What you say makes sense if, and only if, the presence of “bad” content is costless.
“Iff” is far too strong. I agree that the “if” claim holds. However, I think that what Ben says also makes sense ifthe bad/high-variance content has costs which are less than its benefits. Demanding costlessness imposes an unnecessarily high standard on positions disagreeing with your own, I think.
Contrasting your position with Ben’s, I sense a potential false dichotomy. Must it be true that either we open the floodgates and allow who-knows-what on the site in order to encourage higher-variance moves, or we sternly allow only the most well-supported reasoning? I think not. What other solutions might be available?
The first—but surely not best—to come to mind is the curation < LW review < ??? pipeline, where posts are subjected to increasing levels of scrutiny and rewarded with increasing levels of visibility. Perhaps there might be some way for people to modulate “how much they update on a post” by “the amount of scrutiny the post has received.” I don’t think this quite fights the corrosion you point at. But it seems like something is possible here, and in any case it seems to me too early to conclude there is only one axis of variation in responses to the situation (free-wheeling vs strict).
I have repeatedly suggested/advocated the (to me, fairly obvious) solution where (to summarize / crystallize my previous commentary on this):
People post things on their personal LW blogs. Post authors have moderation powers on their personal-blog posts.
Things are posted to the front page only if (but not necessarily “if”!) they are intended to be subject to the sort of scrutiny wherein we insist that posts live up to non-trivial epistemic/etc. standards (with attendant criticism, picking-apart, analysis, etc.; and also with attendant downvotes for posts judged to be bad). Importantly, post authors do not have moderation powers in this case, nor the ability to decide on moderation standards for comments on their posts. (In this case a post might be front-paged by the author, or, with the author’s consent, by the mods.)
Posts that go to the front page, are evaluated by the above-described process, and judged to be unusually good, may be “curated” or what have you.
In this case, it would be proper for the community to judge personal-blog posts, that have not been subjected to “frontpage-level” scrutiny, as essentially ignorable. This would go a long way toward ensuring that posts of the “jam-packed with bullshit” type (which would either be posted to personal blogs only, or would go to the front page and be mercilessly torn apart, and clearly and publicly judged to be poor) would be largely costless.
I agree with you that this sort of setup would not quite solve the problem, and also that it would nonetheless improve the situation markedly.
But the LW team has consistently been opposed to this sort of proposal.
It sounds to me like posting on your High-Standards-Frontpage is a very high effort endeavor, an amount of effort that currently only around 3-30 posts each year have put into them. I’ve thought of this idea before with the name “LW Journal” or “LW Peer Review”, which also had a part where it wasn’t only commenters critiquing your post, but we paid a few people full-time for reviewing of the posts in this pipeline, and there was also a clear pass/failure with each submission. (Scott Garrabrant has also suggested this idea to me in the past, as a publishing place for his papers.)
I think the main requirement I see is a correspondingly larger incentive to write something that passes this bar. Else I mostly expect the same fate to befall us as with LW 1.0, where Main became increasingly effortful and unpleasant for authors to post to, such that writers like Scott Alexander moved away to writing on their personal blogs.
(I’m generally interested to hear ideas for what would be a big reward for writers to do this sort of thing. The first ones that come to my mind are “money” and “being published in physical books”.)
I do think that something like this would really help the site in certain ways; I think a lot of people have a hard time figuring out what standard to hold their posts to, and having a clearly “high standard” and “lower standard” place would help authors feel more comfortable knowing what they’re aiming for in their writing. (“Shortform” was an experiment with a kind of lower-standards place.) But I don’t currently see a simple way to cause a lot of people to produce high-effort high-standards content for that part of the site, beyond the amount of effort we currently receive on the highest effort posts each year.
The first ones that come to my mind are “money” and “being published in physical books”.
So I think the Review is pretty good at getting good old content, but I think the thing Said is talking about should happen more quickly, and should be more like Royal Society Letters or w/e.
Actually, I wonder about Rohin’s newsletters as a model/seed. They attract more scrutiny to things, but they come with the reward of Rohin’s summary (and, presumably, more eyeballs than it would have gotten on its own). But also people were going to be writing those things for their own reasons anyway.
I think if we had the Eliezer-curated weekly newsletter of “here are the LW posts that caught my interest plus commentary on them”, we would probably think the reward and scrutiny were balanced. Of course, as with any suggestion that proposes spending Eliezer-time on something, I think this is pretty dang expensive—but the Royal Society Letters were also colossally expensive to produce.
I would likely do this from my own motivation (i.e. not necessarily need money) if I were given at least one of:
a) guaranteed protection from the badgunk comments by e.g. three moderators willing to be dependably high-effort down in the comments
b) given the power to hide badgunk comments pending their author rewriting them to eliminate the badgunk
c) given the power to leave inline commentary on people’s badgunk comments
The only thing holding me back from doing something much more like what Said proposes is “LW comment sections regularly abuse and exhaust me.” Literally that’s the only barrier, and it’s a substantial one. If LW comment sections did not regularly abuse and exhaust me, such that every post feels like I need to set aside fifty hours of life and spoons just in case, then I could and would be much more prolific.
(To be clear: some people whose pushback on this post was emphatically not abuse or exhausting include supposedlyfun, Said, Elizabeth, johnswentsworth, and agrippa.)
a) guaranteed protection from the badgunk comments by e.g. three moderators willing to be dependably high-effort down in the comments
Would you accept this substitute:
“A site/community culture where other commenters will reliably ‘call out’ (and downvote) undesirable comments, and will not be punished for doing so (and attempts to punish them for such ‘vigilante-style’ a.k.a. ‘grassroots’ ‘comment policing’ will themselves be punished—by other commenters, recursively, with support from moderators if required).”
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for noting it. That substitute is much more what the OP is pushing for.
EDIT: With the further claim that, once such activity is reliable and credible, its rate will also decrease. That standards, clearly held and reliably enforced, tend to beget fewer violations in the first place, and that, in other words, I don’t think this would be a permanent uptick in policing.
“Iff” is far too strong. I agree that the “if” claim holds. However, I think that what Ben says also makes sense if the bad/high-variance content has costs which are less than its benefits. Demanding costlessness imposes an unnecessarily high standard on positions disagreeing with your own, I think.
Contrasting your position with Ben’s, I sense a potential false dichotomy. Must it be true that either we open the floodgates and allow who-knows-what on the site in order to encourage higher-variance moves, or we sternly allow only the most well-supported reasoning? I think not. What other solutions might be available?
The first—but surely not best—to come to mind is the curation < LW review < ??? pipeline, where posts are subjected to increasing levels of scrutiny and rewarded with increasing levels of visibility. Perhaps there might be some way for people to modulate “how much they update on a post” by “the amount of scrutiny the post has received.” I don’t think this quite fights the corrosion you point at. But it seems like something is possible here, and in any case it seems to me too early to conclude there is only one axis of variation in responses to the situation (free-wheeling vs strict).
Re: other solutions:
I have repeatedly suggested/advocated the (to me, fairly obvious) solution where (to summarize / crystallize my previous commentary on this):
People post things on their personal LW blogs. Post authors have moderation powers on their personal-blog posts.
Things are posted to the front page only if (but not necessarily “if”!) they are intended to be subject to the sort of scrutiny wherein we insist that posts live up to non-trivial epistemic/etc. standards (with attendant criticism, picking-apart, analysis, etc.; and also with attendant downvotes for posts judged to be bad). Importantly, post authors do not have moderation powers in this case, nor the ability to decide on moderation standards for comments on their posts. (In this case a post might be front-paged by the author, or, with the author’s consent, by the mods.)
Posts that go to the front page, are evaluated by the above-described process, and judged to be unusually good, may be “curated” or what have you.
In this case, it would be proper for the community to judge personal-blog posts, that have not been subjected to “frontpage-level” scrutiny, as essentially ignorable. This would go a long way toward ensuring that posts of the “jam-packed with bullshit” type (which would either be posted to personal blogs only, or would go to the front page and be mercilessly torn apart, and clearly and publicly judged to be poor) would be largely costless.
I agree with you that this sort of setup would not quite solve the problem, and also that it would nonetheless improve the situation markedly.
But the LW team has consistently been opposed to this sort of proposal.
It sounds to me like posting on your High-Standards-Frontpage is a very high effort endeavor, an amount of effort that currently only around 3-30 posts each year have put into them. I’ve thought of this idea before with the name “LW Journal” or “LW Peer Review”, which also had a part where it wasn’t only commenters critiquing your post, but we paid a few people full-time for reviewing of the posts in this pipeline, and there was also a clear pass/failure with each submission. (Scott Garrabrant has also suggested this idea to me in the past, as a publishing place for his papers.)
I think the main requirement I see is a correspondingly larger incentive to write something that passes this bar. Else I mostly expect the same fate to befall us as with LW 1.0, where Main became increasingly effortful and unpleasant for authors to post to, such that writers like Scott Alexander moved away to writing on their personal blogs.
(I’m generally interested to hear ideas for what would be a big reward for writers to do this sort of thing. The first ones that come to my mind are “money” and “being published in physical books”.)
I do think that something like this would really help the site in certain ways; I think a lot of people have a hard time figuring out what standard to hold their posts to, and having a clearly “high standard” and “lower standard” place would help authors feel more comfortable knowing what they’re aiming for in their writing. (“Shortform” was an experiment with a kind of lower-standards place.) But I don’t currently see a simple way to cause a lot of people to produce high-effort high-standards content for that part of the site, beyond the amount of effort we currently receive on the highest effort posts each year.
So I think the Review is pretty good at getting good old content, but I think the thing Said is talking about should happen more quickly, and should be more like Royal Society Letters or w/e.
Actually, I wonder about Rohin’s newsletters as a model/seed. They attract more scrutiny to things, but they come with the reward of Rohin’s summary (and, presumably, more eyeballs than it would have gotten on its own). But also people were going to be writing those things for their own reasons anyway.
I think if we had the Eliezer-curated weekly newsletter of “here are the LW posts that caught my interest plus commentary on them”, we would probably think the reward and scrutiny were balanced. Of course, as with any suggestion that proposes spending Eliezer-time on something, I think this is pretty dang expensive—but the Royal Society Letters were also colossally expensive to produce.
I would likely do this from my own motivation (i.e. not necessarily need money) if I were given at least one of:
a) guaranteed protection from the badgunk comments by e.g. three moderators willing to be dependably high-effort down in the comments
b) given the power to hide badgunk comments pending their author rewriting them to eliminate the badgunk
c) given the power to leave inline commentary on people’s badgunk comments
The only thing holding me back from doing something much more like what Said proposes is “LW comment sections regularly abuse and exhaust me.” Literally that’s the only barrier, and it’s a substantial one. If LW comment sections did not regularly abuse and exhaust me, such that every post feels like I need to set aside fifty hours of life and spoons just in case, then I could and would be much more prolific.
(To be clear: some people whose pushback on this post was emphatically not abuse or exhausting include supposedlyfun, Said, Elizabeth, johnswentsworth, and agrippa.)
Would you accept this substitute:
“A site/community culture where other commenters will reliably ‘call out’ (and downvote) undesirable comments, and will not be punished for doing so (and attempts to punish them for such ‘vigilante-style’ a.k.a. ‘grassroots’ ‘comment policing’ will themselves be punished—by other commenters, recursively, with support from moderators if required).”
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for noting it. That substitute is much more what the OP is pushing for.
EDIT: With the further claim that, once such activity is reliable and credible, its rate will also decrease. That standards, clearly held and reliably enforced, tend to beget fewer violations in the first place, and that, in other words, I don’t think this would be a permanent uptick in policing.