Made an opinionated “update” for the anti-kibitzer mode script; it works for current LessWrong with its agree/disagree votes and all that jazz, fixes some longstanding bugs that break the formatting of the site and allow you to see votes in certain places, and doesn’t indent usernames anymore. Install Tampermonkey and browse to this link if you’d like to use it.
Semi-related, I am instituting a Reign Of Terror policy for my poasts/shortform, which I will update my moderation policy with. The general goal of these policies is to reduce the amount of time I spend thinking and distressing about the same shit every social media platform makes you stress out about to the detriment of your mental health: which person is commenting on my posts, what upboats are they/I getting, Muh Status, etc. I respect that these are stringent enough requirements, that I have epsilon negotiating leverage, and that I will probably end up either banning or scaring off nine of the ten people that would have ever commented on or read the things I plan to write on LW. This is the only way I think I’ll be able to tolerate writing anything for smart people moving forward, so I’m going to do it even if nobody ever comments on my posts again.
The Reign of Terror policy says:
You must respect the wishes of those who are using the anti-kibitzer script not to know who you are. This means not saying stuff that people on here could reasonably use to infer your identity, even if “who you are” is something you don’t expect to make people take what you say better. The exception is if you’re drawing on absolutely fucking critical anecdotal evidence, like when disputing serious factual mistakes about you or someone you personally know. I will be extremely unforgiving about exceptions, which will be rare because of the rule below.
No discussions of specific individuals, if they could ever be reasonably expected to read anything you write, or if anybody else who personally knows them could ever be reasonably expected to read anything you write, perhaps by Googling their name and coming up on the post or by searching for themselves inside LW.
Examples of people whose names you can utter: Xi Jinping, Jeffrey Epstein. Examples of people whose names you can’t utter: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, the name of my religious college friend who has a sysadmin job now.
It’s of course sometimes necessary in rationality discussions to imply things about particular people, for example to respond to their ideas or the ideas of a specific group like “Christians”, but I will only allow this if you literally have no other way of effectively making some broader point. If it seems to me like you missed a more general way of making said point but you did your best I won’t permaban you and instead just ask you to modify your comment.
No implying positive status differences between you and either the median American computer programmer or another commenter, under any circumstances, regardless of how much it would contribute to the conversation for you to do so. If you have something you feel like you have to say entirely independent of the fact that it makes you look cool (and thus makes other people feel small), you must either refrain from saying it, or find a way to say it in a way that doesn’t do that. No asking people for information that would confirm/disconfirm such things either.
There is no separate policy or exception for people who got their status by founding a save-the-drowning-children corporation.
I will be sooooo retarded about this rule. If I don’t ban someone in the next six months for breaking this rule, I will go ahead ban the person with the highest log-odds of having broken this rule in a way I didn’t understand, just to precommit to the three people that have read this far that I mean business.
Rudeness is allowed, but only rudeness that makes you look dumb and the other person look good. Think, 4chan rudeness, when 4chan isn’t being totally spiteful or mean. If you take that kind of 4chan rudeness seriously and you start commenting on my posts you have forfeited any and all sympathy from me in particular and will just be pointed to Da Rules.
Please install the anti-kibitzer script. Not a rule, I couldn’t enforce it anyways, but strongly suggested.
This only applies to posts and shortforms I make from-now-on. I certainly haven’t followed it myself. You of course get one opportunity to follow the reign of terror policy and then I will click the ban forever button, because even if you’ve been a diligent sport throughout the last 800 posts, I won’t know who you are when you decide to mention in passing that you used to work at Google or MIRI or whatever.
I have no clue whether any of my previous comments on your posts will qualify me for perma-ban, but if so, please do so now, to save the trouble of future annoyance since I have no intention of changing anything. I am generally respectful, but I don’t expect to fully understand these rules, let alone follow them.
I have no authority over this, but I’d hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy, or a surprisingly-large ban list.
I’d hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy
I think it’s better to annoy commenters than to annoy post authors, so actually allowing serious Reign of Terror is better than meaningfully discouraging it. That’s the whole point of Reign of Terror, and as the name suggests it shouldn’t be guaranteed to be comfortable for its subjects.
One problem with how it’s currently used is authors placing Reign of Terror policy for their own comfort in a motte/bailey way, without any actual harsh moderation activity, inflating the category into the territory of expected comfort for the commenters. There should be weak incentive for authors to not do this if they don’t actually care.
For a lot of posts, the value is pretty evenly distributed among the post and the comments. For frontpage-worthy ones, it’s probably weighted more to posts, granted. I fully agree that “reign of terror” is not sufficient reason to keep something off frontpage.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don’t (to me) match my intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation—how many comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
Mostly, I really hope LW doesn’t become a publishing medium rather than a discussion space.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don’t (to me) match my intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation—how many comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
There’s practically no reason on a rationality forum for you to assert your identity or personal status over another commenter. I agree the rules I’ve given are very detailed. I don’t agree that any of the vast majority of valuable comments on LessWrong are somehow bannable by my standard.
The reason I’m stringent about doing this, is because the status asserting comments literally ruin it for everybody else, even when the majority of everybody else is not interested in such competitions. They make people like me, who are jealous and insecure, review everything they’ve ever written in the light that they might be judged. I don’t come here because I want to engage in yet another status tournament. I come here because I want to become a better thinker and learn new and interesting things about the world. I also come here because I like being able to presume that most of the other commenters are using the forum like I am. In this sense it’s worth it to me if this policy prevents one person from trying to social climb even if I have to prevent four other comments that wouldn’t otherwise be a problem.
As I said, obviously this is not a retroactively applying policy, I have not followed it until now, and I will not ban anybody for commenting differently on my posts. I’m not going to ban you pre-emptively or judge you harshly for not following all of my ridiculously complicated rules. Feel free to continue commenting on my posts as you please and just let me eventually ban you; that’s honestly fine by me and you should not feel bad about it.
I personally hope they would not refuse to frontpage my posts from now on for having a restrictive comment policy when it’s not obviously censoring criticism of the post itself, but I have already forfeited arbitrarily large amounts of exposure and the mods can do what they wish.
Made an opinionated “update” for the anti-kibitzer mode script; it works for current LessWrong with its agree/disagree votes and all that jazz, fixes some longstanding bugs that break the formatting of the site and allow you to see votes in certain places, and doesn’t indent usernames anymore. Install Tampermonkey and browse to this link if you’d like to use it.
Semi-related, I am instituting a Reign Of Terror policy for my poasts/shortform, which I will update my moderation policy with. The general goal of these policies is to reduce the amount of time I spend thinking and distressing about the same shit every social media platform makes you stress out about to the detriment of your mental health: which person is commenting on my posts, what upboats are they/I getting, Muh Status, etc. I respect that these are stringent enough requirements, that I have epsilon negotiating leverage, and that I will probably end up either banning or scaring off nine of the ten people that would have ever commented on or read the things I plan to write on LW. This is the only way I think I’ll be able to tolerate writing anything for smart people moving forward, so I’m going to do it even if nobody ever comments on my posts again.
The Reign of Terror policy says:
You must respect the wishes of those who are using the anti-kibitzer script not to know who you are. This means not saying stuff that people on here could reasonably use to infer your identity, even if “who you are” is something you don’t expect to make people take what you say better. The exception is if you’re drawing on absolutely fucking critical anecdotal evidence, like when disputing serious factual mistakes about you or someone you personally know. I will be extremely unforgiving about exceptions, which will be rare because of the rule below.
No discussions of specific individuals, if they could ever be reasonably expected to read anything you write, or if anybody else who personally knows them could ever be reasonably expected to read anything you write, perhaps by Googling their name and coming up on the post or by searching for themselves inside LW.
Examples of people whose names you can utter: Xi Jinping, Jeffrey Epstein. Examples of people whose names you can’t utter: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, the name of my religious college friend who has a sysadmin job now.
It’s of course sometimes necessary in rationality discussions to imply things about particular people, for example to respond to their ideas or the ideas of a specific group like “Christians”, but I will only allow this if you literally have no other way of effectively making some broader point. If it seems to me like you missed a more general way of making said point but you did your best I won’t permaban you and instead just ask you to modify your comment.
No implying positive status differences between you and either the median American computer programmer or another commenter, under any circumstances, regardless of how much it would contribute to the conversation for you to do so. If you have something you feel like you have to say entirely independent of the fact that it makes you look cool (and thus makes other people feel small), you must either refrain from saying it, or find a way to say it in a way that doesn’t do that. No asking people for information that would confirm/disconfirm such things either.
There is no separate policy or exception for people who got their status by founding a save-the-drowning-children corporation.
I will be sooooo retarded about this rule. If I don’t ban someone in the next six months for breaking this rule, I will go ahead ban the person with the highest log-odds of having broken this rule in a way I didn’t understand, just to precommit to the three people that have read this far that I mean business.
Rudeness is allowed, but only rudeness that makes you look dumb and the other person look good. Think, 4chan rudeness, when 4chan isn’t being totally spiteful or mean. If you take that kind of 4chan rudeness seriously and you start commenting on my posts you have forfeited any and all sympathy from me in particular and will just be pointed to Da Rules.
Please install the anti-kibitzer script. Not a rule, I couldn’t enforce it anyways, but strongly suggested.
This only applies to posts and shortforms I make from-now-on. I certainly haven’t followed it myself. You of course get one opportunity to follow the reign of terror policy and then I will click the ban forever button, because even if you’ve been a diligent sport throughout the last 800 posts, I won’t know who you are when you decide to mention in passing that you used to work at Google or MIRI or whatever.
I have no clue whether any of my previous comments on your posts will qualify me for perma-ban, but if so, please do so now, to save the trouble of future annoyance since I have no intention of changing anything. I am generally respectful, but I don’t expect to fully understand these rules, let alone follow them.
I have no authority over this, but I’d hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy, or a surprisingly-large ban list.
I think it’s better to annoy commenters than to annoy post authors, so actually allowing serious Reign of Terror is better than meaningfully discouraging it. That’s the whole point of Reign of Terror, and as the name suggests it shouldn’t be guaranteed to be comfortable for its subjects.
One problem with how it’s currently used is authors placing Reign of Terror policy for their own comfort in a motte/bailey way, without any actual harsh moderation activity, inflating the category into the territory of expected comfort for the commenters. There should be weak incentive for authors to not do this if they don’t actually care.
For a lot of posts, the value is pretty evenly distributed among the post and the comments. For frontpage-worthy ones, it’s probably weighted more to posts, granted. I fully agree that “reign of terror” is not sufficient reason to keep something off frontpage.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don’t (to me) match my intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation—how many comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
Mostly, I really hope LW doesn’t become a publishing medium rather than a discussion space.
There’s practically no reason on a rationality forum for you to assert your identity or personal status over another commenter. I agree the rules I’ve given are very detailed. I don’t agree that any of the vast majority of valuable comments on LessWrong are somehow bannable by my standard.
The reason I’m stringent about doing this, is because the status asserting comments literally ruin it for everybody else, even when the majority of everybody else is not interested in such competitions. They make people like me, who are jealous and insecure, review everything they’ve ever written in the light that they might be judged. I don’t come here because I want to engage in yet another status tournament. I come here because I want to become a better thinker and learn new and interesting things about the world. I also come here because I like being able to presume that most of the other commenters are using the forum like I am. In this sense it’s worth it to me if this policy prevents one person from trying to social climb even if I have to prevent four other comments that wouldn’t otherwise be a problem.
As I said, obviously this is not a retroactively applying policy, I have not followed it until now, and I will not ban anybody for commenting differently on my posts. I’m not going to ban you pre-emptively or judge you harshly for not following all of my ridiculously complicated rules. Feel free to continue commenting on my posts as you please and just let me eventually ban you; that’s honestly fine by me and you should not feel bad about it.
I personally hope they would not refuse to frontpage my posts from now on for having a restrictive comment policy when it’s not obviously censoring criticism of the post itself, but I have already forfeited arbitrarily large amounts of exposure and the mods can do what they wish.