Any progress on this? With the switchover from LW1 now imminent, I’ve looked at the LessWrong code on github a bit more and from a cursory review, it really does seem that the usecase or ‘flow’ of a user editing their own “recovery email” address is broken. The code calls the proper Meteor/Vulcan functions when creating a new user, and will in turn create new users when importing them for the first time from a legacy (LW1) database, but aside from that, there is no acknowledgement that Vulcan/Meteor has its own functions in the ‘account’-related packages for setting/updating these data. Did you test this user flow (even just in a test instance of the code) and verify that it can be used to set an email address that the “forgot password/reset password” will rely on?
bogus
Part of it is just semantics, really. In contemporary times, “art” tends to be connoted as left-wing, while “design” and “craft”, which occupy much of the same space, as apolitical or even loosely on the ‘right’. Wiewing website design as “art” as opposed to a “craft”, or even just one design activity among many, isn’t quite a value-free choice!
There’s currently a lot of useful content at the LessWrong (LW1) Wiki, wiki.lesswrong.com. What will happen to it? It seems that at a very minimum, you should request a wikidump as well from Trike; it would even be relatively easy to make a public dump available, using the tools that MediaWiki makes available for this purpose.
Great news, overall. However, do notice that, by all indications, this migration will in fact break links, for the case of “links to comments on a deleted LW1 post”. As I mentioned on LW1 itself, given such a LW1 “permlink”, you can freely explore “parent” comments and replies. Lesser Wrong does not support individual “permlink” pages, so it simply links to the individual comment as part of an “all comments” listings, which breaks in the “deleted page” case (It also impacts the case of a page with a large number of comments—if only from a sheer usability POV—because a user is now effectively forced to load all comments instead of just requesting what she’s actually interested in—and possibly even with “what she’s interested in” being buried in a deep subthread somewhere, beyond the “load more comments” feature and nowhere to be found in what actually was loaded!). I mention this in a simple comment here rather than opening a formal “issue report”, because I do not regard this as a true “bug” with the site that can be easily fixed or that even has truly significant impact. However, since (due to the vicissitudes of early LW1 history, with at least one major contributor having wiped his whole presence from the site!) there is actually quite a bit of early content that’s impacted by this, it may be something to think about at a later time, for a more complete restoration of early LW history.
I actually thought the “coalitional” part did deserve a mention, precisely because it is one of the few facets of the problem that we can just fight (which is not to say that coalitions don’t have a social and formal role to play in any actual political system!) Again, I think Crick would also agree with this, and ISTM that he did grapple with these issues at a pretty deep level. If we’re going to go beyond our traditional “no politics!” attitude, I really have to wonder why he’s not considered a trusted reference here, on a par w/ the Sequences and whatever the latest AI textbook is.
… I’ll just briefly note for the benefit of others that this excerpt seems like the biggest crux and point of disagreement. …
In tne interest of the general norm of “trying to identify cruxes and make them explicit”, I’d like to endorse this—except that to me, the issue goes well beyond “human coalitions” and also encompasses many other things that would generally fall under the rubric of ‘politics’ in a broad sense—or for that matter, of ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’! When people, plausibly, were ‘politically’ mindkilled by Duncan’s Dragon Army proposal, this was not necessarily due to their belonging to an “anti-Duncan”, “anti-rationality” or whatever-coalition; instead, the proposal itself may have been aversive to them in a rather deep sense, involving what they regarded as their basic values. This impacts the proposed solution as well, of course; it may not be sufficient to “actively fight back” a narrow coalitional instinct, but a need may arise for addressing “the political [or for that matter, moral, ethical etc.] aspects of things” at a somewhat deeper level, that goes beyond a conventional “arguments and evidence” structure to seek for ‘cruxes’ in our far more fundamental attitudes, and addresses them with meaningful and creative compromises.
That this can be a place where people will actually put forth the effort to get the basic everywhere everyday flawed human communication bugs out of the picture, and do deliberate and intentional communication and collaborative truth seeking on a meaningfully higher level. … Everything Scott said in that post rings true to me about people and populations in general. But the hope is that LessWrong is not just humans doing business as usual. The hope is that LessWrong is actually different.
Look, I hate to break the news to you, but just like Soylent Green, Less Wrong is people! Your goals and aspirations are extremely worthwhile and I entirely agree with them, but to whatever extent they succeed, it will NOT be because “LessWrong is not just humans doing business as usual”! Rather, it will be bdcause the very definition of “business as usual”—and, crucially, “politics as usual”! - will have been successfully modified and perfected to make it more in line with both human values (humaneness) as they actually exist out there, in the real world, and a general norm of truth seeking and deliberation (which is however, i claim, not a sufficient condition to achieving this goal, other ‘norms of engagement’ being just as important). This is what it actually means to “raise the sanity waterline”! Making us less human and perhaps more Clippy-like (that is, with the entirety of accepted discourse being “Hey, it looks like you might be having problem X! Would you like me to use advanced Bayesian inference techniques to help you assess this problem and provide you with a helpful, canned solution to it? [OK]/[CANCEL]”) is not a sensible or feasible goal, and it is indeed somewhat puzzling that you as a CFAR instructor yourself do not immediately notice and engage with this important point.
Ah, but who will argue for the “Alex’s” who were genuinely made uncomfortable by the proposed norms of Dragon’s Army—perhaps to the point of disregarding even some good arguments and/or evidence in favor of it—and who are now being conflated with horribly abusive people as a direct result of this LW2 post? Social discomfort can be a two-way street.
I myself was wrong to engage with them as if their beliefs had cruxes that would respond to things like argument and evidence.
This is a fully-general-counterargument to any sort of involvement by people with even middling real-world concerns in LW2 - so if you mean to cite this remark approvingly as an example of how we should enforce our own standard of “perfectly rational” epistemic norms, I really have to oppose this. It is simply a fact about human psychology that “things like argument and evidence” are perhaps necessary but not sufficient to change people’s minds about issues of morality or politics that they actually care about, in a deep sense! This is the whole reason why Bernard Crick developed his own list of political virtues which I cited earlier in this very comment section. We should be very careful about this, and not let non-central examples on the object level skew our thinking about these matters.
Thank you Qiaochu_Yuan for this much-needed clarification! It seems kinda important to address this sort of ambiguity well before you start casually talking about how ‘some views’ ought to be considered unacceptable for the sake of our community. (--Thus, I think both habryka and Duncan have some good points in the debate about what sort of criticism should be allowed here, and what standards there should be for the ‘meta’ level of “criticizing critics” as wrongheaded, uncharitable or whatever.)
… in at least some ways, it’s important to have Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys around on the side of LW’s culture, and not just David Monroes and Dumbledores.
This is an interesting point—and, ISTM, a reason not to be too demanding about people coming to LW itself with a purely “good faith” attitude! To some extent, “bad faith” and even fights for dominance just come with the territory of Hobbesian social and political struggle—and if you care about “hav[ing] Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys” on our side, you’re clearly making a point about politics as well, at least in the very broadest sense.
I suspect they think that you’re not being sufficiently polite toward those you’re trying to throw out of the overton window
Actually, what I would say here is that “politeness” itself (and that’s actually a pretty misleading term since we’re dealing with fairly important issues of morality and ethics, not just shallow etiquette—but whatever, let’s go with it) entails that we should seek a clear understanding of what attitudes we’re throwing out of the Overton window, and why, or out of what sort of specific concerns. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with considering “harsh criticism [that] might be seen as threatening” as being outside the Overton window, but whereas this makes a lot of sense when dealing with real-world based efforts like the Dragon Army group, or the various “rationalist Baugruppes” that seem to be springing up in some places, it feels quite silly to let the same attitude infect our response to “criticism” of Less Wrong as an online site, or of LessWrong 2 for that matter, or even of the “rationalist” community not as an actual community that might be physically manifested in some place, but as a general shared mindset.
When we say that “the behavior of the critics Duncan is replying to are [not] the sort of behavior we want/need to accept in our community”, what do we actually mean by “behavior” and “community” here? Are we actually pointing out the real-world concerns inherent in “criticizing” an effort like Dragon Army in a harsh, unpolite and perhaps even threatening (if perhaps only in a political sense, such as by ‘threatening’ a loss of valued real-world allies!) way? Or are we using these terms in a metaphorical sense that could in some sense encompass everything we might “do” on the Internet as folks with a rationalist mindset? I see the very fact that it’s not really “explicit who (or what) [we’re] responding to” as a problem that needs to be addressed in some way, at least wrt. its broadest plausible implications—even though I definitely understand the political benefits of understating such things!
I don’t think the difference between “talking about internet stuff” and “talking about stuff that’s happening IRL” has any meaningful relevance when it comes to standards of discourse.
Well, human psychology says that “stuff that’s happening IRL” kinda has to play by its own rules. Online social clubs simply aren’t treated the same by common sense ‘etiquette’ (much less common-sense morality!) as actual communities where people naturally have far higher stakes.
I don’t want to carve out an exception that says “intellectual dishonesty and immature discourse are okay if it’s a situation where you really care about something important,
If you think I’m advocating for willful dishonesty and immaturity, than you completely missed the point of what I was saying. Perhaps you are among those who intuitively associate “politics” or even “tribalism” with such vices (ignoring the obvious fact that a ‘group house’ itself is literally, inherently tribal—as in, defining a human “tribe”!) You may want to reference e.g. Bernard Crick’s short work In Defense of Politics (often assigned in intro poli-sci courses as required reading!) for a very different POV indeed of what “political” even means. Far beyond the usual ‘virtues of rationality’, other virtues such as adaptability, compromise, creativity etc. --even humor! are inherently political.
The flip side of this, though, is that people will often disagree about what’s intellectually dishonest or immature in the first place! Part of a productive attitude to contentious debate is an ability and inclination to look beyond these shallow attributions, to a more charitable view of even “very bad” arguments. Truth-seeking is OK and should always be a basic value, but it simply can’t be any sort of all-encompassing goal, when we’re dealing with real-world conmunities with all the attendant issues of those.
I think it’s important to have public, common-knowledge deterrence of that sort of behavior. I think that part of what allowed it to flourish on LessWrong 1.0 is the absence of comments like my parenthetical, making it clear that that sort of thing is outside the Overton window
There is a very important distinction to be made here, between criticism of an online project like LessWrong itself or even LessWrong 2, where the natural focus is on loosely coordinating useful work to be performed “IRL” (the ‘think globally, act locally’ strategy) and people ‘criticizing’ a real-world, physical community where people are naturally defending against shared threats of bodily harm, and striving to foster a nurturing ‘ecology’ or environment. To put it as pithily as possible, the somewhat uncomfortable reality is that, psychologically, a real-world, physical community is _always_ a “safe space”, no matter whether it is explicitly connoted as such or not, or whether its members intend it as such or not; and yes, this “safe space” characterization comes with all the usual ‘political’ implications about the acceptability of criticism—except that these implications are actually a lot more cogent here than in your average social club on Tumblr or whatever! I do apologize for resorting to contentious “political” or even “tribal” language which seems to be frowned upon by the new moderation guidelines, but no “guidelines” or rules of politeness could possibly help us escape the obvious fact that doing something physically, in the real world always comes with very real political consequences which, as such, need to be addressed via an attitude that’s properly mindful and inclined to basic values such as compromise and adaptability—no matter what the context!
Huh, apologies for not being available for ‘realtime chat’ then. I just tried this quickly with a JS console, but weirdly enough I don’t see any message when pressing that button—all I see is the usual error message “user not found” popping up in the browser webview (This is probably an issue on my end, though—I’m not really familiar with how the browser console works). What I do see (though in the network view, not quite in the console) is the info being updated when I submit the “edit account” form, and I notice that the resulting object has an “email” property with the desired address as a string. (However, from quickly perusing the Meteor source code, it looks like it has all sorts of specialized functions on the server side for creating/updating/setting ‘account email’ data—e.g. it seems to keep track of ‘verified’ status and to also support multiple emails per user. I wonder if the problem is that the “edit account” ‘flow’ is not resulting in these functions being called? Or perhaps it’s not providing data in the format they expect? Something to look into, perhaps. I’m not sure how LW2 itself changes what Meteor does by default here)
Um, yes I did? (The email does appear in my ‘account’ page, after all.) Anyway, this issue is not so critical to me that I need “real-time support” from the site devs or anything like that. I only really care to the extent that other users may be similarly affected (as seen, e.g. from recent discussions on LW1!). So if it turns out that this is not a generalized problem w/ the site that would also hit other people, I’d think it preferable to just wait until other work on LW2 is completed and perhaps revisit the issue at a later time.
Aside from whpearson’s point (which I broadly agree with), it’s just a fact of life that most people are boring. And folks who literally pay for ordinary social interaction (seriously, that’s what she’s selling: Social Interaction As A Service!) are likely to be far more boring/awkward than average. A lot of dating success is simply “be less boring, and mske sure that you’re aware of when you’re boring someone to death, so you can course-correct”. Perhaps it’s just me, but I see this as fairly obvious.
Um, now there is a “reset password” link, but it does not work properly at least in my case. My recovery address from LW1 was not in the version of the database that was imported to Lesser Wrong, and apparently setting that address as an ‘email’ in the “edit account” page did not help, either—it is not seen by the “reset password” functionality as a recovery address associated with my user. Weird.
I do agree that as soon as you log in, we should strongly encourage the user to create a new password. I will try to implement that soon.
Was the “change password” page actually tested to work for users who have logged in with ‘legacy’ LW1 credentials? E.g. I notice that there’s a textfield asking for my ‘current’ password on that page, and I have no idea how that would interact with your solution. I also edited the ‘email’ field in my user options, expecting it to set a ‘recovery’ address, but I have no idea if that worked properly. (I didn’t get a ‘verification’ message at that email, whereas that happened right away when I added it on LW1.) All this makes me quite nervous about fiddling with my LW2 credentials at this time, either by ‘changing’ or ‘resetting’ them. I’d rather deal with a theoretically ‘insecure’ hashing function for a while.
Hi, it currently appears to me that the LW2 functionality around ‘recovery email’ addresses is subtly broken, and if I am correct, this will impact LW1 users who did not set a recovery email until after the first database import to LesserWrong, as well as any users wishing to change their associated ‘recovery’ email in the future. Please see this subthread (or GreaterWrong link) for details about the issue. I’m not confident that opening a formal “issue” ticket on GitHub would be appropriate here, because all I have is circumstantial evidence, and I am quite unsure how things were expected to work in the first place. However, I do think some cursory attention from the devs would very much be appropriate, if only to ascertain whether there’s an actual issue here.