Yes, too-strong conventions against nastiness are bad. It doesn’t look to me as if we have those here, any more than it looks to me as if there’s much of a shooting-the-messenger culture.
I’ve been asking you for examples to support your claims. I’ll give a few to support mine. I’m not (at least, not deliberately) cherry-picking; I’m trying to think of cases where something has come along that someone could with a straight face argue is something like a refutation of something important to LW:
Someone wrote an article called “The death of behavioral economics”. Behavioural economics is right up LW’s street, and has a lot of overlap with the cognitive-bias material in the “Sequences”. And the article specifically attacks Kahneman and Tversky (founders of the whole heuristics-and-biases thing), claiming that their work on prospect theory was both incompetent and dishonest. So … one of the admins of LW posted a link to it saying it was useful, and that linkpost is sitting on a score of +143 right now.
Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell took a look at the Singularity Institute (the thing that’s now called MIRI) as a possible recipient of donations and wrote a really damning piece about it. Luke Muelhauser (then the executive director of the SI) and Eliezer Yudkowsky (founder of the SI) responded by … thanking HK for his comments and agreeing that there was a lot of merit to his criticisms. That really damning piece is currently on a score of +325. (Hazy memory tells me that the highest-voted thing ever on LW is Yvain’s “Diseased thinking about disease”; I may or may not be right about that, but at any rate that one’s on +393. Just for context.)
and I had a look for comments that were moderately nasty but with some sort of justification, to see how they were received:
Consider Valentine’s post about enlightenment experiences. Here are some of the things said in response: Ben Pace’s comment, saying serious meditation seems likely to be a waste of time, its advocates can’t show actual evidence of anything useful, Valentine is quite likely just confused, etc. +60. Said Achmiz’s comment, making similar points similarly bluntly. +31. clone of saturn’s response to that, calling other things said in the discussion “pretty useless” and “obnoxious”. +29. There are plenty more examples in that discussion of frankness-to-the-point-of-rudeness getting (1) positive karma and (2) constructive responses.
Unfortunately, searching for moderately-nasty-but-at-least-kinda-justified comments is difficult because (1) most comments aren’t of that kind and (2) it’s not the sort of thing that e.g. Google can help very much with. (I did try searching for various negative words but that didn’t come up with much.)
But, overall, I repeat that my impression is that the usual LW response to criticism is to take it seriously, and that LW is not so intolerant of negativity as to be a problem. I am willing to be persuaded that I’m wrong, but I’d want to see some actual evidence rather than just a constant tone of indignation that I won’t make the leap from “Eliezer called another AI researcher an idiot once” to any broad conclusion about how LW people respond to criticism.
I’m well aware that the big people get treated right. That’s compatible with the little people being shot. Look how Haziq has been treated for asking a question.
He’s asked a lot of questions. His various LW posts are sitting, right now, at scores of +4, +4, +2, +11, +9, +10, +4, +1, +7, −2. This one’s slightly negative; none of the others are. It’s not the case that this one got treated more harshly because it suggested that something fundamental to LW might be wrong; the same is true of others, including the one that’s on +11.
This question (as well as some upvotes and slightly more downvotes) received two reasonably detailed answers, and a couple of comments (one of them giving good reason to doubt the premise of the question), all of them polite and respectful.
Unless your position is that nothing should ever be downvoted, I’m not sure what here qualifies as being “shot”.
(I haven’t downvoted this question nor any of Haziq’s others; but my guess is that this one was downvoted because it’s only a question worth asking if Halpern’s counterexample to Cox’s theorem is a serious problem, which johnswentworth already gave very good reasons for thinking it isn’t in response to one of Haziq’s other questions; so readers may reasonably wonder whether he’s actually paying any attention to the answers his questions get. Haziq did engage with johnswentworth in that other question—but from this question you’d never guess that any of that had happened.)
Yes, too-strong conventions against nastiness are bad. It doesn’t look to me as if we have those here, any more than it looks to me as if there’s much of a shooting-the-messenger culture.
I’ve been asking you for examples to support your claims. I’ll give a few to support mine. I’m not (at least, not deliberately) cherry-picking; I’m trying to think of cases where something has come along that someone could with a straight face argue is something like a refutation of something important to LW:
Someone wrote an article called “The death of behavioral economics”. Behavioural economics is right up LW’s street, and has a lot of overlap with the cognitive-bias material in the “Sequences”. And the article specifically attacks Kahneman and Tversky (founders of the whole heuristics-and-biases thing), claiming that their work on prospect theory was both incompetent and dishonest. So … one of the admins of LW posted a link to it saying it was useful, and that linkpost is sitting on a score of +143 right now.
Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell took a look at the Singularity Institute (the thing that’s now called MIRI) as a possible recipient of donations and wrote a really damning piece about it. Luke Muelhauser (then the executive director of the SI) and Eliezer Yudkowsky (founder of the SI) responded by … thanking HK for his comments and agreeing that there was a lot of merit to his criticisms. That really damning piece is currently on a score of +325. (Hazy memory tells me that the highest-voted thing ever on LW is Yvain’s “Diseased thinking about disease”; I may or may not be right about that, but at any rate that one’s on +393. Just for context.)
and I had a look for comments that were moderately nasty but with some sort of justification, to see how they were received:
Consider Valentine’s post about enlightenment experiences. Here are some of the things said in response: Ben Pace’s comment, saying serious meditation seems likely to be a waste of time, its advocates can’t show actual evidence of anything useful, Valentine is quite likely just confused, etc. +60. Said Achmiz’s comment, making similar points similarly bluntly. +31. clone of saturn’s response to that, calling other things said in the discussion “pretty useless” and “obnoxious”. +29. There are plenty more examples in that discussion of frankness-to-the-point-of-rudeness getting (1) positive karma and (2) constructive responses.
Unfortunately, searching for moderately-nasty-but-at-least-kinda-justified comments is difficult because (1) most comments aren’t of that kind and (2) it’s not the sort of thing that e.g. Google can help very much with. (I did try searching for various negative words but that didn’t come up with much.)
But, overall, I repeat that my impression is that the usual LW response to criticism is to take it seriously, and that LW is not so intolerant of negativity as to be a problem. I am willing to be persuaded that I’m wrong, but I’d want to see some actual evidence rather than just a constant tone of indignation that I won’t make the leap from “Eliezer called another AI researcher an idiot once” to any broad conclusion about how LW people respond to criticism.
I’m well aware that the big people get treated right. That’s compatible with the little people being shot. Look how Haziq has been treated for asking a question.
He’s asked a lot of questions. His various LW posts are sitting, right now, at scores of +4, +4, +2, +11, +9, +10, +4, +1, +7, −2. This one’s slightly negative; none of the others are. It’s not the case that this one got treated more harshly because it suggested that something fundamental to LW might be wrong; the same is true of others, including the one that’s on +11.
This question (as well as some upvotes and slightly more downvotes) received two reasonably detailed answers, and a couple of comments (one of them giving good reason to doubt the premise of the question), all of them polite and respectful.
Unless your position is that nothing should ever be downvoted, I’m not sure what here qualifies as being “shot”.
(I haven’t downvoted this question nor any of Haziq’s others; but my guess is that this one was downvoted because it’s only a question worth asking if Halpern’s counterexample to Cox’s theorem is a serious problem, which johnswentworth already gave very good reasons for thinking it isn’t in response to one of Haziq’s other questions; so readers may reasonably wonder whether he’s actually paying any attention to the answers his questions get. Haziq did engage with johnswentworth in that other question—but from this question you’d never guess that any of that had happened.)