Reading this post I kinda feel like you are failing to take your own advice about gardening in a certain way.
Like it feels good to call people out on their BS and get a conversation going, but also 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.
My belief here is that you can’t really cause much effective, lasting change by just telling people they’re doing something that sucks and is causing a problem. Rarely will they get excited about it and take up the fight. 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.
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).
My own experience was discovering several years ago that, yeah, rationalists the community actually kinda suck at the basic skills of rationality in really obvious ways on a day to day basis. Like forget big stuff that matters like AI alignment or community norms. They just suck at like figuring out how not to constantly have untied shoelaces and other borning, minor drags on their ability to be effective agents. And that’s because they’re just human, with no real special powers, only they intellectually know a thing or two about how in theory they could be more effective if only they could do it on a day to day basis and not have to resort to a bunch of cheap hacks that work but also cause constant self harm by repeatedly giving oneself negative feedback in order to beat oneself into the desired shape.
Now of course not all rationalists, there’s plenty of folks doing great stuff. But it’s for this reason I basically just see LW as one small part that can play a role in helping a person become more fully realized in the world. And a part of that is arguably a place where folks can just kinda suck at being rationalists and others can notice this or not or not notice it for a long time and others go off in anger. Maybe this seems kinda weird, but I hold this sense that LW can only be the thing it’s capable of being, because that’s all any group can do. For example, I don’t expect my Zen community to help me be better at making calibrated bets; it’s just not designed for that and any attempt to shove it in probably wouldn’t work. So maybe the thing is that the LW community just isn’t designed to do the things you’d like it to do, and maybe it just can’t do those things, and that’s why it seems so impossible to get it to be otherwise.
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.
FWIW, I agree with “direct action”, but that only works if the site moderators / admins are not opposed to that action (and, preferably, even support it). If they are, then “direct action” doesn’t work, and only persuasive posts have any chance of working.
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.
Reading this post I kinda feel like you are failing to take your own advice about gardening in a certain way.
Like it feels good to call people out on their BS and get a conversation going, but also 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.
My belief here is that you can’t really cause much effective, lasting change by just telling people they’re doing something that sucks and is causing a problem. Rarely will they get excited about it and take up the fight. 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.
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).
My own experience was discovering several years ago that, yeah, rationalists the community actually kinda suck at the basic skills of rationality in really obvious ways on a day to day basis. Like forget big stuff that matters like AI alignment or community norms. They just suck at like figuring out how not to constantly have untied shoelaces and other borning, minor drags on their ability to be effective agents. And that’s because they’re just human, with no real special powers, only they intellectually know a thing or two about how in theory they could be more effective if only they could do it on a day to day basis and not have to resort to a bunch of cheap hacks that work but also cause constant self harm by repeatedly giving oneself negative feedback in order to beat oneself into the desired shape.
Now of course not all rationalists, there’s plenty of folks doing great stuff. But it’s for this reason I basically just see LW as one small part that can play a role in helping a person become more fully realized in the world. And a part of that is arguably a place where folks can just kinda suck at being rationalists and others can notice this or not or not notice it for a long time and others go off in anger. Maybe this seems kinda weird, but I hold this sense that LW can only be the thing it’s capable of being, because that’s all any group can do. For example, I don’t expect my Zen community to help me be better at making calibrated bets; it’s just not designed for that and any attempt to shove it in probably wouldn’t work. So maybe the thing is that the LW community just isn’t designed to do the things you’d like it to do, and maybe it just can’t do those things, and that’s why it seems so impossible to get it to be otherwise.
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.
FWIW, I agree with “direct action”, but that only works if the site moderators / admins are not opposed to that action (and, preferably, even support it). If they are, then “direct action” doesn’t work, and only persuasive posts have any chance of working.
Can confirm from experience.
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.