[New] Rejected Content Section
tl:dr;
The LessWrong reviews all first time submissions from new users
In the last month, we’ve built a new process where we reject some of those submissions (with explanation) – you can now see what was rejected from the main site on the new Rejected Content section
New users shouldn’t be very afraid to submit, the bar could well be lower than you think (and now you can check based on what we actually reject). The worst that happens now is you get some feedback from us, rather than getting downvoted by many people.
Though maybe write something shorter as your first thing. Don’t write thousands of words only for us to say “this has serious problem X”.
What is the Rejected Content section?
When new users submit their first post or comment, it is reviewed by a LessWrong team member before it goes live on the site. Many times, especially with an increased influx of users to LessWrong, we will sometimes reject these first posts/comments and not let them go live.
To increase transparency and accountability, we’ve made a new section of the site where you can view everything we’ve rejected, and usually with some explanation of why. This means that anyone who is motivated can both go fishing for things they think were actually good but were mistakenly classified as reject-worthy, or in general just verify that the LessWrong team is (or isn’t) exercising good and fair judgment in what we’re rejecting.
The Rejected Content section is part of the Moderation Log, viewable at
lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-posts
and
lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-comments
What to do if you disagree with a rejection decision?
Message us directly about it – maybe we didn’t pay close enough attention and it’ll be no big deal to change it. See the contact us page.
Mention in the monthly Open Thread.
Write a top-level post if you want to start a larger conversation about our moderation philosophy or approach.
The point of the feature is precisely so people can weigh in, so don’t feel afraid to question our choices here. (This isn’t a promise to change in response to feedback, but is a good amount of willingness to listen to feedback.)
Why build it?
As I wrote in a recent post of of mine about moderation, the moderation team has historically faced a tricky choice. Either we:
Approve and let userbase evaluate: When we view low quality content[1] being submitted by new users[2], we nonetheless approve it (perhaps with downvote) and allow the userbase to evaluate and vote accordingly.
Block using our own judgment: We block that content from going live (and send some message to the author explaining why)
Each choice has costs and benefits. Letting userbase evaluate decreases reliance on the mod team’s judgment. We will make mistakes, so seems safer to have more people look at things. Also I feel bad if behind the scenes the LessWrong team is filtering what goes live and people don’t know even know what choices we’re making or why.
At the same time, letting the userbase decide means often:
a whole bunch of users will view a bad post that they won’t benefit from. This seems true even if a moderator gives it an initial downvote.
you get negative karma posts showing up in different places that feels pretty ughy, e.g. in the All Posts page
they can end up in search results
negative karma comments (even if they’re collapsed) still make comments sections feel more ughy
Theoretically, visibility of negative karma content could be fixed in other ways, but it’s kind of a weird situation to have this content if you’re going to to a lot of trouble to prevent it being seen by people anyway.
On the other hand, when us moderators decide to block content going live, we’re relying on our judgment, which is fallible. And heck, we often disagree even among ourselves. Plus I generally dislike moderation actions aren’t visible to people generally.
Solution
The Rejected Content section tries to get us the best of both options. We prevent not-good content going live and degrading the signal-to-noise ratio of the site, and also we’re not acting behind the scenes where no one can catch our mistakes or call us out if we’re systematically going astray.
Should I be more afraid to post on LessWrong now?
As a new user, counter-intuitively perhaps, the rejection system (perhaps named in an unfriendly way), actually means you should have a lower bar for posting things. Instead of risking getting downvoted by many people (ouch), you can get some quick feedback from the mod team, no harm done!
Also, take a look at the actual stuff we reject to see if you think you’re in that bucket. If you’re worried, likely you’re not.
Also Open Threads (regular and AI specific) are particular good place for first time intro questions, including about whether your idea for a post would be well received.
Standard Reasons for Rejection
We’re continuing to iterate on our criteria for inclusion/reject on LessWrong, and in particular, we want to make these salient and available to new users when they’re writing their first submission so they don’t get a surprise rejection.
If you want to see what we show people, one option is just to make a new account and attempt to make a post/comment and see what we show. (Feedback welcome, current stuff is mid-improvement.) See some of our messaging here.
Also this is the state of some of our rejection reasons messages (these get sent to users if we’ve rejected their content). Our moderator UI for rejection looks like this:
Checking each of these sends a user a longer explanation.
Here are some of them (my ideal is to make all of these templates public viewable too):
[ ] Low Quality or 101-Level AI Content. There’ve been a lot of new users coming to LessWrong recently interested in AI. To keep the site’s quality high and ensure stuff posted is interesting to the site’s users, we’re currently only accepting posts that meets a pretty high bar. We look for good reasoning, making a new and interesting point, bringing new evidence, and/or building upon prior discussion. If you were rejected for this reason, possibly a good thing to do is read more existing material. The AI Intro Material wiki-tag is a good place, for example.
[ ] Not addressing relevant prior discussion. Your post doesn’t address or build upon relevant previous discussion of its topic that much of the LessWrong audience is already familiar with. If you’re not sure where to find this discussion, feel free to ask in monthly open threads (general one, one for AI). Another form of this is writing a post arguing against a position, but not being clear about who exactly is being argued against, e.g., not linking to anything prior. Linking to existing posts on LessWrong is a great way to show that you are familiar/responding to prior discussion. If you’re curious about a topic, try Search or look at our Concepts page.
[ ] Missing some rationality basics. Sometimes it’s hard to judge, but my feeling from your submission it fails to apply some of the basic rationality mental motions that are expected on LessWrong. There’s a fairly long list of these, but they include things like focusing on predictions, defining things clearly or tabooing definitions, expressing uncertainty [quantitatively]. See this general intro to LessWrong.
[ ] Clearer Introduction. It was hard for me to assess whether your submission was a good fit for the site due to its length and that the opening didn’t seem to explain the overall goal of your submission. Your first couple paragraphs should make it obvious what the main point of your post is, and ideally gesture at the strongest argument for that point. It’s helpful to explain why your post is relevant to the LessWrong audience.
[ ] Confusion / muddled reasoning. I felt your submission has a bit too much confusion or muddled thinking to approve. Reasons I check the box for this feedback item include things like “really strange premises that aren’t justified”, “inferences that don’t seem to follow from the premises,” “use of weird categories,” “failure to understand basics topics of what it discusses (e.g. completely misunderstand how LLMs work)”, and/or “failure to respond to basic arguments about the topic”. Often the right thing to do in this case is read more about the topic you’re discussing.
[ ] Somewhat offtopic crosspost. Looks like you’re crossposting this from your blog elsewhere. That can be fine, but sometimes we we’ll reject these crossposts (or allow them but with a warning) if they seem like they’re not quite aimed at the LessWrong audience or adopting LessWrong norms. LessWrong has particular norms aimed at getting towards truth (e.g. avoiding rhetoric, being precise, being quantitative, etc), and your post isn’t obviously displaying those. Good solutions to this are to (a) write an extra intro to your post to explain why people on LessWrong might find it interesting, (b) rewrite to be a style more aimed at truth than persuasiveness or engagingness.
[ ] Gratuitously Offensive. Yo, c’mon.
Also we often write custom messages with more specific feedback in addition to or instead of the above reasons.
To see these reasons in use, see the Rejected Contents section on the Moderation Log page.
- LessWrong FAQ by (14 Jun 2019 19:03 UTC; 87 points)
- Should Rational Animations invite viewers to read content on LessWrong? by (27 May 2023 19:26 UTC; 40 points)
- 's comment on Writer’s Shortform by (4 May 2023 15:50 UTC; 3 points)
- 's comment on A Manifold market notice: Binance by (23 May 2023 11:24 UTC; 2 points)
Should there also be a bar for getting into the Rejected section at all? There is one rejected comment there that I am thinking should not be displayed, and the poster’s account should be deleted.
The pedophile fantasy, of course.
I actually think the answer is “probably not” because 1) that’d be more work for the mods and 2) I don’t expect many comments to not meet the “worth putting in the Rejected section” bar.
We do do a different process for literal spam. I think in some cases it might make sense to do that for other classes of users but I don’t have a strong sense of where that line is and for now would err towards public rejection.
(I don’t actually know where the comment/post Richard is pointing at is, feel free to link it to me in P)
PM’d.
I don’t think calling it a fantasy is exactly fair. It was a moral scenario and moral question/argument. I think the argument was bad but if had he made a good argument, I possibly would have approved it. Discussing the morality of societal taboos (in an appropriate way) is something I hope is possible to discuss on LessWrong (although we are mindful of pragmatic considerations).
I agree with Ruby that being able to have that kind of discussion is valuable and that includes understanding pedophiles’ POV, but agree with Richard that that particular comment was someone luxuriating in a fantasy not making a moral argument. I wouldn’t keep that particular comment out of the rejected section but could see someone going far enough I would want that option.
Having now looked at it more closely, part of my thought process is “We’re fairly busy, so the effort involved in figuring out ‘is this a plausibly real argument vs pure fantasy vs fantasy plausibly-deniably-masquerading as argument’ isn’t really worth it. Nothing particularly bad happens AFAICT if it’s in the rejected section, and generally having a habit of using the “reject” button for things that aren’t obviously spam seems kinda fine.”
Calling it a fantasy is exactly fair. That is what it plainly is. Observe the weird drifting from third person to second to a mingling of first and second, from the hypothetical to the real, from the past to the present. This is typical of bad sexual fantasy writing (and almost all such writing is bad), the writer starting from a distant viewpoint, and when they become excited at the story they are telling, jumping into the characters and the present tense in order to excite themselves even more (while presumably typing with one hand). It closes by wandering back into the past, the hypothetical, and the third person. (The writer is typing with two hands again.)
It is not a moral scenario. Certainly it is a scenario that has a moral aspect, a serious one. There is no real moral question raised, though. The reflection at the end of the final paragraph is the writer’s wishful daydreaming. Oh, if only he could do such things with a 12-year-old girl. How unfair of the world to prevent it.
And what does the moral question amount to, that it supposedly asks? “Suppose some imagined instance of sex between a 20 year old and a 12 year old harmed no-one — then it would harm no-one!” But reality does not work that way, only fantasy does. Think of any class of morally bad things, and you can fabulate up an example of the category that seems to not be bad. Go on, you have a virtual outcome pump in your head that is omnipotent in the virtual realm, and unlike the genies described in that link, this one does exactly what you truly intend, perfectly aligned with your desires. Choose such a class and create an exception to it. It’s easy.
So these bad things, they might not be bad, right? No, it’s just a fantasy constructed to join up the chosen dots, the bottom line written in advance and all of the evidence fictional. Reality is not so compliant.
A quote, source unrecorded, but it is relevant that the context of the original was a discussion forum on BDSM: “Fantasy is not reality. Fantasy is not always even a desired reality. Rather, fantasy is the selection of certain thematic elements and the exclusion of certain others, in combinations which may not be available or even possible in reality.”
How does the writer, who eventually places himself in the 20-year-old character, know that the 12-year-old is as enthusiastic as he is about the situation? He simply imagines it to be so, and this being something he’s just making up in his head, the fantasy proceeds exactly as he imagines it. He is the god of his virtual world. Everything in it happens because he imagines it, and for no other reason. That is how fantasy works.
That is not how reality works. For sexual fantasies such as this one, the difference can be instantly surfaced by asking, “why is the other person there?” In a fantasy, they are there because the fantasiser imagined them. The imagined figure is a virtual sex toy, a virtual vibrator or fleshlight, whose sole reason for existence is to gratify the imaginer’s urges. Whatever backstory they may invent to heighten the illusion of reality, they are still just making the whole thing up. There is nobody actually there but the person indulging the fantasy.
In reality, when a real person is having real sex with a real other person, that other person must have their own reasons for being there. Those reasons cannot be imagined into existence. Each must have been found attractive to the other, and there must have been a process, whether short or prolonged, before they got to the bonking stage.
Perhaps “Ryan Baker” should quit fantasising about 12-year-old girls and find someone his own age. If his comment isn’t his personal fantasy, I can only say that he has done a very persuasive job of making it seem so. I suspect that if he submitted it to a commercial porn site, they would reject it out of legal caution.
There’s a real world out there. Imagining that this sort of material can be the basis of a discussion on LessWrong is just another fantasy.
Okay, going back to look over it and you pointing out those features, especially the lapse into first person, I see what you mean about it being something the author clearly desires and in that sense being a fantasy. But there is in a question in it of “suppose no one actually suffered, what did they deserve [bad outcome]?” which could be a moral question/argument.
I think we might not be in that much of disagreement. Quoting Elizabeth:
I agree with it. Perhaps our difference is I think the issue is not presence of fantasy but absence of decent argument (we agree that’s missing), whereas maybe you take issue with the presence of fantasy? I’m not sure.
I’m curious how strongly you feel that this shouldn’t even be on the Rejected Content section? Raemon is right that once we’ve decided there’s sufficient reason to not accept something, we don’t put a lot of extra thought into it.
I wouldn’t have allowed it anywhere on the site, but I’m not a moderator. I’ve said everything I think needed to be said about it, and at this point I’d prefer to leave it to the mods, whatever they decide.
I really like this feature, and really love lightcone more generally for how honest & transparent they’re willing to be.
A bug: On firefox at least, looking at the rejected comments, the “(Read More)” button isn’t working.
Whoops. I’ll hopefully fix that soon. For the immediate future, if you click the post title + link icon you’ll go to a permalink which includes the whole comment.
Ouch! I clicked the Rejected Posts link, and now my eyes hurt. But at the same time, my respect for the moderators and their hard work increased.
Some of that is pure WTF. Such as, why would one post a Chinese article to an English-speaking website.
Some of that, crackpots and similar. A Youtube video containing an open message for Eliezer; I watched the first three minutes of it, still not sure what it was about. Someone else hears voices talking to them at night.
Friendly reminders that the current AI is not superintelligent yet.
More interesting is content of the type: “It depends on frequency. Once a month would be okay, but every day is an overkill.” Two major subcategories are fiction and 101 questions. I don’t mind occasional fiction; some of it definitely belongs here (beisutsukai, HPMoR fan fiction). But when new authors come and post long, mediocre stories about AI, I wish they tried their luck somewhere else instead. Similarly, an occasional 101 question is an opportunity to think again about the basics, and maybe a reminder to write/update a FAQ. Too much, and the questions are just left unanswered, or only answered by other enthusiastic newbies.
EDIT:
Looking at the rejected comments makes me wonder: would it make sense to only allow new users to comment on articles less than 7 days old? Then their comments would be seen by most users. As opposed to commenting on old articles, where it is more likely to be seen by either moderators or no one.
Ruby and I had some disagreement about how to handle fiction, but my current take is “fiction is too hard to evaluate from new users. I can’t figure out if it’s any good from the first few paragraphs, and I don’t have time to read it all. So basically I think LWers should first post something more concrete/object-level/easy-to-evaluate as part of their getting-familiar with the site, and post fiction once they’re a bit more vetted.
I think Ruby is a bit more open to fiction from new users but we haven’t talked through it thoroughly yet.
I fear Ray might be right, even though I’m sad if we’re blocking fiction. I actually still hope we can build a Fiction Page of the site, but we would to make it be good fiction.
To be clear I think fiction is totally fine once a user’s demonstrated that they’re otherwise a pretty good fit for the site. So the thing here is “we get the fiction later”, not “not at all” (hopefully).
Yeah, wanted to say something similar. An interesting failure mode would be irrational writers of good fiction; like someone who gets on average +20 karma for their fiction articles, −20 karma for their non-fiction articles, and write so much really good fiction that they can afford to write lots of bad articles.
Perhaps we could officially recommend some existing fiction website as the default place to go if you want to post fiction? Intuitively, saying “go to X instead” sounds more polite and more actionable than saying “go away”. Especially if X would already have something like rationalist fiction as a category.
Recent comments appear in the “Recent Discussion” section of the front page, regardless of post age. Not sure how many people use this feature, but I like it as a way to follow longer-term ongoing discussions after I’ve hidden the post itself or it has fallen off the top of the “Latest Posts” section.
So I do occasionally see comments from new users on much older posts. The quality varies, but I’m not sure that there’s any correlation between post age and new-user comment quality that would make a rule like this worth implementing.
I like this plan. Having a place for rejected/probationary-pending-edits posts seems appropriate and transparent. Thanks for putting in the mod work.
I think this is a good idea, thanks for implementing!
Very minor but the link lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-comments just goes to the same page as lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-posts (the written address is correct but the hyperlink goes to the wrong page)
Thanks, fixed.