintbrush handles) is not something a human mind would just accidentally happen to form a terminal value around (barring astronomical odds on the order of sun-explodes-next-second) without first developing terminal values around punishment-threats (which not all humans have, if any), decision tree sizes, and various other components of the very complex pattern we call “lack of freedom” (because lack of freedom is much easier to describe than freedom, and freedom is the absence or diminution of lack(s) of freedom).
I don’t see any evidence that a sufficient number of humans happen to have most of the prerequisite terminal values for there to be any specimen which has this complex construct as a terminal value.
As I said in a different comment, though, it’s very possible (and very likely) that the lighting-up of the mental node for freedom could be a terminal value, which feels from inside like freedom itself is a terminal value. However, the terminal value is really just the perception of things that light up the “freedom!” mental node, not the concept of freedom itself.
Once you try to describe “freedom” in terms that a program or algorithm could understand, you realize that it becomes extremely difficult for the program to even know whether there is freedom in something or not, and that it is an abstraction of multiple levels interacting at multiple scales in complex ways far, far above the building blocks of matter and reality, and which requires values and algorithms for a lot of other things. You can value the output of this computation as a terminal value, but not the whole “freedom” business.
A very clever person might be capable of tricking their own brain by abusing an already built-in terminal value on a freedom mental-node by hacking in safety-checks that will force them to shut up and multiply, using best possible algorithms to evaluate “real” freedom-or-no-freedom, and then light up the mental node based on that, but it would require lots of training and mind-hacking.
Hence, I maintain that it’s extremely unlikely that someone really has freedom itself as a terminal value, rather than feeling from inside like they value freedom. A bit of Bayes suggests I shouldn’t even pay attention to it in the space of possible hypotheses, because of the sheer amount of values that get false positives as being terminal due to feeling as such from inside versus the amount of known terminal values that have such a high level of complexity and interconnections between many patterns, reality-referents, indirect valuations, etc.
“Lack of freedom” can’t be significantly easier to describe than freedom—they differ by at most one bit.
No opinion on whether the mental node representing “freedom” or actual freedom is valued—that seems to suffer/benefit from all of the same issues as any other terminal value representing reality.
If someone tries to manacle me in a dungeon, I will perform great violence upon that person. I will give up food, water, shelter, and sleep to avoid it. I will sell prized possessions or great works of art if necessary to buy weapons to attack that person. I can’t think of a better way to describe what a terminal value feels like.
Manacling you in a dungeon also triggers your mental node for freedom and also triggers the appearance of restrictions and constraints, and more so you are the direct subject yourself. It lacks a control group and feels like a confirmation-biased experiment.
If I simply told you (and you have easy means of confirming that I’m telling the truth) that I’m restricting the movements of a dozen people you’ve never heard of, and the restriction of freedom is done in such a way that the “victims” will never even be aware that their freedoms are being restricted (e.g. giving a mental imperative to spend eight hours a day in a certain room with a denial-of-denial clause for it), would you still have the same intense this-is-wrong terminal value for no other reason than that their freedom is taken from them in some manner?
If so, why are employment contracts not making you panic in a constant stream of negative utility? Or compulsive education? Or prison? Or any other form of freedom reduction which you might not consider to be about “freedom” but which certainly fits most reductions of it?
Yes, I meant “freedom for me”—I thought that was implied.
I would not want to be one of those people. If you convincingly told me that I was one of those people, I’d try to get out of it. If I was concerned about those people and thought they also valued freedom, I’d try to help them.
My employment can be terminated at will by either party. There are some oppressive labor laws that make this less the case, but they mostly favor me and neither myself nor my employer is going to call on them. What’s an “employment contract” and why would I want one?
Compulsory education is horrible. It’s profoundly illiberal and I believe it’s a violation of the constitutional amendment against slavery. I will not send my children to school and “over my dead body” is my response to anyone who intends to take them. I try to convince my friends not to send their children to school either.
I don’t intend to go to prison and would fight to avoid it. If my friends were in prison, I’d do what I could to get them out.
...therefore, if you are never aware of your own lack of freedom, you do not assign value to this. Which loops around back to the appearance of freedom being your true value. This would be the most uncharitable interpretation.
It seems, however, that in general you will be taking the course of action which maximizes the visible freedom that you can perceive, rather than a course of action you know to be optimized in general for widescale freedom. It seems more like a cognitive alert to certain triggers, and a high value being placed on not triggering this particular alert, than valuing the principles.
Edit: Also, thanks for indulging my curiosity and for all your replies on this topic.
Would you sell possessions to buy weapons to attack a person would runs an online voluntary community who changes the rules without consulting anyone?
If the two situations are comparable, I think it’s important to know exactly why.
Also note that manacling you to a dungeon isn’t just eliminating your ability freely choose things arbitrarily, it’s preventing you from having satisfying relationships, access to good food, meaningful life’s work and other pleasures. Would you mind being in a prison that enabled you to do those things?
Yes. If this were many years ago and I weren’t so conversant on the massive differences between the ways different humans see the world, I’d be very confused that you even had to ask that question.
No. There are other options. At the moment I’m still vainly hoping that Eliezer will see reason. I’m strongly considering just dropping out.
I feel like asking this question is wrong, but I want the information:
If I know that letting you have freedom will be hurtful (like, say, I tell you you’re going to get run over by a train, and you tell me you won’t, but I know that you’re in denial-of-denial and subconsciously seeking to walk on train tracks, and my only way to prevent your death is to manacle you in a dungeon for a few days), would you still consider the freedom terminally important? More important than the hurt? Which other values can be traded off? Would it be possible to figure out an exchange rate with enough analysis and experiment?
Regarding this, what if I told you “Earth was a giant prison all along. We just didn’t know. Also, no one built the prison, and no one is actively working to keep us in here—there never was a jailor in the first place, we were just born inside the prison cell. We’re just incapable of taking off the manacles on our own, since we’re already manacled.”? In fact, I do tell you this. It’s pretty much true that we’ve been prisoners of many, many things. Is your freedom node only triggered at the start of imprisonment, the taking away of a freedom once had? What if someone is born in the prison Raemon proposes? Is it still inherently wrong? Is it inherently wrong that we are stuck on Earth? If no, would it become inherently wrong if you knew that someone is deliberately keeping us here on Earth by actively preventing us from learning how to escape Earth?
The key point being: What is the key principle that triggers your “Freedom” light? The causal action that removes freedoms? The intentions behind the constraints?
It seems logical to me to assume that if you have freedom as a terminal value, then being able to do anything, anywhere, be anything, anyhow, anywhen, control time and space and the whole universe at will better than any god, without any possible restrictions or limitations of any kind, should be the Ultimately Most Supremely Good maximal possible utility optimization, and therefore reality and physics would be your worst possible Enemy, seeing as how it is currently the strongest Jailer than restricts and constrains you the most. I’m quite aware that this is hyperbole and most likely a strawman, but it is, to me, the only plausible prediction for a terminal value of yourself being free.
This should answer most of the questions above. Yes, the universe is terrible. It would be much better if the universe were optimized for my freedom.
All values are fungible. The exchange rate is not easily inspected, and thought experiments are probably no good for figuring them out.
You’re right, this does answer most of my questions. I had made incorrect assumptions about what you would consider optimal.
After updates based on this, it now appears much more likely for me that you use terminal valuation of your freedom node such that it gets triggered by more rational algorithms that really do attempt to detect restrictions and constraints in more than mere feeling-of-control manner. Is this closer to how you would describe your value?
I’m still having trouble with the idea of considering a universe optimized for one’s own personal freedom as a best thing (I tend to by default think of how to optimize for collective sum utilities of sets of minds, rather than one). It is not what I expected.
“freedom as a terminal value” != “freedom as the only terminal value”
True, and I don’t quite see where I implied this. If you’re referring to the optimal universe question, it seems quite trivial that if the universe literally acts according to your every will with no restrictions whatsoever, any other terminal values will instantly be fulfilled to their absolute maximal states (including unbounded values that can increase to infinity) along with adjustment of their referents (if that’s even relevant anymore).
No compromise is needed, since you’re free from the laws of logic and physics and whatever else might prevent you from tiling the entire universe with paperclips AND tiling the entire universe with giant copies of Eliezer’s mind.
So if that sort of freedom is a terminal value, this counterfactual universe trivially becomes the optimal target, since it’s basically whatever you would find to be your optimal universe regardless of any restrictions.
Sometimes freedom is a bother, and sometimes it’s a way to die quickly, and sometimes it’s essential for survival and that “good life” of yours (depending on what you mean by it). You can certainly come up with plenty of examples of each. I recommend you do before pronouncing that freedom is a terminal value for you.
With the caveats:
If the dictator isn’t particularly noticed to be behaving in that kind of way it is probably not worth enforcing the principle. ie. It is fine for people to have the absolute power to do whatever they want regardless of the will of the people as long as they don’t actually use it. A similar principle would also apply if the President of the United States started issuing pardons for whatever he damn well pleased. If US television informs me correctly (and it may not) then he is technically allowed to do so but I don’t imagine that power would remain if it was used frequently for his own ends. (And I doubt it the reaction against excessive abuse of power would be limited to just not voting for him again.)
The ‘should’ is weak. ie. It applies all else being equal but with a huge “if it is convenient to do so and you haven’t got something else you’d rather do with your time” implied.
Agreed. With the caveat that I think all ’should’s are that weak.
“If you see someone about to die and can save them, you should.”
Now, you might agree or disagree with this. But “If you see someone about to die and can save them, you should, if it is convenient to do so and you haven’t got something else you’d rather do with your time” seems more like disagreement to me.
I don’t think so. I agree with that statement, with the same caveats. If there are also 100 people about to die and I can save them instead, I should probably do so. I suppose it depends how morally-informed you think “something else you’d rather do with your time” is supposed to be.
But Eliezer Yudkowsky, too, is subject to the loss aversion effect. Just as those dissatisfied with changes overweight change’s negative consequences, so does Eliezer Yudkowsky overweight his dissatisfaction with changes initiated by the “community.” (For example, increased tolerance of responding to “trolling.”)
Moreover, if you discount the result of votes on rules, why do you assume votes on other matters are more rational? The “community” uses votes on substantive postings to discern a group consensus. These votes are subject to the same misdirection through loss aversion as are procedural issues. If the community has taken a mistaken philosophical or scientific position, people who agree with that position will be biased to vote down postings that challenge that position, a change away from a favored position being a loss. (Those who agree with the newly espoused position will be less energized, since they weight their potential gain less than their opponents weigh their potential loss.)
If you think “voting” is so highly distorted that it fails to represent opinion, you should probably abolish it entirely.
True. For that to be an effective communication channel, there would need to be a control group. As for how to create that control group or run any sort of blind (let alone double-blind) testing… yeah, I have no idea. Definitely a problem.
ETA: By “I have no idea”, I mean “Let me find my five-minute clock and I’ll get back to you on this if anything comes up”.
So I thought for five minutes, then looked at what’s been done in other websites before.
The best I have is monthly surveys with randomized questions from a pool of stuff that matters for LessWrong (according to the current or then-current staff, I would presume) with a few community suggestions, and then possibly later implementation of a weighing algorithm for diminishing returns when multiple users with similar thread participation (e.g. two people that always post in the same thread) give similar feedback.
The second part is full of holes and horribly prone to “Death by Poking With Stick”, but an ideal implementation of this seems like it would get a lot more quality feedback than what little gets through low-bandwidth in-person conversations.
There are other, less practical (but possibly more accurate) alternatives, of course. Like picking random LW users every so often, appearing at their front door, giving them a brain-scan headset (e.g. an Emotiv Epoc), and having them wear the headset while being on LW so you can collect tons of data.
I’d stick with live feedback and simple surveys to begin with.
I’ve moderated a few forums before, and with that experience in mind I’d have to agree that there’s a huge, and generally hugely negative, selection bias at play in online response to moderator decisions. It’d be foolish to take those responses as representative of the entire userbase, and I’ve seen more than one forum suffer as a result of such a misconception.
That being said, though, I think it’s risky to write off online user feedback in favor of physical. The people you encounter privately are just as much a filtered set as those who post feedback here, though the filters point in different directions: you’re selecting people involved in the LW interpersonal community, for one thing, which filters out new and casual users right off the bat, and since they’re probably more likely to be personally friendly to you we can also expect affect heuristics to come into play. Skepticism toward certain LW norms may also be selected against, which could lead people to favor new policies reinforcing those norms. Moreover, I’ve noticed a trend in the Bay Area group—not necessarily an irrational one, but a noticeable one—toward treating the online community as low-quality relative to local groups, which we might expect to translate into antipathy towards its status quo.
I don’t know what the weightings should be, but if you’re looking for a representative measure of user preferences I think it’d be wise to take both groups into account to some extent.
I will be starting another Less Wrong Census/Survey in about three weeks; in accordance with the tradition I will first start a thread asking for question ideas. If you can think of a good list of opinions you want polled in the next few weeks, consider posting them there and I’ll stick them in.
You… know I don’t optimize dinner parties as focus groups, right? The people who showed up that night were people who like chili (I had to swap in backup guests for some people who don’t) and who hadn’t been over too recently. A couple of the attendees from that party barely even post on LW.
It is perhaps more importantly dinner parties are optimised for status and social comfort. Actually giving honest feedback rather than guessing passwords would be a gross faux pas.
Getting feedback at dinner parties is a good way to optimise the social experience of getting feedback and translate one’s own status into the agreement of others.
FWIW, I eat chili but I don’t think the strongest of the proposed anti-troll measures are a good idea.
If I were to guess, I’d guess that the main filter criteria for your dinner parties is geographical; when you have a dinner party in the Bay area, you invite people who can be reasonably expected to be in the Bay area. This is not entirely independant of viewpoint—memes which are more common local to the Bay area will be magnified in such a group—but the effect of that filter on moderation viewpoints is probably pretty random (similarly, the effect of the filter of ‘people who like chili’ on moderation viewpoints is probably also pretty random).
So the dinner party filter exists, but it less likely to pertain to the issue at hand than the online self-selection filter.
The problem with the dinner party filter is not that it is too strong, but that it is too weak: it will for example let through people who aren’t even regular users of the site.
That’s kinda the point.
That’s fair, and your strategy makes sense. I also agree with DaFranker, below, regarding meta-threads.
This said, however, at the time when I joined Less Wrong, my model of the site was something like, “a place where smart people hold well-reasoned discussions on a wide range of interesting topics” (*). TheOtherDave’s comment, in conjunction with yours, paints a different picture of what you’d like Less Wrong to be; let’s call it Less Wrong 2.0. It’s something akin to, “a place where Eliezer and a few of his real-life friends give lectures on topics they think are important, with Q&A afterwards”.
Both models have merit, IMO, but I probably wouldn’t have joined Less Wrong 2.0. I don’t mean that as any kind of an indictment; if I were in your shoes, I would definitely want to exclude people like this Bugmaster guy from Less Wrong 2.0, as well.
Still, hopefully this one data point was useful in some way; if not, please downvote me !
(*) It is possible this model was rather naive.
EY has always seemed to me to want LW to be a mechanism for “raising the sanity waterline”. To the extent that wide-ranging discussion leads to that, I’d expect him to endorse it; to the extent that wide-ranging discussion leads away from that, I’d expect him to reject it. This ought not be a surprise.
Nor ought it be surprising that much of the discussion here does not noticeably progress this goal.
That said, there does seem to be a certain amount of non-apple selling going on here; I don’t think there’s a cogent model of what activity on LW would raise the sanity waterline, so attention is focused instead on trying to eliminate the more blatant failures: troll-baiting, for example, or repetitive meta-threads.
Which is not a criticism; it is what it is. If I don’t know the cause, that’s no reason not to treat the symptoms.
No; you’re conflating “Eliezer considers he should have the last word on moderation policy” and “Eliezer considers LessWrong’s content should be mostly about what he has to say”.
The changes of policy Eliezer is pushing have no effect on the “main” content of the site, i.e. posts that are well-received, and upvoted. The only disagreement seems to be about sprawling threads and reactions to problem users. I don’t know where you’re getting “Eliezer and a few of his real-life friends give lectures on topics they think are important” out of that, it’s not as if Eliezer has been posting many “lectures” recently.
I was under the impression that Eliezer agreed with TheOtherDave’s comment upthread:
Combined with Eliezer’s rather aggressive approach to moderation (f.ex. deleting downvoted comments outright), this did create the impression that Eliezer wants to restrict LessWrong’s content to a narrow list of specific topics.
I very much appreciate the attempts at greater moderation, including the troll penalty. Thank you.
Me too. Troll posts and really wrong people are too distracting without some form of intervention. Not sure the current solution is optimal (but this point has been extensively argued elsewhere), but I applaud the effort to actually stick one’s neck out and try something.
Thank you both. Very much, and sincerely.
Accepting thanks with sincerity, while somewhat-flippantly mostly-disregarding complaints? …I must be missing some hidden justification?
People who agree are more likely to keep quiet than people who disagree. Rewarding them for speaking up reduces that effect, which means comments get closer to accurately representing consensus.
Can you summarize your reasons for believing that people who agree are more likely to keep quiet than people who disagree?
It’s the impression I’ve got from informal observation, and it’s true when talking about myself specifically. (If I disagree, I presumably have something to say that has not yet been said. If I agree, that’s less likely to be true. I don’t know if that’s the whole reason, but it feels like a substantial part of it.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ provides an anecdote, and suggests that Eliezer has also gotten the same impression.
I certainly agree with your last sentence.
My own experience is that while people are more likely to express immediate disagreement than agreement in contexts where disagreement is expressed at all, they are also more likely to express disagreement with expressed disagreement in such forums, from which agreement can be inferred (much as I can infer your agreement with EY’s behavior from your disagreement with Will_Newsome). The idea that they are more likely to keep quiet in general, or that people are more likely to anonymously downvote what they disagree with than upvote what they agree with, doesn’t jive with my experience.
And in contexts where disagreement is not expressed, I find the Asch results align pretty well with my informal expectations of group behavior.
I admit that I hadn’t considered this mechanism. I have no gut feeling for whether it’s true or not, but it sounds plausible.
Do you doubt that content people whine less?
No, I don’t doubt that content people whine less.
Then I do not understand your request for further explanations.
I am confused by your confusion. The claim wasn’t that content people whine less, it was that they’re more likely to keep quiet. The only way I can make sense of your comments is if you’re equating the two—that is, if you assume that the only options are “keep quiet” or “whine”—but that seems an uncharitable reading. Still, if that is what you mean, I simply disagree.
Yeah, I phrased it quite poorly. Should have been “speak up less”. The point I was (unsuccessfully) making is that both groups have an option of acting (expensive) or not acting (cheap). Acting is what people generally do when they want to change the current state of the world, and non-acting when they are happy with it. Thus any expensive reaction is skewed toward negative. I should probably look up some sources on that, but I will just tap out instead, due to rapidly waning interest.
He is thanking them for their support, not their information.
Sometimes AKA the “Forum Whiners” effect, well known in the PC games domain:
When new PC games are released, almost inevitably the main forums for the game will become flooded with a large surge of complaints, negative reviews, rage, rants, and other negative stuff. This is fully expected and the absence of such is actually a bad sign. People that are happy with the product are playing the game, not wasting their time looking for forums and posting comments there—while people who have a problem or are really unhappy often look for an outlet or a solution to their issues (though the former in much greater numbers, usually). If no one is bothering to post on the forums, then that’s evidence that no one cares about the game in the first place.
I see a lot of similarities here, so perhaps that’s one thing worth looking into? I’d expect some people somewhere to have done the math already on this feedback (possibly by comparing to overall sales, survey results and propagation data), though I may be overestimating the mathematical propensity of the people involved.
Regarding the stop-watching-threads thing, I’ve noticed that I pretty much always stop paying attention to a thread once I’ve gotten the information I wanted out of it, and will only come back to it if someone directly replies to one of my comments (since it shows up in the inbox). This has probably been suggested before, but maybe a “watchlist” to mark some threads to show up new comments visibly somewhere and/or a way to have grandchildren comments to one of your own show up somehow could help? I often miss it when someone replies to a reply to my comment.
Upvoted for the “watchlist” idea, I really wish Less Wrong had it.
Each individual post/comment has its own RSS feed (below your user name, karma scores etc. and above “Nearest meetups” in the right sidebar).
In case you need assurance from the online sector. I wholeheartedly welcome any increase in the prevalence of the banhammer, and the “pay 5 karma” thing seems good too.
During that Eridu fiasco, I kept hoping a moderator would do something like “this thread is locked until Eridu taboos all those nebulous affect-laden words.”
Benevolent dictators who aren’t afraid of dissent are a huge win, IMO.
At risk of failing to JFGI: can someone quickly summarize what remaining code work we’d like done? I’ve started wading into the LW code, and am not finding it quite as impenetrable as last time, so concrete goals would be good to have.
http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/list
Fair enough. All I see is the vote-counts and online comments, but the real-life commenters are of course also people, and I can understand deciding to attend more to them.
I think his point is that there is less selection bias IRL.
But that’s almost certainly false. IRL input has distinct selection bias from viewing meta threads, but not no selection bias.
Yeah, exactly. Which is why I took it to mean a simple preference for considering the community of IRL folks. Which is not meant as a criticism; after all, I also take more seriously input from folks in my real life than folks on the internet.
Even when the topic on which you are receiving input is how to run an internet forum (on which the real-life folks don’t post)?
Well, I don’t do that, clearly, since I don’t run such an Internet forum.
Less trivially, though… yeah, I suspect I would do so. The tendency to take more seriously people whose faces I can see is pretty strong. Especially if it were a case like this one, where what the RL people are telling me synchronizes better with what I want to do in the first place, and thus gives me a plausible-feeling justification for doing it.
I suspect you’re not really asking me what I do, though, so much as implicitly suggesting that what EY is doing is the wrong thing to do… that the admins ought to attend more to commenters and voters who are actually participating on the thread, rather than attending primarily to the folks who attend the minicamp or Alicorn’s dinner parties.
If so, I don’t think it’s that simple. Fundamentally it depends on whether LW’s sponsors want it to be a forum that demonstrates and teaches superior Internet discourse or whether it wants to be a forum for people interested in rational thinking to discuss stuff they like to discuss. If it’s the latter, then democracy is appropriate. If it’s the former, then purging stuff that fails to demonstrate superior Internet discourse is appropriate.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
Yes, that’s certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it’s currently being done, there’s too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.
Then he is OK with this particular selection bias :)