That person is more responsible than any other single individual for Eliezer not being around much these days.
I can’t model Eliezer very well, but I’d argue that Eliezer is responsible for that decision. Whether it’s because he gets more reach elsewhere, less annoying diagreement/pointing out flaws, or what, it’s on him, not on any individual poster. I give him a ton of credit (and Robin Hanson) for starting LessWrong, but I reject any implication that we should limit or prune LessWrong to make it more appealing to Eliezer. Multiplied by a lot if Eliezer isn’t directly asking for some change, and we’re just cargo-culting what it looked like a decade ago.
I chose Eliezer as one example; it would be a mistake to think that my overall point was about Eliezer.
This single individual (who was recently making a big deal about being non-banned/in good standing) is more responsible than any other single individual for driving away more than a dozen high-quality authors; is the most-frequently cited reason, as far as I can tell, when high-quality people are asked to be specific about why they’re not on LessWrong/what makes LessWrong a miserable place to try to share their ideas and co-think.
Hearing that they’re tolerated because they maintain GreaterWrong makes my CFAR instincts tingle and makes me want to teach people about goal factoring.
Fair enough. I bounce off a lot of posts and comments, so I probably do some amount of victim-blaming if someone over-weights criticism, especially if it’s annoying and wrong. I don’t see how one or a few posters can move the site from well-worth posting to negative value, though it certainly could change the sign for a very marginal decision.
Even so, unless the problematic posts and comments are getting downvoted, but somehow still in-your-face enough to drive someone away, it’s hard to see that banning or otherwise authoritatively controlling the poster is justified.
Er, the (somewhat fuzzy) thesis of the post is that there’s a thing where, like, one or two prominent Socrati set the vibe, and then a bunch of other people follow suit; I find that criticism on LW feels more like [that guy] + [100 emulators of his style of engagement] than it used to.
Ultimately, it isn’t about just that one person’s engagement (although as I note above, they seem to have an outsized direct impact) so much as it is about a … prion disease?
As someone who’s posted about 60 or 70 essays on LW over the past eight years, doing so in 2023 involves a lot of bracing, as if I were hyping myself up to grab an electric fence. I straightforwardly expect the experience of posting to involve a net-negative subsequent four days. This was not the case in e.g. the Conor Moreton days, even though one or two of the Conor Moreton essays ended up in net negative territory.
If it’s that rough for me, when I’m a good writer who’s confident in his insights and has a lot of people who are interested-by-default in his thoughts, I imagine it can get a lot harder for the twenty-year-old not-yet-known version of me.
My recollection is that “Conor Moreton” at least once wrote something along the lines of “I find writing for LW stressful because I get a lot of criticism”. Maybe I’m misremembering, and for sure the obvious guess would be that you remember more clearly than I do, but my recollection now of my impression then is that it was nearer than you’re suggesting to how you describe your present experience of posting on LW.
Oh, I’ve definitely found it somewhat stressful all along; I think I’m in the most sensitive quintile if not decile.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the shift was from [zero] to [large number]. More wanted to gesture at a shift from [moderate number] to [large number].
Like, there’s the difference between viscerally expecting one in four essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 10 lasting for a day or two, and viscerally expecting two in three essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 30 lasting for four days.
If the “ban commenter” function had not been implemented, I wouldn’t have posted any of my last five or six essays, and would be already gone.
Ah, I see. I don’t really disagree, but I also don’t think LW is unique in this, nor that there is (or can be) a long-lived growing-popularity group that maintains the feel of the early days. This seems like an evolution that’s plagued old-timers of a medium for all time, from SF fandom to pre-internet BBSs and Usenet, to early-internet special-purpose forums, to LW and rationalist-adjecent fora.
I don’t think Duncan’s gesturing at the “eternal September” problem—I think he’s talking about the “toxic low-grade criticism” problem, which is a related but separate issue. A persistent culture of toxic low-grade criticism exacerbates the eternal September problem by allowing impressionable newcomers to become acculturated to the pre-existing toxic dynamic, or to self-select for compatibility with it, making it that much harder to deal with. But you can work on improving the culture while also admitting that the constant influx of newcomers may make it difficult to go as far as you’d like to in terms of creating a specific and consistent set of norms.
I think there are some differences between this and other instances of degradation of quality by growth and entry of less-hardcore newcomers, and a resulting shift in norms that are generally negative in terms of quality. But I think there are a lot more similarities than differences.
I affirm that you did not say it, and believe that you did not mean it.
I would bet $100 to someone’s $1 that, if we could check the other timeline where that person behaved exactly the same way in comments, but had not made GreaterWrong, they would’ve been banned years ago.
(I believe this in part because I’ve heard multiple mods across multiple years talk about wanting to ban that person specifically, and I’ve heard GreaterWrong raised explicitly as cause for hesitation in something like four out of seven such discussions.)
I can’t think of any way to operationalize that bet—other than maybe noting that you have some of the same objections to Zack as to Said, and Zack also has not been banned; but to my mind their styles of interaction on LW are quite different and I can easily imagine someone finding one of them clearly net positive and the other clearly net negative. I guess we could ask the moderators, but they might very reasonably not want to answer that question, and you might fairly reasonably not trust whatever answer they gave.
If we could operationalize it, though, I think I would be quite happy taking the other side of it. 100:1 feels way overconfident to me.
Oh, to be clear: I don’t think Zack should be banned from LW. I’d prefer to never interact with him at all, but as noted elsewhere, I’m perfectly happy to stay in my corner and leave him alone over in his.
(I also can’t think of any way to operationalize the bet.)
I can’t model Eliezer very well, but I’d argue that Eliezer is responsible for that decision. Whether it’s because he gets more reach elsewhere, less annoying diagreement/pointing out flaws, or what, it’s on him, not on any individual poster. I give him a ton of credit (and Robin Hanson) for starting LessWrong, but I reject any implication that we should limit or prune LessWrong to make it more appealing to Eliezer. Multiplied by a lot if Eliezer isn’t directly asking for some change, and we’re just cargo-culting what it looked like a decade ago.
I chose Eliezer as one example; it would be a mistake to think that my overall point was about Eliezer.
This single individual (who was recently making a big deal about being non-banned/in good standing) is more responsible than any other single individual for driving away more than a dozen high-quality authors; is the most-frequently cited reason, as far as I can tell, when high-quality people are asked to be specific about why they’re not on LessWrong/what makes LessWrong a miserable place to try to share their ideas and co-think.
Hearing that they’re tolerated because they maintain GreaterWrong makes my CFAR instincts tingle and makes me want to teach people about goal factoring.
Fair enough. I bounce off a lot of posts and comments, so I probably do some amount of victim-blaming if someone over-weights criticism, especially if it’s annoying and wrong. I don’t see how one or a few posters can move the site from well-worth posting to negative value, though it certainly could change the sign for a very marginal decision.
Even so, unless the problematic posts and comments are getting downvoted, but somehow still in-your-face enough to drive someone away, it’s hard to see that banning or otherwise authoritatively controlling the poster is justified.
Er, the (somewhat fuzzy) thesis of the post is that there’s a thing where, like, one or two prominent Socrati set the vibe, and then a bunch of other people follow suit; I find that criticism on LW feels more like [that guy] + [100 emulators of his style of engagement] than it used to.
Ultimately, it isn’t about just that one person’s engagement (although as I note above, they seem to have an outsized direct impact) so much as it is about a … prion disease?
As someone who’s posted about 60 or 70 essays on LW over the past eight years, doing so in 2023 involves a lot of bracing, as if I were hyping myself up to grab an electric fence. I straightforwardly expect the experience of posting to involve a net-negative subsequent four days. This was not the case in e.g. the Conor Moreton days, even though one or two of the Conor Moreton essays ended up in net negative territory.
If it’s that rough for me, when I’m a good writer who’s confident in his insights and has a lot of people who are interested-by-default in his thoughts, I imagine it can get a lot harder for the twenty-year-old not-yet-known version of me.
My recollection is that “Conor Moreton” at least once wrote something along the lines of “I find writing for LW stressful because I get a lot of criticism”. Maybe I’m misremembering, and for sure the obvious guess would be that you remember more clearly than I do, but my recollection now of my impression then is that it was nearer than you’re suggesting to how you describe your present experience of posting on LW.
Oh, I’ve definitely found it somewhat stressful all along; I think I’m in the most sensitive quintile if not decile.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the shift was from [zero] to [large number]. More wanted to gesture at a shift from [moderate number] to [large number].
Like, there’s the difference between viscerally expecting one in four essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 10 lasting for a day or two, and viscerally expecting two in three essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 30 lasting for four days.
If the “ban commenter” function had not been implemented, I wouldn’t have posted any of my last five or six essays, and would be already gone.
Ah, I see. I don’t really disagree, but I also don’t think LW is unique in this, nor that there is (or can be) a long-lived growing-popularity group that maintains the feel of the early days. This seems like an evolution that’s plagued old-timers of a medium for all time, from SF fandom to pre-internet BBSs and Usenet, to early-internet special-purpose forums, to LW and rationalist-adjecent fora.
I don’t think Duncan’s gesturing at the “eternal September” problem—I think he’s talking about the “toxic low-grade criticism” problem, which is a related but separate issue. A persistent culture of toxic low-grade criticism exacerbates the eternal September problem by allowing impressionable newcomers to become acculturated to the pre-existing toxic dynamic, or to self-select for compatibility with it, making it that much harder to deal with. But you can work on improving the culture while also admitting that the constant influx of newcomers may make it difficult to go as far as you’d like to in terms of creating a specific and consistent set of norms.
I think there are some differences between this and other instances of degradation of quality by growth and entry of less-hardcore newcomers, and a resulting shift in norms that are generally negative in terms of quality. But I think there are a lot more similarities than differences.
I repeat that I did not say and did not mean that anyone is “tolerated because they maintain GreaterWrong”.
I affirm that you did not say it, and believe that you did not mean it.
I would bet $100 to someone’s $1 that, if we could check the other timeline where that person behaved exactly the same way in comments, but had not made GreaterWrong, they would’ve been banned years ago.
(I believe this in part because I’ve heard multiple mods across multiple years talk about wanting to ban that person specifically, and I’ve heard GreaterWrong raised explicitly as cause for hesitation in something like four out of seven such discussions.)
I can’t think of any way to operationalize that bet—other than maybe noting that you have some of the same objections to Zack as to Said, and Zack also has not been banned; but to my mind their styles of interaction on LW are quite different and I can easily imagine someone finding one of them clearly net positive and the other clearly net negative. I guess we could ask the moderators, but they might very reasonably not want to answer that question, and you might fairly reasonably not trust whatever answer they gave.
If we could operationalize it, though, I think I would be quite happy taking the other side of it. 100:1 feels way overconfident to me.
Oh, to be clear: I don’t think Zack should be banned from LW. I’d prefer to never interact with him at all, but as noted elsewhere, I’m perfectly happy to stay in my corner and leave him alone over in his.
(I also can’t think of any way to operationalize the bet.)
Lucky, I have a comment saved to that exact effect, as I have been workshopping a community dynamics post for a long time about a related dynamic:
> I don’t intend to ban you any time soon, because I really value your place in this community—you’re one of the few people to build useful community infrastructure like ReadTheSeqeunces.com and the UI of GreaterWrong.com, and that’s been one of the most salient facts to me throughout all of my thinking on this matter. (Ben Pace, 5 years ago now according to the timestamp)