I could get behind most of the ideas discussed here, but I’m wary of the entire “Standards of Discourse and Policy on Mindkillers” section. It’s refreshing to have a section of the internet not concerned with politics. Besides, I don’t think the world is even Pareto optimized, so I don’t think political discussions are even useful, since acquiring better political views incur opportunity costs. Why fight the other side to gain an inch of ground when we could do something less controversial but highly efficient at improving things? I’m all for discussing weird, counterintuitive, and neglected topics, but politics is only interesting for the same reason soap operas and dramas are interesting. The most viral arguments aren’t necessarily the most worthwhile.
As for mandatory Crocker’s rules, the wiki article has this to say:
Crocker emphasized, repeatedly, in Wikipedia discourse and elsewhere, that one could only adopt Crocker’s rules to apply to oneself, and could not impose them on a debate or forum with participants who had not opted-in explicitly to these rules, nor use them to exclude any participant.
I suspect that if Crocker’s rules were mandatory for participation in something, there would be a large number of people who would be pushed into accepting them. I don’t think this would actually improve anything. Lots of people invoking Crocker’s rules is a symptom of a healthy discourse, not a cause of it. Personally, I know that when I invoke Crocker’s rules I have a much smaller knee-jerk reaction to criticism. LessWrong can already be a blunt place at times, probably more than is optimal.
I probably have 50 pages of random notes and thoughts that would be appropriate to post here, but haven’t. Some are things I started to write specifically for LW, but never finished polishing. I suspect both the community and I would benefit from the discussion, but honestly it takes an order of magnitude more time for me to get something to a state where I would be willing to post it here. That’s probably twice as much time as for me to be willing to post something on Facebook. I get diminishing returns from rereading the same thing over and over again, but it’s much more difficult to achieve activation energy here. I suspect that difference is mostly due to the subjective feel of the group.
I could get behind most of the ideas discussed here, but I’m wary of the entire “Standards of Discourse and Policy on Mindkillers” section. It’s refreshing to have a section of the internet not concerned with politics. Besides, I don’t think the world is even Pareto optimized, so I don’t think political discussions are even useful, since acquiring better political views incur opportunity costs. Why fight the other side to gain an inch of ground when we could do something less controversial but highly efficient at improving things? I’m all for discussing weird, counterintuitive, and neglected topics, but politics is only interesting for the same reason soap operas and dramas are interesting. The most viral arguments aren’t necessarily the most worthwhile.
As for mandatory Crocker’s rules, the wiki article has this to say:
I suspect that if Crocker’s rules were mandatory for participation in something, there would be a large number of people who would be pushed into accepting them. I don’t think this would actually improve anything. Lots of people invoking Crocker’s rules is a symptom of a healthy discourse, not a cause of it. Personally, I know that when I invoke Crocker’s rules I have a much smaller knee-jerk reaction to criticism. LessWrong can already be a blunt place at times, probably more than is optimal.
I probably have 50 pages of random notes and thoughts that would be appropriate to post here, but haven’t. Some are things I started to write specifically for LW, but never finished polishing. I suspect both the community and I would benefit from the discussion, but honestly it takes an order of magnitude more time for me to get something to a state where I would be willing to post it here. That’s probably twice as much time as for me to be willing to post something on Facebook. I get diminishing returns from rereading the same thing over and over again, but it’s much more difficult to achieve activation energy here. I suspect that difference is mostly due to the subjective feel of the group.