LessWrong has a broader merit than merely “intellectual discussion”, as it a place where people figure out a wide range of their stances on a wide range of topics, and has given birth to a rich community of people with many mutual interests beyond intellectual discussion. It’s also really important for LessWrong to think about what incentives its members are under, and discussion here directly or indirectly affects many strategic and tactical decisions at many organizations.
This makes the role of LessWrong meaningfully different from just narrow technical journal, and most importantly means that of course people should gain or lose social standing based on a wide variety of actions they take on or off LW.
This doesn’t mean every post should be a place to discuss people’s relationship to lab employees, or adjacent topics, but suggesting that such a topic is completely outside of the remit of LessWrong, as I think you are saying here, seems quite wrong to me. People will want to prosecute conflict and standing and credit allocation on LessWrong, and I don’t really see a way of doing that without allowing some amount of social consequences to be imposed (at the very least for violating discourse rules, but of course extending into broader deceptive or immoral conduct in as much as this community can have any norms or rules of standing).
Historically these topics cleaved reasonably well along the “frontpage”/”personal-blog” distinction. Community inside baseball is important, but shouldn’t be what newcomers end up attracted by, and doesn’t make sense to be broadcasted that much (and what is broadcasted should usually focus on the intellectual discussion part) but it’s still really important to have here! And then of course, in as much as it makes sense for someone to lose standing as part of something they did (like act deceptively towards others) that will of course affect how others interact with them all across the site (including on frontpage posts).
Huh, I guess I don’t know how to interpret this sentence otherwise?
I would suggest that if you want to impose social costs on lab employees, you do it outside LW.
Maybe I misunderstood, which is totally possible! But this to me reads as a suggestion to keep LessWrong free of any attempts at imposing social costs on lab employees (and by extension presumably any other kind of social cost on anyone else for off-site behavior).
I interpret the sentence as meaning something more lilke “it would be bad to impose social costs on lab employees via LW policies or via interfering with their discussions on object level discussions on LW” (as opposed to things saying there shouldn’t be top level LW posts like “How we should impose social costs on lab employees” or saying that people shouldn’t take into account that they are lab employees when responding to them). Like I don’t Boaz wasn’t saying the topic shouldn’t be discussed or that it’s bad in principle for there to be top level posts on LW with the explicit goal of shaming lab employees / similar. (I expect he’d think that posts focused on shaming lab employees on LW wouldn’t be net good, but I didn’t interpret him as making this point.)
Like I interpret Boaz as talking about intellectual discussion on LW:
I post on LW for intellectual discussion, and not to make friends. If people are rude here, it won’t cause me to quit OpenAI or change what I’m doing, but it can cause me to stop posting or reading. That may well be the desired outcome, though I personally think it would be unfortunate.
Hmm, OK, I think I am confused what your interpretation is of what he says should not be done on LW. Like, the only thing that comes to mind is “you shouldn’t be rude to lab employees”, and my response to that is “I don’t really know whether you should ever just be ‘rude’ to someone, but in as much as a lab employees is e.g. making a request that requires good social standing (such as a request for a critique to be replied to) or a request of resource allocation (such as an encouragement for more people to enter a field of study), then of course I think we should take into account their job and professional background, their incentives and their past general conduct when determining whether to accept or reject that bid”.
And then, if you buy that argument, I really don’t know what’s left that’s off-limits that isn’t just like, common sense “don’t be obtusely rude to people”.
I think it’s mostly common sense “don’t be (unnecessarily) rude to people” and “don’t hijack threads” and maybe also “don’t have a policy of aggressively dunking on people”. Like this includes many of the ways people try to impose social costs on X.[1]
Yes it’s what Ryan said. I don’t mind at all if there is a frontpage post saying “lab employees should not be welcome at venue X” or anything else along these lines. I think it is legitimate for people to make such choices and also to coordinate them here. This counts to me as imposing a social cost on people outside of LW.
I mostly mean that if I post on LW and people are rude then I‘d be less likely to post.
Another issue, that I didn’t get into, is that very extreme rhetoric, including Nazi comparisons, has the risk of radicalizing people and inciting violence, and is also just not good for people’s mental health.
LessWrong has a broader merit than merely “intellectual discussion”, as it a place where people figure out a wide range of their stances on a wide range of topics, and has given birth to a rich community of people with many mutual interests beyond intellectual discussion. It’s also really important for LessWrong to think about what incentives its members are under, and discussion here directly or indirectly affects many strategic and tactical decisions at many organizations.
This makes the role of LessWrong meaningfully different from just narrow technical journal, and most importantly means that of course people should gain or lose social standing based on a wide variety of actions they take on or off LW.
This doesn’t mean every post should be a place to discuss people’s relationship to lab employees, or adjacent topics, but suggesting that such a topic is completely outside of the remit of LessWrong, as I think you are saying here, seems quite wrong to me. People will want to prosecute conflict and standing and credit allocation on LessWrong, and I don’t really see a way of doing that without allowing some amount of social consequences to be imposed (at the very least for violating discourse rules, but of course extending into broader deceptive or immoral conduct in as much as this community can have any norms or rules of standing).
Historically these topics cleaved reasonably well along the “frontpage”/”personal-blog” distinction. Community inside baseball is important, but shouldn’t be what newcomers end up attracted by, and doesn’t make sense to be broadcasted that much (and what is broadcasted should usually focus on the intellectual discussion part) but it’s still really important to have here! And then of course, in as much as it makes sense for someone to lose standing as part of something they did (like act deceptively towards others) that will of course affect how others interact with them all across the site (including on frontpage posts).
I don’t interpret Boaz as saying this FWIW.
Huh, I guess I don’t know how to interpret this sentence otherwise?
Maybe I misunderstood, which is totally possible! But this to me reads as a suggestion to keep LessWrong free of any attempts at imposing social costs on lab employees (and by extension presumably any other kind of social cost on anyone else for off-site behavior).
I interpret the sentence as meaning something more lilke “it would be bad to impose social costs on lab employees via LW policies or via interfering with their discussions on object level discussions on LW” (as opposed to things saying there shouldn’t be top level LW posts like “How we should impose social costs on lab employees” or saying that people shouldn’t take into account that they are lab employees when responding to them). Like I don’t Boaz wasn’t saying the topic shouldn’t be discussed or that it’s bad in principle for there to be top level posts on LW with the explicit goal of shaming lab employees / similar. (I expect he’d think that posts focused on shaming lab employees on LW wouldn’t be net good, but I didn’t interpret him as making this point.)
Like I interpret Boaz as talking about intellectual discussion on LW:
Hmm, OK, I think I am confused what your interpretation is of what he says should not be done on LW. Like, the only thing that comes to mind is “you shouldn’t be rude to lab employees”, and my response to that is “I don’t really know whether you should ever just be ‘rude’ to someone, but in as much as a lab employees is e.g. making a request that requires good social standing (such as a request for a critique to be replied to) or a request of resource allocation (such as an encouragement for more people to enter a field of study), then of course I think we should take into account their job and professional background, their incentives and their past general conduct when determining whether to accept or reject that bid”.
And then, if you buy that argument, I really don’t know what’s left that’s off-limits that isn’t just like, common sense “don’t be obtusely rude to people”.
I think it’s mostly common sense “don’t be (unnecessarily) rude to people” and “don’t hijack threads” and maybe also “don’t have a policy of aggressively dunking on people”. Like this includes many of the ways people try to impose social costs on X. [1]
(I’m committing to bowing out here.)
This originally said “all of”, I edited to “many of”.
Cool, yeah, I didn’t parse it that way, but this seems reasonable.
Yes it’s what Ryan said. I don’t mind at all if there is a frontpage post saying “lab employees should not be welcome at venue X” or anything else along these lines. I think it is legitimate for people to make such choices and also to coordinate them here. This counts to me as imposing a social cost on people outside of LW.
I mostly mean that if I post on LW and people are rude then I‘d be less likely to post.
Another issue, that I didn’t get into, is that very extreme rhetoric, including Nazi comparisons, has the risk of radicalizing people and inciting violence, and is also just not good for people’s mental health.