I think there’s some alternative version of these two posts that’s not about building up a model and trying to convince people that something is wrong that must be done about it, and instead a version that just fights the fight at the object level against particular posts, comments, etc. as part of a long slog to change the culture through direct action that others will see and emulate through a shift in the culture.
Instead you just have to fight it out, one weed at a time, until some corner of the garden is plucked and you have a small team of folks helping you with the gardening, then expanding from there.
You say this as if I do not do it, a lot, and get downvoted, a lot.
If LW is not that place and folks don’t seem to be doing the work, then maybe LW is simply not the sort of thing that can be what you’d like it to be. Heck, maybe the thing you’d like to exist can’t even exist for a bunch of reasons that aren’t currently obvious (I’m not sure about this myself; haven’t thought about it much).
This is a totally valid hypothesis imo, and one I keep very close to the forefront.
Likely there is some community that could do those things, but it’s hard to see how you could pull that out of the existing rationalist culture by a straight line. Seems more likely to me to require a project on the order of founding LW than on the order of, say, creating LW 2.0.
I agree. I am for that reason not putting all my eggs in the this-working-out basket. <3
(Appreciated and upvoted, in case my tone is not clear.)
You say this as if I do not do it, a lot, and get downvoted, a lot.
Haha, true, I think you and I have occasionally gotten into it directly with regards to this.
I guess to that point I’m not sure the norms you want are actually the norms the community wants. I know for myself the norms I want don’t always seem to be the ones the community wants, but I guess I accept this as different people want different things, and I’m just gonna push for the world to be more how I’d like it. I guess that’s what you’re doing, too, but in a way that feels more forceful, especially in that you sometimes advocate for stuff not belonging rather than to be allowed but argued against.
This is likely some deep difference of opinion, but I see LW like a dojo, and you have to let people mess up, and it’s more effective to let people see the correction in action rather than for it to go away because you push so hard that everyone is afraid to make mistakes. I get the vibe that you want LW to make corrections so hard that we’d see engagement drop below critical mass, like what happened with LW 1.0 by other means, but that might be misinterpreting what you want to see happen (although you’re pretty clear about some of your ideas, so I’m not that uncertain about this).
TBC, I don’t [want] us to drop below critical mass. The point of disagreement is whether a cleaner standard would result in that or not, and I have a strong suspicion that it would not, in no small part because it wouldn’t change the behavior of the high-quality contributors we already have at all, and it would bring in some high-quality contributors who aren’t here because the comments are Too Much Headache.
You say this as if I do not do it, a lot, and get downvoted, a lot.
This is a totally valid hypothesis imo, and one I keep very close to the forefront.
I agree. I am for that reason not putting all my eggs in the this-working-out basket. <3
(Appreciated and upvoted, in case my tone is not clear.)
Haha, true, I think you and I have occasionally gotten into it directly with regards to this.
I guess to that point I’m not sure the norms you want are actually the norms the community wants. I know for myself the norms I want don’t always seem to be the ones the community wants, but I guess I accept this as different people want different things, and I’m just gonna push for the world to be more how I’d like it. I guess that’s what you’re doing, too, but in a way that feels more forceful, especially in that you sometimes advocate for stuff not belonging rather than to be allowed but argued against.
This is likely some deep difference of opinion, but I see LW like a dojo, and you have to let people mess up, and it’s more effective to let people see the correction in action rather than for it to go away because you push so hard that everyone is afraid to make mistakes. I get the vibe that you want LW to make corrections so hard that we’d see engagement drop below critical mass, like what happened with LW 1.0 by other means, but that might be misinterpreting what you want to see happen (although you’re pretty clear about some of your ideas, so I’m not that uncertain about this).
TBC, I don’t [want] us to drop below critical mass. The point of disagreement is whether a cleaner standard would result in that or not, and I have a strong suspicion that it would not, in no small part because it wouldn’t change the behavior of the high-quality contributors we already have at all, and it would bring in some high-quality contributors who aren’t here because the comments are Too Much Headache.