We consider this tabloid reporting. I’ve removed the link from the OP because our policy is not to reward trolling (by reporters or anyone else) with publicity or Google rank. OP can add the link back in if they wish and I won’t remove it again, but please keep in mind that we would like to ask politely that you don’t. You should also feel free to delete this post entirely, which you can do by setting the status back to “Draft”.
Yes, and the oblique suggestion to remove even the mere mention of the newspaper article makes Eliezer look like a). an authoritarian who can’t stomach any media exposure that he does not control, and b). someone who’s never heard of the Streisand Effect.
Oh no, someone told the internet about your polyamorous cuddle-piling cohabiting group of people! Did you not expect those things to get talked about it if you achieved any level of fame? Considering the judgement laid down on politicians for hints of inappropriateness, you should either make your relationships more normal and mainstream, or just learn to deal with people attacking you for the weirdness.
To be honest, as a long term supporter of SIAI, this sort of social experimentation seems like a serious political blunder. I personally have no problem with finding new (or not part of current western culture) techniques of… social interactions… if you believe it will make yourself and others ‘better’ for some definition of better.
But if you are serious in actually getting the world behind the movement, this is Bad. “Why should I believe you when you seem to be amoral?”. I have more arguments on this matter but they are easy to generate anyway.
Another thought: one way to think of it might be that to achieve your goals personal sacrifice is necessary and applauded: ‘I’m too busy saving the world to have a girlfriend.’. Perhaps there are better examples than that. Maybe it’s time to get rid of couches?
“Why should I believe you when you seem to be amoral?”
If we took this argument seriously, we (at least those of us in the United States) would have to pretend to be Christians, too.
Optimizing your life to minimize the worst that Mrs Grundy can say about you is a losing proposition — even if Mrs Grundy is a trendy New York gossip columnist rather than a curtain-twitching busybody neighbor.
To be honest, as a long term supporter of SIAI, this sort of social experimentation seems like a serious political blunder.
AFAIK, most of the people in the article are not SI employees, so as a criticism of SI this seems odd. SI can hardly dictate what other people do with their personal lives.
Well, hiding things like this or stopping doing them is possibly even worse as far as image is concerned.
There’s also the issue of demonstrating rationality. If they claim to that being rational will change your life and make you happier, but seem to live exactly like everyone else, then their claims hold less force than if being more rational makes you do seemingly weird things. There’s arguments to be made that making an effort to tone down the weirdness is counter to the goal of promoting radically different means of thought than most people are used to.
I’m pro-poly, pro-cuddlepiles, and pro-cohabiting, I just think it’s silly to do all these things and then act shocked when someone else points out that they are weird.
Lets be honest about ‘demonstrating rationality’ here. If your goals are to have much more romping in the bedroom, they have done well here. However many of these techniques speak to me of cults, the ones with the leader getting all the brainwashed girls.
A much better sign of rationality is to have success in career, in money, in fame—to be Successful. Not to just have more fun. Being successful hasn’t been much demonstrated, though I am hopeful still.
If your goals are to have much more romping in the bedroom, they have done well here. However many of these techniques speak to me of cults, the ones with the leader getting all the brainwashed girls.
The irony is that I recall a few years ago reading someone criticizing LWers to the effect that ‘I would be more impressed by their so-called rationality if they were losing their virginity or getting laid more, than the stuff they focus on’. So, the NYCers are apparently doing just that and the response is this?
(Truly, damned if you do and damned if you don’t.)
Also we don’t want to forget the people this will attract. Being obviously happy works pretty well for Mormons, it might work well for Lesswrong. I dunno the value of the tradeoffs there but it’s probably non-negligible, especially if you’re interested in getting your group to skew younger.
As noted elsewhere, the article is generally accurate and Eliezer conceded “hatchet job” wasn’t really the right word. But “we” includes most of the people featured in the article, many of whom did not know there was a reporter at a party.
Yes, that’s a good point. Recording people without their knowledge, and then publishing the article without their consent, is clearly unethical. That said, though, once the cat is out of the bag, attempting to cram it back in is futile.
I’ve said it before: what the SIAI needs are some real, tangible accomplishments. Then, Eliezer could just say, “Yeah, our cuddle puddles are sensational and all, but guess what ? You know about that cancer vaccine that got FDA-approved last week ? We wrote the software that built it. How do you like dem apples ?”
That was a bit of a hyperbole, of course, but hopefully the idea is clear.
I think SI needs to work on real tangible accomplishments to be able to fitful it’s stated mission at all, given it’s reliance on self education and importance of calibration to self-education.
I really don’t see it as much of a hatchet job. It reads to me like “these people are a bit strange, but interesting”, which I have trouble taking offense at. Certainly it picks and chooses the “interesting” stuff, but it doesn’t strike me as particular worse than normal human interest stories (judging by the very limited sample of news articles that I have close personal knowledge of the subjects of).
I suspect if this was actually a hatchet job (as in, the reporter really was intentionally trying to make LW look bad, or really didn’t like someone), it would be a lot worse.
Calling it a hatchet job seems… disingenuous. Especially given that I don’t see many specific objections being raised. Sure, it could be better, and it’s not something an insider would have written. But neither of those surprises me, based on what I know about journalists and news articles.
A hatchet job implies destruction as the goal. Usually the target would be someone or something the author finds threatening or dangerous. Targets that are perceived as legitimate or powerful get hack jobs. This was just pure mockery.
I agree. I don’t think this great publicity, but I don’t think that it is too actively bad particularly given the intended audience (this is the paper Sex and the City is based on I expect that the have a relatively pro-poly attitude). Furthermore, I think the negative aspects are due to the unfortunate(from our perspective) fact that the article was about the NY group as a tribe/lifestyle than about the singularity or rationality per se, and not the result of the kind of malice that “hatchet job” usually implies.
Many of the people mentioned are not in the New York group currently; they’re in Berkeley. However, New York media stereotypically see the world as revolving around New York.
It seems to me that some of the biggest tension between this article and the way LWers see ourselves is that the article is about people and their human quirks (living arrangements, sexual habits, and physical behavior), with the ideas presented as irrelevant eccentricities. Whereas within the LW-space, the ideas are pretty important. It’s like an article about Nikola Tesla that focuses on his affection for pigeons.
“In early 2005, Google implemented a new value, “nofollow”, for the rel attribute of HTML link and anchor elements, so that website developers and bloggers can make links that Google will not consider for the purposes of PageRank—they are links that no longer constitute a “vote” in the PageRank system.”
I’m not sure how to use (or if it’s even possible to use) “nofollow” with the markup here, though.
I think most of the parts I’d see as “hatchet job” can be explained by sensationalism and are subverted by other parts of the article. Maybe the biggest subversion is that LW gets treated as a group of “others” in only two places, while much of the article is spent on humanizing people, which is unusual during a hatcheting. The impression I got was less “here’s this weird group of people, let’s apply the absurdity heuristic” and more “here’s this group of people who believe something interesting and unusual, and here is everything I could find out about their sex lives.” Which can still be bad for the people tabloidized (sorry!), but for LessWrong seems fine.
This was an attempted hatcheting that ended up with the author really sincerely liking the group, but she still had to publish a hatchet piece because that’s what her editors were expecting.
First, before having read this post, I found a reference in the welcome thread about someone who joined Less Wrong because they read the article and found it interesting. They didn’t reference the article link in their welcome post, which naturally made me curious, and wanted to read it in a “Article? What Article, I don’t see a link to an Article.” way. I then found a link to the article online, and posted it to my comment here:
You can delete it if you feel necessary, although given the other heavily upvoted objections to doing so from removing it from the original post, you may feel that would not be necessary.
There was once an occasion where a reporter wrote about me, and did a hatchet job. It was my first time being reported on, and I was completely blindsided by it. I’d known that reporters sometimes wrote hatchet jobs, but I’d thought that it would require malice—I hadn’t begun to imagine that someone might write a hatchet job just because it was a cliche, an easy way to generate a few column inches. So I drew upon my own powers of narration, and wrote an autobiographical story on what it felt like to be reported on for the first time—that horrible feeling of violation. I’ve never sent that story off anywhere, though it’s a fine and short piece of writing as I judge it.
Meh. I think the main effect of removing the link was that, in order to get to the article, instead of spending about 0.2 seconds to click on the link, one has to spend nearly a second to select the title, right-click it, click “Search Google for ‘Faith …’”, and click on the top result.
If that hadn’t been true I would’ve been much more reluctant to delete the URL. I was trying to control Pagerank flow, not information discovery. Please feel free to mirror the text on your home site and direct readers there.
You can edit the post manually and put it in. In the post editor, click on the “HTML” toolbar icon to go into source code mode and then change the link so it looks like
Huh. I tested this and it appeared to work, which surprised me, because it’d been previously claimed that this HTML editor would filter all attributes not explicitly allowed (e.g. to filter Javascript misbehavior). Perhaps that one is explicitly allowed.
What correction are you referring to? I don’t see a record of a correction, the way journalists usually work. Maybe it would be obvious what you talking about if I reread the article with it in mind, but I don’t want to do that.
Someone who works for SingInst choosing to overwrite Eliezer’s decision strikes me as unlikely. Not that Eliezer is likely to be aware that Malo works for them, via Luke. (I am fairly sure this is the same Malo.)
Eliezer: Even without considering the extra influence you have over Malo it may have been more practical for you to request via comment and by personal message that the OP remove the link. Very few people would refuse—many may even be more inclined to take the offer to add it back than to refuse to remove it. You could expect the link to remain for only a few hours longer and the likely reception by the community would likely switch from significantly negative to neutral or slightly positive.
This is a case where the degree of power exercised in the two options would be technically almost equivalent but the perception of the intervention would be entirely different—especially if you put some more thought into how to word your comment. Or, heck, just get Luke to do it or ghost write it for you.
We consider this tabloid reporting. I’ve removed the link from the OP because our policy is not to reward trolling (by reporters or anyone else) with publicity or Google rank. OP can add the link back in if they wish and I won’t remove it again, but please keep in mind that we would like to ask politely that you don’t. You should also feel free to delete this post entirely, which you can do by setting the status back to “Draft”.
I disagree with removing the link strongly. It makes you look defensive at best.
Yes, and the oblique suggestion to remove even the mere mention of the newspaper article makes Eliezer look like a). an authoritarian who can’t stomach any media exposure that he does not control, and b). someone who’s never heard of the Streisand Effect.
Oh no, someone told the internet about your polyamorous cuddle-piling cohabiting group of people! Did you not expect those things to get talked about it if you achieved any level of fame? Considering the judgement laid down on politicians for hints of inappropriateness, you should either make your relationships more normal and mainstream, or just learn to deal with people attacking you for the weirdness.
To be honest, as a long term supporter of SIAI, this sort of social experimentation seems like a serious political blunder. I personally have no problem with finding new (or not part of current western culture) techniques of… social interactions… if you believe it will make yourself and others ‘better’ for some definition of better.
But if you are serious in actually getting the world behind the movement, this is Bad. “Why should I believe you when you seem to be amoral?”. I have more arguments on this matter but they are easy to generate anyway.
Another thought: one way to think of it might be that to achieve your goals personal sacrifice is necessary and applauded: ‘I’m too busy saving the world to have a girlfriend.’. Perhaps there are better examples than that. Maybe it’s time to get rid of couches?
If we took this argument seriously, we (at least those of us in the United States) would have to pretend to be Christians, too.
Optimizing your life to minimize the worst that Mrs Grundy can say about you is a losing proposition — even if Mrs Grundy is a trendy New York gossip columnist rather than a curtain-twitching busybody neighbor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqDFGpd845Y
AFAIK, most of the people in the article are not SI employees, so as a criticism of SI this seems odd. SI can hardly dictate what other people do with their personal lives.
Well, hiding things like this or stopping doing them is possibly even worse as far as image is concerned.
There’s also the issue of demonstrating rationality. If they claim to that being rational will change your life and make you happier, but seem to live exactly like everyone else, then their claims hold less force than if being more rational makes you do seemingly weird things. There’s arguments to be made that making an effort to tone down the weirdness is counter to the goal of promoting radically different means of thought than most people are used to.
I’m pro-poly, pro-cuddlepiles, and pro-cohabiting, I just think it’s silly to do all these things and then act shocked when someone else points out that they are weird.
Lets be honest about ‘demonstrating rationality’ here. If your goals are to have much more romping in the bedroom, they have done well here. However many of these techniques speak to me of cults, the ones with the leader getting all the brainwashed girls.
A much better sign of rationality is to have success in career, in money, in fame—to be Successful. Not to just have more fun. Being successful hasn’t been much demonstrated, though I am hopeful still.
The irony is that I recall a few years ago reading someone criticizing LWers to the effect that ‘I would be more impressed by their so-called rationality if they were losing their virginity or getting laid more, than the stuff they focus on’. So, the NYCers are apparently doing just that and the response is this?
(Truly, damned if you do and damned if you don’t.)
It would be nice if they had a list of awesome people who agree with Lesswrong or support it, instead of pointing to Thiel and Tallinn over and over.
Also we don’t want to forget the people this will attract. Being obviously happy works pretty well for Mormons, it might work well for Lesswrong. I dunno the value of the tradeoffs there but it’s probably non-negligible, especially if you’re interested in getting your group to skew younger.
Who’s included in “we”?
Good question, I would also like to know the answer to this, as well as to the following: which parts of the article do “we” believe are inaccurate ?
As noted elsewhere, the article is generally accurate and Eliezer conceded “hatchet job” wasn’t really the right word. But “we” includes most of the people featured in the article, many of whom did not know there was a reporter at a party.
Yes, that’s a good point. Recording people without their knowledge, and then publishing the article without their consent, is clearly unethical. That said, though, once the cat is out of the bag, attempting to cram it back in is futile.
I’ve said it before: what the SIAI needs are some real, tangible accomplishments. Then, Eliezer could just say, “Yeah, our cuddle puddles are sensational and all, but guess what ? You know about that cancer vaccine that got FDA-approved last week ? We wrote the software that built it. How do you like dem apples ?”
That was a bit of a hyperbole, of course, but hopefully the idea is clear.
I think SI needs to work on real tangible accomplishments to be able to fitful it’s stated mission at all, given it’s reliance on self education and importance of calibration to self-education.
I really don’t see it as much of a hatchet job. It reads to me like “these people are a bit strange, but interesting”, which I have trouble taking offense at. Certainly it picks and chooses the “interesting” stuff, but it doesn’t strike me as particular worse than normal human interest stories (judging by the very limited sample of news articles that I have close personal knowledge of the subjects of).
I suspect if this was actually a hatchet job (as in, the reporter really was intentionally trying to make LW look bad, or really didn’t like someone), it would be a lot worse.
Calling it a hatchet job seems… disingenuous. Especially given that I don’t see many specific objections being raised. Sure, it could be better, and it’s not something an insider would have written. But neither of those surprises me, based on what I know about journalists and news articles.
A hatchet job implies destruction as the goal. Usually the target would be someone or something the author finds threatening or dangerous. Targets that are perceived as legitimate or powerful get hack jobs. This was just pure mockery.
I agree. I don’t think this great publicity, but I don’t think that it is too actively bad particularly given the intended audience (this is the paper Sex and the City is based on I expect that the have a relatively pro-poly attitude). Furthermore, I think the negative aspects are due to the unfortunate(from our perspective) fact that the article was about the NY group as a tribe/lifestyle than about the singularity or rationality per se, and not the result of the kind of malice that “hatchet job” usually implies.
Many of the people mentioned are not in the New York group currently; they’re in Berkeley. However, New York media stereotypically see the world as revolving around New York.
It seems to me that some of the biggest tension between this article and the way LWers see ourselves is that the article is about people and their human quirks (living arrangements, sexual habits, and physical behavior), with the ideas presented as irrelevant eccentricities. Whereas within the LW-space, the ideas are pretty important. It’s like an article about Nikola Tesla that focuses on his affection for pigeons.
I think you’re right. Maybe if LW’s ideas bore more fruit in the external world, journalists would give them more airtime compared to gossip...
I am inclined to agree with your first request about not rewarding reporting like this with increased page rank. As such I won’t re-add the link.
However, I’m having trouble understanding why a discussion about a portrayal of LW in the media isn’t something worth discussing here.
“In early 2005, Google implemented a new value, “nofollow”, for the rel attribute of HTML link and anchor elements, so that website developers and bloggers can make links that Google will not consider for the purposes of PageRank—they are links that no longer constitute a “vote” in the PageRank system.”
I’m not sure how to use (or if it’s even possible to use) “nofollow” with the markup here, though.
Because the article is moderately negative.
I think most of the parts I’d see as “hatchet job” can be explained by sensationalism and are subverted by other parts of the article. Maybe the biggest subversion is that LW gets treated as a group of “others” in only two places, while much of the article is spent on humanizing people, which is unusual during a hatcheting. The impression I got was less “here’s this weird group of people, let’s apply the absurdity heuristic” and more “here’s this group of people who believe something interesting and unusual, and here is everything I could find out about their sex lives.” Which can still be bad for the people tabloidized (sorry!), but for LessWrong seems fine.
I’d be willing to swap “tabloid” for “hatchet”, sure.
How come I don’t see an “edited” star in the original comment? Is it because it was edited using Mod Powers?
This was an attempted hatcheting that ended up with the author really sincerely liking the group, but she still had to publish a hatchet piece because that’s what her editors were expecting.
Are you just speculating, or do you have a strong reason to believe this?
Speculation, but I’m somewhat confident that this is how the editorial process of a tabloid works.
First, before having read this post, I found a reference in the welcome thread about someone who joined Less Wrong because they read the article and found it interesting. They didn’t reference the article link in their welcome post, which naturally made me curious, and wanted to read it in a “Article? What Article, I don’t see a link to an Article.” way. I then found a link to the article online, and posted it to my comment here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/90l/welcome_to_less_wrong_2012/739j
You can delete it if you feel necessary, although given the other heavily upvoted objections to doing so from removing it from the original post, you may feel that would not be necessary.
Secondly, is the policy linked somewhere that I just can’t find? If it isn’t, should it be somewhere like http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ ? The only link I can find about you and hatchet/tabloid reporting is your article on http://lesswrong.com/lw/uu/why_does_power_corrupt/ where you mention such points as:
Meh. I think the main effect of removing the link was that, in order to get to the article, instead of spending about 0.2 seconds to click on the link, one has to spend nearly a second to select the title, right-click it, click “Search Google for ‘Faith …’”, and click on the top result.
If that hadn’t been true I would’ve been much more reluctant to delete the URL. I was trying to control Pagerank flow, not information discovery. Please feel free to mirror the text on your home site and direct readers there.
Did you know you can put a “nofollow” attribute on a link and control search ranking that way?
We don’t have sufficient development resources to do very basic things with the LW codebase. This is one of them.
You can edit the post manually and put it in. In the post editor, click on the “HTML” toolbar icon to go into source code mode and then change the link so it looks like
link text
Huh. I tested this and it appeared to work, which surprised me, because it’d been previously claimed that this HTML editor would filter all attributes not explicitly allowed (e.g. to filter Javascript misbehavior). Perhaps that one is explicitly allowed.
A good sign is that the author of the piece made a correction based on something said in the comments section.
What correction are you referring to?
I don’t see a record of a correction, the way journalists usually work.
Maybe it would be obvious what you talking about if I reread the article with it in mind, but I don’t want to do that.
TH
Someone who works for SingInst choosing to overwrite Eliezer’s decision strikes me as unlikely. Not that Eliezer is likely to be aware that Malo works for them, via Luke. (I am fairly sure this is the same Malo.)
Eliezer: Even without considering the extra influence you have over Malo it may have been more practical for you to request via comment and by personal message that the OP remove the link. Very few people would refuse—many may even be more inclined to take the offer to add it back than to refuse to remove it. You could expect the link to remain for only a few hours longer and the likely reception by the community would likely switch from significantly negative to neutral or slightly positive.
This is a case where the degree of power exercised in the two options would be technically almost equivalent but the perception of the intervention would be entirely different—especially if you put some more thought into how to word your comment. Or, heck, just get Luke to do it or ghost write it for you.
Anissimov (the Media Director) doesn’t, Kevin doesn’t. Vassar doesn’t.
Hmm, weird how people here go all libertarian just because EY does not want to contribute to some half-assed article’s Google rank.