Man, posting on LessWrong seems really unrewarding. You show up, you put a ton of effort into a post, and at the end the comment section will tear apart some random thing that isn’t load bearing for your argument, isn’t something you consider particularly important, and whose discussion doesn’t illuminate what you are trying to communicate, all the while implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas.
You could run an LLM every time someone tries to post a comment. If a top level reply tries to nitpick something that isn’t key to the post, the LLM could say “It seems like you are tying to nitpick a point that’s not central? Do you really want to write post this comment?”
While I hope it’s gotten less, I do think I have written some comment myself in the past criticizing posts for minor issues that aren’t central to the post. For me, I think a gentle nudge from an LLM asking “It seems like you are nitpicking something minor, do you really want to do that?” would seem like it would reduce posts that fall into that bucket when I’m in the mode of “something said something wrong on the internet, it’s not central to their post but it’s wrong, so let’s write a comment pointing out that it’s wrong”.
The same mechanism could also be used for other classes of comments that you want to have less of. An LLM can easily analyze whether a comment falls into that bucket and then ask the user whether they really want to post the comment.
You could run an LLM every time someone tries to post a comment. If a top level reply tries to nitpick something that isn’t key to the post, the LLM could say “It seems like you are tying to nitpick a point that’s not central? Do you really want to write post this comment?”
While I hope it’s gotten less, I do think I have written some comment myself in the past criticizing posts for minor issues that aren’t central to the post. For me, I think a gentle nudge from an LLM asking “It seems like you are nitpicking something minor, do you really want to do that?” would seem like it would reduce posts that fall into that bucket when I’m in the mode of “something said something wrong on the internet, it’s not central to their post but it’s wrong, so let’s write a comment pointing out that it’s wrong”.
The same mechanism could also be used for other classes of comments that you want to have less of. An LLM can easily analyze whether a comment falls into that bucket and then ask the user whether they really want to post the comment.