Possibly relevant point: I believe there was a quiet room and Katie took Andromeda to the quiet room, but the room was not as soundproofed as they thought it was and she could still be heard.
(I am another person who considers the tone this is being brought up in to be highly unkind.)
Fair enough! I think my general point still stands: for two-month-olds, parenting skill is probably outweighed by the mood and temperament of the child when determining how likely the child is to scream during Solstice.
I am ecstatic about this idea and would participate in it at a good deal of personal inconvenience.
I think an accurate qualitative argument is better than a sourceless quantitative argument.
Thank you for making this website! It looks really good and like someplace I might want to crosspost to.
If I may make two suggestions:
(1) It doesn’t seem clear whether Less Wrong 2.0 will also have a “no politics” norm, but if it doesn’t I would really appreciate a “no culture war” tag which alerts the moderators to nuke discussion of race, gender, free speech on college campuses, the latest outrageous thing [insert politician here] did, etc. I think that culture war stuff is salacious enough that people love discussing it in spite of its obvious unimportance, and it would be good to have a way to dissuade that. Personally, I’ve tended to avoid online rationalist spaces where I can’t block people who annoy me, because culture war stuff keeps coming up and when interacting with certain people I get defensive and upset and not in a good frame for discussion at all.
(2) Some inconspicuous way of putting in assorted metadata (content warnings, epistemic statuses, that sort of thing) so that interested people can look at them but they are not taking up the first 500 words of the post.
Yes, that was my intent.
I believe the plan is to eventually allow some trusted submitters to e.g. ban people from commenting on their posts, but I would hope the “no culture war” tag could be applied even by people whom the mod team doesn’t trust with broader moderation powers.
I’m not sure if I agree with banning it entirely. There are culture-war-y discussions that seem relevant to LW 2.0: for instance, people might want to talk about sexism in the rationality community, free speech norms, particular flawed studies that touch on some culture-war issue, dating advice, whether EAs should endorse politically controversial causes, nuclear war as existential risk, etc.
OTOH a policy that people should post this sort of content on their own private blogs seems sensible. There are definite merits in favor of banning culture war things. In addition to what you mention, it’s hard to create a consensus about what a “good” culture war discussion is. To pick a fairly neutral example, my blog Thing of Things bans neoreactionaries on sight while Slate Star Codex bans the word in the hopes of limiting the amount they take over discussion; the average neoreactionary, of course, would strongly object to this discriminatory policy.
Sorry, this might not be clear from the comment, but as a prospective writer I was primarily thinking about the comments on my posts. Even if I avoid culture war stuff in my posts, the comment section might go off on a tangent. (This is particularly a concern for me because of course my social-justice writing is the most well-known, so people might be primed to bring it up.) On my own blog, I tend to ban people who make me feel scared and defensive; if I don’t have this capability and people insist on talking about culture-war stuff in the comments of my posts anyway, being on LW 2.0 will probably be unpleasant and aversive enough that I won’t want to do it. Of course, I’m just one person and it doesn’t make sense to set policy based on luring me in specific; however, I suspect this preference is common enough across political ideologies that having a way to accommodate it would attract more writers.
My post appears for me if I go to my profile page and switch the view to “most recent posts.” I am not sure why it only wants to show one post of mine at a time though; this seems pretty confusing.
ETA: when I go to Chris_Leong’s page, it doesn’t show him as having written any blog posts at all, even though he has clearly written a blog post which I am currently commenting on. So perhaps there is some deeper problem?
Magical scoring might work well to filter through large amounts of content and only promote the best, but right now there is not a lot of content. I’m curious to look at all the things people have posted, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to do that. In particular, I want to know which writers I already like are signed up to LW 2.0 so I can subscribe to them, and I don’t have any way of distinguishing “this writer hasn’t signed up for LW 2.0” from “this writer has signed up for LW 2.0 but none of their posts have made it to the front page.”
One problem I’ve noticed with common jargon is that jargon that starts off with a single, precise meaning often evolves to have a broader and less useful meaning. Since I tend to do a lot of arguing about social justice, the examples that occur to me are “gaslighting,” “intersectionality” and “demisexual.” It seems like providing context clues might help: none of those words have particularly obvious meanings, and “demisexual” in particular sounds like it means “somewhat sexually attracted to people” rather than “only sexually attracted to close friends.” But it seems to me that that’s not 100% of the problem. When jargon is used by a 101-level audience, their misunderstandings can build on each other to the point where even experts cannot use the term without being misunderstood.
Hypothesis: The problem with your proposal is that, as a practical matter, no one ever clicks on the damn links and reads the definition. It makes sense from the reader’s perspective—they assume they know what you mean, why would they bother reading a link? Even if you define the word in the post, many people will skim over the definition. I also think definitions are sort of ‘sticky’: for example, if someone wrote a post where ‘chair’ was defined to mean ‘table’, you would probably end up confused when they suggest putting food on the chair, even if they’d put in a sentence explaining that they mean a chair to be a flat thing with four legs.
I also dislike calls to punish people for things. It seems like figuring out how to use jargon well is hard, and I think rewarding people who get it right is going to be a better course.
Because I am confused about how to use the website, I think. :)
I think I am used to commenting in places where the comments are a single line and not ranked by upvotes/downvotes, so if you want to respond to someone you go to the “reply” button in the original comment. It seems hard to come up with a UI that would direct me away from this default behavior (other than having my comments be misthreaded until I get it, I guess :) ).
I think “daily” is actually the thing I was looking for, in which case it is rather hidden and perhaps should be placed in some more obvious location such as the sidebar.
Bug: “Daily” lists some posts as having been made on Friday; these posts appear briefly then disappear by the time the page has fully loaded. I think it might be because right now it is Thursday in my time zone?
ETA: “Daily” is now working properly. It is still Thursday in my time zone.
ETA2: Now the bug is happening again? I am confused.
I don’t actually think that parents have a huge amount of influence over the behavior of a person who is two months old. (I mean, it’s unclear whether parents have much influence over the behavior of a child of any age, but the case of two-month-olds seems particularly clearcut.) It seems unfair to praise them for the coincidence of Merlin happening to be sleepy at the time.