Hire a team of well-paid moderators for a three-month high-effort experiment of responding to every bad comment with a fixed version of what a good comment making the same point would have looked like. Flood the site with training data.
What’s so terrible about this idea? I imagine the main way it could go wrong is not being able to find enough people willing to do it / accidentally having too low a bar and being overwhelmed by moderators who don’t know what they are doing and promote the wrong norms. But I feel like there are probably enough people on LW that if you put out a call for applications for a very lucrative position (maybe it would be a part-time position for three months, so people don’t have to quit their jobs) and you had a handful of people you trusted (e.g. Lightcone?) runing the show, it would probably work.
On reflection, it’s of a slightly different character than other items on the list.
(Each item on the list is “terrible” for somewhat different reasons/has a somewhat different failure mode.)
For that one, the main reason I felt I should disclaim it is “here’s the part where I try to spend tens of thousands of someone else’s money,” and it feels like that should be something of a yellow flag.
What’s so terrible about this idea? I imagine the main way it could go wrong is not being able to find enough people willing to do it / accidentally having too low a bar and being overwhelmed by moderators who don’t know what they are doing and promote the wrong norms. But I feel like there are probably enough people on LW that if you put out a call for applications for a very lucrative position (maybe it would be a part-time position for three months, so people don’t have to quit their jobs) and you had a handful of people you trusted (e.g. Lightcone?) runing the show, it would probably work.
On reflection, it’s of a slightly different character than other items on the list.
(Each item on the list is “terrible” for somewhat different reasons/has a somewhat different failure mode.)
For that one, the main reason I felt I should disclaim it is “here’s the part where I try to spend tens of thousands of someone else’s money,” and it feels like that should be something of a yellow flag.
It’s only a yellow flag if you are spending the money. If you are uninvolved and e.g. the Lightcone team is running the show, then it’s fine.
(But I have no problem with you doing it either)