Strong-upvote. I want to register that I have had disagreements with Said in the past about this, and while I am still not completely sure whether I agree with his frame, recent developments have in fact caused me to update significantly towards his view.
I suspect this is true of others as well, such that I think Said’s view (as well as associated views that may differ in specifics but agree in thrust) can no longer be treated as the minority viewpoint. (They may still be the minority view, but if so I don’t expect it to be a small minority anymore, where “small” might be operationalized as “less than 1 in 5 people on this site”.)
There are, at the very least, three prominent examples that spring to mind of people advocating something like “higher epistemic standards on LW”: Duncan, Said, and (if I might be so bold) myself. There are, moreover, a smattering of comments from less prolific commenters, most of whom seem to express agreement with Duncan’s OP. I do not think this is something that should be ignored, and I think the site may benefit from some kind of poll of its userbase, just to see exactly how much consensus there is on this.
(I recognize that the LW/Lightcone team may nonetheless choose to ignore the result of any such poll, and for the sake of clarity I wish to add that I do not view this as problematic. I do not, on the whole, think that the LW team should be reduced to a proxy that implements whatever the userbase thinks they want; my expectation is that this would produce worse long-term outcomes than if the team regularly exercised their own judgement, even if that judgement sometimes results in policy decisions that conflict with a substantial fraction of the userbase’s desires. Even so, however, I claim that information of the form “X% of LW users believe Y” is useful information to have, and will at the very least play a role in any kind of healthy decision-making process.)
I am generally in favor of people running polls and surveys about information they’re interested in.
(Here’s a very random one I did, and looking through search I see people have done them on general demographics, nootropics, existential risk, akrasia, and more.)
Strong-upvote. I want to register that I have had disagreements with Said in the past about this, and while I am still not completely sure whether I agree with his frame, recent developments have in fact caused me to update significantly towards his view.
I suspect this is true of others as well, such that I think Said’s view (as well as associated views that may differ in specifics but agree in thrust) can no longer be treated as the minority viewpoint. (They may still be the minority view, but if so I don’t expect it to be a small minority anymore, where “small” might be operationalized as “less than 1 in 5 people on this site”.)
There are, at the very least, three prominent examples that spring to mind of people advocating something like “higher epistemic standards on LW”: Duncan, Said, and (if I might be so bold) myself. There are, moreover, a smattering of comments from less prolific commenters, most of whom seem to express agreement with Duncan’s OP. I do not think this is something that should be ignored, and I think the site may benefit from some kind of poll of its userbase, just to see exactly how much consensus there is on this.
(I recognize that the LW/Lightcone team may nonetheless choose to ignore the result of any such poll, and for the sake of clarity I wish to add that I do not view this as problematic. I do not, on the whole, think that the LW team should be reduced to a proxy that implements whatever the userbase thinks they want; my expectation is that this would produce worse long-term outcomes than if the team regularly exercised their own judgement, even if that judgement sometimes results in policy decisions that conflict with a substantial fraction of the userbase’s desires. Even so, however, I claim that information of the form “X% of LW users believe Y” is useful information to have, and will at the very least play a role in any kind of healthy decision-making process.)
I am generally in favor of people running polls and surveys about information they’re interested in.
(Here’s a very random one I did, and looking through search I see people have done them on general demographics, nootropics, existential risk, akrasia, and more.)