I think this is extremely bad. Letting anyone, no matter how prominent, costlessly remove/silence others is toxic to the principle of open debate.
At minimum, there should be a substantial penalty for banning and deleting comments. And not a subtraction, a multiplication. My first instinct would be to use the fraction of users you have taken action against as a proportional penalty to your karma, for all purposes. Or, slightly more complex, take the total “raw score” of karma of all users you’ve taken action against, divide by the total “raw score” of everyone on the site, double it, and use that as the penalty factor. If Eliezer actually only bans unhelpful newbies, then this will be a small penalty. If he starts taking repeated action against many people otherwise regarded as serious contributors, then it will be a large penalty.
The intended use case of this may be positive, but let’s be real: even among rationalists, status incentives always win out. Put on your David Monroe/ialdabaoth hats and remember that for a group rationality project, priorities 1, 2, and 3 must be defanging social incentives to corrupt group epistemics.
Nobody is silenced here in the sense that their ability to express themselves gets completely removed.
If someone has a serious objection to a given post they are free to write a rebuttal to the post on their personal page.
This policy rewards people for writing posts instead of writing comments and that’s a good choice. The core goal is to get more high quality posts and comments are a lesser concern.
People absolutely are silenced by this, and the core goal is to get high quality discussion, for which comments are at least as important as posts.
Writing a rebuttal on your personal page, if you are low-status, is still being silenced. To be able to speak, you need not just a technical ability to say things, but an ability to say them to the audience that cares.
Under this moderation scheme, if I have an novel, unpopular dissenting view against a belief that is important to the continuing power of the popular, they can costlessly prevent me from getting any traction.
No, you can still get traction, if your argument is good enough. It just requires that your rebuttal itself, on the basis of its own content and quality, attracts enough attention to be read, instead of you automatically getting almost as much attention as the original author got just because you are the first voice in the room.
If you give exposure to whoever first enters a conversation opened by someone with a lot of trust, then you will have a lot of people competing to just be the first ones dominating that discussion, because it gives their ideas a free platform. Bandwith is limited, and you need to allocate bandwidth by some measure of expected quality, and authors should feel free to not have their own trust and readership given to bad arguments, or to people furthering an agenda that is not aligned with what they want.
There should be some mechanisms by which the best critiques of popular content get more attention than they would otherwise, to avoid filter bubble effects, but critiques should not be able to just get attention by being aggressive in the comment section of a popular post, or by being the first comment, etc. If we want to generally incentivize critiques, then we can do that via our curation policies, and by getting people to upvote critiques more, or maybe by other technical solutions, but the current situation does not strike me as remotely the best at giving positive incentives towards the best critiques.
If a nobody disagrees with, being less wrong than, Yudkowsky, they’ll be silenced for all practical purposes. And I do think there was a time when people signalled by going against him, which was the proof of non-phyggishness. Phygs are bad.
You could try red-letter warnings atop posts saying, “there’s a rebuttal by a poster banned from this topic: [link]”, but I don’t expect you will, because the particular writer obviously won’t want that.
Definitely put on the Ialdabaoth hat. You do not in any circumstances have to consciously devise any advantage to hand to high-status people, because they already get all conceivable advantages for free.
High-status people get advantages for free because it’s beneficial for agents to give them advantages. For a high status person it’s easy to stay away and publish their content on their own blog and have an audience on their own blog. This makes it more important to incentive them to contribute.
Companies have bonus system to reward the people who already have the most success in the company because it’s very important to keep high performers happy.
I think this is extremely bad. Letting anyone, no matter how prominent, costlessly remove/silence others is toxic to the principle of open debate.
At minimum, there should be a substantial penalty for banning and deleting comments. And not a subtraction, a multiplication. My first instinct would be to use the fraction of users you have taken action against as a proportional penalty to your karma, for all purposes. Or, slightly more complex, take the total “raw score” of karma of all users you’ve taken action against, divide by the total “raw score” of everyone on the site, double it, and use that as the penalty factor. If Eliezer actually only bans unhelpful newbies, then this will be a small penalty. If he starts taking repeated action against many people otherwise regarded as serious contributors, then it will be a large penalty.
The intended use case of this may be positive, but let’s be real: even among rationalists, status incentives always win out. Put on your David Monroe/ialdabaoth hats and remember that for a group rationality project, priorities 1, 2, and 3 must be defanging social incentives to corrupt group epistemics.
Nobody is silenced here in the sense that their ability to express themselves gets completely removed.
If someone has a serious objection to a given post they are free to write a rebuttal to the post on their personal page.
This policy rewards people for writing posts instead of writing comments and that’s a good choice. The core goal is to get more high quality posts and comments are a lesser concern.
People absolutely are silenced by this, and the core goal is to get high quality discussion, for which comments are at least as important as posts.
Writing a rebuttal on your personal page, if you are low-status, is still being silenced. To be able to speak, you need not just a technical ability to say things, but an ability to say them to the audience that cares.
Under this moderation scheme, if I have an novel, unpopular dissenting view against a belief that is important to the continuing power of the popular, they can costlessly prevent me from getting any traction.
No, you can still get traction, if your argument is good enough. It just requires that your rebuttal itself, on the basis of its own content and quality, attracts enough attention to be read, instead of you automatically getting almost as much attention as the original author got just because you are the first voice in the room.
If you give exposure to whoever first enters a conversation opened by someone with a lot of trust, then you will have a lot of people competing to just be the first ones dominating that discussion, because it gives their ideas a free platform. Bandwith is limited, and you need to allocate bandwidth by some measure of expected quality, and authors should feel free to not have their own trust and readership given to bad arguments, or to people furthering an agenda that is not aligned with what they want.
There should be some mechanisms by which the best critiques of popular content get more attention than they would otherwise, to avoid filter bubble effects, but critiques should not be able to just get attention by being aggressive in the comment section of a popular post, or by being the first comment, etc. If we want to generally incentivize critiques, then we can do that via our curation policies, and by getting people to upvote critiques more, or maybe by other technical solutions, but the current situation does not strike me as remotely the best at giving positive incentives towards the best critiques.
If a nobody disagrees with, being less wrong than, Yudkowsky, they’ll be silenced for all practical purposes. And I do think there was a time when people signalled by going against him, which was the proof of non-phyggishness. Phygs are bad.
You could try red-letter warnings atop posts saying, “there’s a rebuttal by a poster banned from this topic: [link]”, but I don’t expect you will, because the particular writer obviously won’t want that.
Comments on the personal page show up for people who browse Popular Posts/Community and also for people who look at the Daily list of posts.
Giving people with a history of providing value contributions (=high status) a better ability to have an audience is desirable.
Definitely put on the Ialdabaoth hat. You do not in any circumstances have to consciously devise any advantage to hand to high-status people, because they already get all conceivable advantages for free.
High-status people get advantages for free because it’s beneficial for agents to give them advantages. For a high status person it’s easy to stay away and publish their content on their own blog and have an audience on their own blog. This makes it more important to incentive them to contribute.
Companies have bonus system to reward the people who already have the most success in the company because it’s very important to keep high performers happy.