I don’t think catching bots plays any real role in the policy. It’s largely IMO about preventing pollution of the epistemic commons by LLM slop.
I think I responded to this line of thinking a bit in my post, but I think this “pollution” is greatly overblown. Compared to humans, LLMs have been found to be better at analyzing complex texts, less likely to believe myths, and third statement to make this sentence sound better (the last part of this sentence is a joke and demonstrates the importance of boilerplate in writing).
Editing: light editing is allowed. Heavy editing always changes the meaning. Whether it’s changed a lot is specific to the writing and very much a judgment call. But saying “make sure you looked closely” is entirely unenforceable. You’d assume lots of people just aren’t going to take the time.
The line between light and heavy editing is blurry, and if you assume people aren’t even going to take the time to review LLM outputs, why would you expect them not to make false claims on their own accord? This is a problem with humans, not LLMs.
So the implication is that there’s a different rule for Neel than for the rest of us. Which makes sense; Neel has proven his contributions to be high-quality, however he’s produced them.
Maybe just ban LLMs for new users or create a karma threshold after which LLM usage is allowed? It seems like the majority of the rationale for the ban is “unscrupulous users will use LLMs irresponsibly and produce writing which is just good enough to not be downvoted, gradually crowding out higher effort posts”, but if this is the case, then the policy should be more targeted towards such users. People with substantial post history have hopefully already shown themselves to be fairly scrupulous.
Without targeting, the justification for this policy becomes tantamount to “we should ban driving, because some people will drive drunk”. How about we focus on those most likely to drive drunk instead of just banning cars for everyone?
I think you’ve got to do more on this front, because that’s the core of why they’re enacting this policy.
“compared to humans” won’t cut it for these purposes; they actually don’t want the average human on LW exactly because they’re bad at stuff.
Boilerplate is super important for most writing outlets. Making things sound better without being better is does not bring upvotes here (usually). We are blessed that it’s not required or appreciated on LW. Mod policy is an attempt to keep LW a special and better place than the rest of the internet.
The question of how much people make claims they don’t really endorse is a huge one. I think they do it a lot—but a lot less than LLMs currently do it by default.
Banning LLMs for new users is exactly what they were doing, and changed away from.
I think I agree with you in principle that we should just ban driving drunk, but we have no breathalyzer for how much human thought was put into any given piece of writing.
The other thing to think of is this: if we make everyone an excellent writer without improving their thinkingk we’ll lose the signal we currently have that helps us read good ideas by noting good writing.
It sucks to lean on that weak signal, because good thinking sometimes occurs without good writing, but we are leaning on that to filter the large quantify of writing posted on LW currently.
Making things sound better without being better is does not bring upvotes here (usually). We are blessed that it’s not required or appreciated on LW. Mod policy is an attempt to keep LW a special and better place than the rest of the internet.
...
The other thing to think of is this: if we make everyone an excellent writer without improving their thinkingk we’ll lose the signal we currently have that helps us read good ideas by noting good writing.
Okay. Which interpretation of the role of writing quality on LessWrong would you like to defend?
Jokes aside, I think everyone writing in a better manner would be better, as better writing is typically more pleasant to read and also conveys ideas more effectively than worse writing.
As to your point about writing quality being one of the best gauges we have for human thought being put into writing, I can kinda see that, but if the moderators want a better gauge for high effort writing, they should put more effort into finding new ways to measure effort, instead of just making a policy that tangentially affects this and either won’t really be enforceable anyway or lead to a lot of false positives.
I think tracking the amount of time spent editing/ number of edits on a given LessWrong post would be a good way to judge the amount of effort placed into a post (this should not be too difficult to track/implement, and for people who write their posts in google drive or word, I doubt it would be a huge inconvenience to move over to LessWrong).
Because we restrict writing to humans, things that sound better usually also are better. There’s no contradiction there. Good writing elsewhere means convincing outside of quality of ideas; here it does not.
I like that idea for tracking actual contribution. But what they’ve done in the meantime is a hell of a lot easier to implement. That would take some tricky algorithms.
I think I responded to this line of thinking a bit in my post, but I think this “pollution” is greatly overblown. Compared to humans, LLMs have been found to be better at analyzing complex texts, less likely to believe myths, and third statement to make this sentence sound better (the last part of this sentence is a joke and demonstrates the importance of boilerplate in writing).
The line between light and heavy editing is blurry, and if you assume people aren’t even going to take the time to review LLM outputs, why would you expect them not to make false claims on their own accord? This is a problem with humans, not LLMs.
Maybe just ban LLMs for new users or create a karma threshold after which LLM usage is allowed? It seems like the majority of the rationale for the ban is “unscrupulous users will use LLMs irresponsibly and produce writing which is just good enough to not be downvoted, gradually crowding out higher effort posts”, but if this is the case, then the policy should be more targeted towards such users. People with substantial post history have hopefully already shown themselves to be fairly scrupulous.
Without targeting, the justification for this policy becomes tantamount to “we should ban driving, because some people will drive drunk”. How about we focus on those most likely to drive drunk instead of just banning cars for everyone?
I think you’ve got to do more on this front, because that’s the core of why they’re enacting this policy.
“compared to humans” won’t cut it for these purposes; they actually don’t want the average human on LW exactly because they’re bad at stuff.
Boilerplate is super important for most writing outlets. Making things sound better without being better is does not bring upvotes here (usually). We are blessed that it’s not required or appreciated on LW. Mod policy is an attempt to keep LW a special and better place than the rest of the internet.
The question of how much people make claims they don’t really endorse is a huge one. I think they do it a lot—but a lot less than LLMs currently do it by default.
Banning LLMs for new users is exactly what they were doing, and changed away from.
I think I agree with you in principle that we should just ban driving drunk, but we have no breathalyzer for how much human thought was put into any given piece of writing.
The other thing to think of is this: if we make everyone an excellent writer without improving their thinkingk we’ll lose the signal we currently have that helps us read good ideas by noting good writing.
It sucks to lean on that weak signal, because good thinking sometimes occurs without good writing, but we are leaning on that to filter the large quantify of writing posted on LW currently.
...
Okay. Which interpretation of the role of writing quality on LessWrong would you like to defend?
Jokes aside, I think everyone writing in a better manner would be better, as better writing is typically more pleasant to read and also conveys ideas more effectively than worse writing.
As to your point about writing quality being one of the best gauges we have for human thought being put into writing, I can kinda see that, but if the moderators want a better gauge for high effort writing, they should put more effort into finding new ways to measure effort, instead of just making a policy that tangentially affects this and either won’t really be enforceable anyway or lead to a lot of false positives.
I think tracking the amount of time spent editing/ number of edits on a given LessWrong post would be a good way to judge the amount of effort placed into a post (this should not be too difficult to track/implement, and for people who write their posts in google drive or word, I doubt it would be a huge inconvenience to move over to LessWrong).
Because we restrict writing to humans, things that sound better usually also are better. There’s no contradiction there. Good writing elsewhere means convincing outside of quality of ideas; here it does not.
I like that idea for tracking actual contribution. But what they’ve done in the meantime is a hell of a lot easier to implement. That would take some tricky algorithms.