In the counterfactual where lesswrong had the epistemic and moderation standards you desire, what would have been the result of the three posts in question, say three days after they were first posted? Can you explain why, using the standards you elucidated here?
(If you’ve answered this elsewhere, I apologize).
Full disclosure: I read all three of those posts, and downvoted the third post (and only that one), influenced in part by some of the comments to that post.
The first one would be near zero, karmawise, and possibly slightly negative. It would include a substantial disclaimer, up front, noting and likely apologizing for the ways in which the first draft was misleading and underjustified. This would be a result of the first ten comments containing at least three highly upvoted ones pointing that out, and calling for it.
The second post would be highly upvoted; Zoe’s actual writing was well in line with what I think a LWer should upvote. The comments would contain much less piling on and being real confident and rampant extrapolation; they would be focused mainly on “okay, how do we integrate this new data (which we largely take at face value and assume to be true)? What are the multiple worlds with which it is compatible? Which worlds that we previously thought possible have been ruled out by this new information?”
They would be doing a lot of split and commit, in other words. Most people in the comments there seemed to have at max a single hypothesis, and to be collecting confirmation rather than seeking falsification.
(The support for Zoe would be unchanged; that part is orthogonal to epistemics.)
The third post would be in more moderate vote territory. It would include a banner update in response to Scott’s top comment (I note that Jessica has some substantive disagreement with Scott’s top comment; I’m not claiming she should just capitulate! But it would prominently feature a reintegration of the information about Vassar). And the comments attempting to distill claims and separate out fact from inference (such as this and this) would have come much sooner, and would be among the top three comments. In general, there would have been an air of “ah, hm, it seems like there’s both important information here and also lots of fog and confusion; can we collaborate with Jessica at distilling out some things we can be sure of?”
“What are the multiple worlds with which it is compatible? Which worlds that we previously thought possible have been ruled out by this new information?”
Thanks for spelling it out like this, that is quite helpful for me. Even though the idea behind it was clear to me before, I intend to implement those two specific questions more into my thinking routines.
I’m confused.
In the counterfactual where lesswrong had the epistemic and moderation standards you desire, what would have been the result of the three posts in question, say three days after they were first posted? Can you explain why, using the standards you elucidated here?
(If you’ve answered this elsewhere, I apologize).
Full disclosure: I read all three of those posts, and downvoted the third post (and only that one), influenced in part by some of the comments to that post.
The three posts would all exist.
The first one would be near zero, karmawise, and possibly slightly negative. It would include a substantial disclaimer, up front, noting and likely apologizing for the ways in which the first draft was misleading and underjustified. This would be a result of the first ten comments containing at least three highly upvoted ones pointing that out, and calling for it.
The second post would be highly upvoted; Zoe’s actual writing was well in line with what I think a LWer should upvote. The comments would contain much less piling on and being real confident and rampant extrapolation; they would be focused mainly on “okay, how do we integrate this new data (which we largely take at face value and assume to be true)? What are the multiple worlds with which it is compatible? Which worlds that we previously thought possible have been ruled out by this new information?”
They would be doing a lot of split and commit, in other words. Most people in the comments there seemed to have at max a single hypothesis, and to be collecting confirmation rather than seeking falsification.
(The support for Zoe would be unchanged; that part is orthogonal to epistemics.)
The third post would be in more moderate vote territory. It would include a banner update in response to Scott’s top comment (I note that Jessica has some substantive disagreement with Scott’s top comment; I’m not claiming she should just capitulate! But it would prominently feature a reintegration of the information about Vassar). And the comments attempting to distill claims and separate out fact from inference (such as this and this) would have come much sooner, and would be among the top three comments. In general, there would have been an air of “ah, hm, it seems like there’s both important information here and also lots of fog and confusion; can we collaborate with Jessica at distilling out some things we can be sure of?”
“What are the multiple worlds with which it is compatible? Which worlds that we previously thought possible have been ruled out by this new information?”
Thanks for spelling it out like this, that is quite helpful for me. Even though the idea behind it was clear to me before, I intend to implement those two specific questions more into my thinking routines.