who thought your recent criticism of the direction of the community got too much karma.
Yes; his criticism was trivially wrong, as could be seen just by looking at posts systematically.
Or maybe someone who didn’t like your responses here.
Actually, I laid out exactly what was wrong with the post: it was a good idea which hadn’t been developed anywhere to the extent that it would be worth reading or referring back to, and I gave pointers to the literature he could use to develop it.
The reason I told Konk that his contributions were slightly net negative—when he specifically asked for my opinion on the matter—was exactly what Vladimir_Nesov guessed: he was flinging around and contributing all sorts of things, and just generally increasing the noise to signal ratio. I suggested he simply develop his ideas better and post less; Konk was the one who decided that he should leave/take a long break, saying that he had a lot of academic work coming up as well.
I’m not convinced his criticism is wrong. Lukeprog listed lots of substantive recent articles, but I question whether they were progress, given the current state of the community (for example, I’d like more historical analysis a la James Q Wilson)
Given the karma, it appears that the community is not convinced the criticism is wrong. Even if Konkvistador is wrong, he isn’t trivially wrong.
Lukeprog listed lots of substantive recent articles, but I question whether they were progress, given the current state of the community (for example, I’d like more historical analysis a la James Q Wilson)
I think you’re shifting goalposts. ‘Progress’, whatever that is, is different from being insular, and ironically enough, genuine progress can be taken as insularity. (For example, Rational Wiki mocks LW for being so into TDT/UDT/*DT which don’t yet have proper academic credentials and insinuates they represent irrational cult-like markers, even though those are some of the few topics I think LW has made clear-cut progress on!)
Given the karma, it appears that the community is not convinced the criticism is wrong. Even if Konkvistador is wrong, he isn’t trivially wrong.
I don’t like to appeal to karma. Karma is changeable, does change, and should change as time passes, the karma at any point being only a provisional estimate: I have, here and on Reddit, on occasion flipped a well-upvoted (or downvoted) comment to the other sign by a well-reasoned or researched rebuttal to some comment that is flat-out wrong.
Perhaps people simply hadn’t looked at the list of recent posts to notice that the basic claim of insularity was obviously wrong, or perhaps they were being generous and like you, read him as claiming something more interesting or subtle or not so obviously wrong like ‘LW is not working on non-LW material enough’.
Well, look through the examples, or heck, posts since then. Do you see people refusing to update? ‘No, I refuse to believe the Greeks could have good empirical grounds for rejecting heliocentrism! I defy your data! And ditto for the possibility Glenn Beck wrote anything flattering to our beliefs!’
What I mean is that certain methodological approaches are heavily disfavored. Slightly longer version of my point here.
Edit: And who is moving the goalposts now? You said “position X” is not trivially wrong. I said, “Here’s an example of Konkvistador articulating position X.”
Since history is so often employed for political purposes (“It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view, all history will back you up”), it’s not surprising we don’t discuss it much. If, even with this disfavoring, people still think posts like http://lesswrong.com/lw/cuk/progress/ are worth posting and inspiring pseudohistory like this—then this is not a disfavoring I can disfavor.
Not that excluding one area is much evidence of insularity. If one declares one will eat only non-apples, is one an insular and picky eater?
I absolutely agree that history is filled with politically motivated bias. But there are actual historical facts (someone won the Siege of Vienna of 1529, and it wasn’t the Ottoman Empire). There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.
To put it differently, the falsity of the theory of moral progress has implications for assessing the difficulty of building a Friendly AI, doesn’t it?
There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.
And how does one do that? The problem is that most historical facts are publicly available, so how does one distinguish a theory producing by data mining and overfitting from one that wasn’t? The only historian I can think of who has anything close to an answer to that is Turchin via the usual statistics method of holding back data to test the extrapolations.
Turchin and Carrier are discussed occasionally, but not that much; why should I think this is not the right amount of discussion?
The bigger problem with most historical analysis takes the following form:
1) Pick a historical thesis (usually because it supports one’s pre-existing moral positions) 2) Find all historical evidence that supports that theory 3) Throw any remaining historical evidence in the trash
If you have successfully avoided that trap, congratulations. Society as a whole has not, and this community is not noticeably better than the greater societies we are draw from.
There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.
And how does one do that? The problem is that most historical facts are publicly available, so how does one distinguish a theory producing by data mining and overfitting from one that wasn’t?
Yes; his criticism was trivially wrong, as could be seen just by looking at posts systematically.
I didn’t think so. Neither did the many posters who publicly endorsed the post.
Actually, I laid out exactly what was wrong with the post: was a good idea which hadn’t been developed anywhere to the extent that it would be worth reading or referring back to, and I gave pointers to the literature he could use to develop it.
Also Lukeprog thought the article you found so clearly deficient worthy of inclusion on his productivity list. Either you are wrong and his article isn’t crap. Or Luke’s standards on what counts as productivity are too low in which case your argument on this criticism of his notion that we aren’t making proper progress is that much weaker.
Also we have different styles of writing. Have you noticed how people are getting bored of Main? Guess what maybe that’s because its becoming a wannabe Academic ghetto dominate with only your style where new posters don’t dare contribute.
it may seem natural to a natural systematizing archiving outlier like you to spend a whole lot of time on your stuff polishing it to perfection, but all this will result in is a whole bunch of a small bag of boring posts of uniformly decent but not extraordinary quality. Isn’t it funny that nearly any old Eliezer sequence post dosen’t live up to such citation heavy, research made explicit standards you set? Such an article would be upvoted by the common poster make no mistake, but l33t busybodies like you would home in on the technicalities.
The reason I told Konk that his contributions were slightly net negative
First of the community obviously disagrees aside from positive comments on his contributions that I could dig up, he has received more karma in the past 30 days than any other single poster and ~7k overall isn’t bad at all. And no this wasn’t due to mass spamming. His average post has like 5 karma or something. Fracking Nerdling on a stick he’s even currently like 50 points ahead of Eliezer HPMOR Yudkowsky who descended down from his throne to write an article answering criticism threatening his funding.
The reason I told Konk that his contributions were slightly net negative—when he specifically asked for my opinion on the matter
If Konkvistador flat out asked you if it would be overall better than the current situation to stop posting at all, and you responded with a yes, then you either lack a social brain, because the right answer is not “yes” but “no, but you should work harder on improving.” especially since he apparently hero worships you.
I suggested he simply develop his ideas better and post less; Konk was the one who decided that he should leave/take a long break, saying that he had a lot of academic work coming up as well.
Have you heard about “saving face”? There is probably an added language and cultural barrier, misunderstandings are common even with those superficially well versed in English.
Also you dark artsily referring to him as “Konk” with faux affection to manipulate the crowd dosen’t impress me.
I read your comment, and I downvoted you because it was rude towards gwern, calling him a “damn robot”.
And I’m one of the guys that urged Konkvistador to stay, in a comment above. That doesn’t excuse your rudeness. So you get properly downvoted by me (and gwern got upvoted because I like that he spoke up and declared he was the “top poster” in question and also gave a clear explanation of his reasons).
That konkvistador gave gwern’s criticism more weight than he should isn’t gwern’s fault, it’s konkvistador’s.
Also Lukeprog thought the article you found so clearly deficient worthy of inclusion on his productivity list. Either you are wrong and his article isn’t crap. Or Luke’s standards on what counts as productivity are too low in which case your argument on this criticism of his notion that we aren’t making proper progress is that much weaker.
Yeah, maybe. Other possibilities include being ironic: if he objects to his inclusion on the list...
Also we have different styles of writing. Have you noticed how people are getting bored of Main? Guess what maybe that’s because its becoming a wannabe Academic ghetto dominate with only your style where new posters don’t dare contribute. it may seem natural to a natural systematizing archiving outlier like you to spend a whole lot of time on your stuff polishing it to perfection, but all this will result in is a whole bunch of a small bag of boring posts of uniformly decent but not extraordinary quality. Isn’t it funny that nearly any old Eliezer sequence post dosen’t live up to such citation heavy, research made explicit standards you set? Such an article would be upvoted by the common poster make no mistake, but l33t busybodies like you would home in on the technicalities.
People are getting bored of Main because the best contributors like Yvain or Eliezer have other things to do, and the standard topics are hard to go over again without either repetition or going into depth beyond most readers. It happens: wells run dry or the material becomes too advanced. And everyone else isn’t stepping up the plate. So, things become less interesting.
I don’t criticize the posts because Eliezer uses cites all the time in the sequences, and where he isn’t, I often know the citations anyway from past discussions on SL4, standard transhumanist reading materials, the old SIAI Bookshelf, book & paper recommendations, etc.
Also you dark artsily referring to him as “Konk” with faux affection to manipulate the crowd dosen’t impress me.
I’m glad that you were able to explain why I and other chatters in #lesswrong sometimes called him by that shortcut: we were just manipulating the IRC crowd.
like they pulled with K and Roko?
Good grief. Maybe I should just put up IRC logs for the past few days so people can see for themselves what was said...
Yeah, maybe. Other possibilities include being ironic: if he objects to his inclusion on the list...
That’s not very nice. Apparently LW is big on being nice. See I’m learning.
I’m glad that you were able to explain why I and other chatters in #lesswrong sometimes called him by that shortcut: we were just manipulating the IRC crowd.
This is the first time I heard about this conversation occurring on IRC. Ok so I’m assuming Konk is a nick people use for him over there. But why use it on LW in this context? Come now, you where trying to communicate “oh look I’m socially near to him”.
I don’t criticize the posts because Eliezer uses cites all the time in the sequences, and where he isn’t, I often know the citations anyway from past discussions on SL4, standard transhumanist reading materials, the old SIAI Bookshelf, book & paper recommendations, etc.
You aren’t always the intended audience. Criticism from the perspective of those unfamiliar with Yudkwosky’s arguments are more valuable don’t you agree? The point of the sequences is to bring people up to speed.
It’s both clever and a dilemma which teaches a relevant point; it may not be nice, but that doesn’t matter.
This is the first time I heard about this conversation occurring on IRC.
Does it matter that it was IRC as opposed to a separate forum website? If it does matter, then perhaps you were jumping to conclusions in interpreting ‘off-site’...
You aren’t always the intended audience. Criticism from the perspective of those unfamiliar with Yudkwosky’s arguments are needed.
Sure. But that’s by definition criticism I am unable to give and an audience I am not in. Am I to be blamed for preferring the material I learn more from?
Yes.
Yes; his criticism was trivially wrong, as could be seen just by looking at posts systematically.
Actually, I laid out exactly what was wrong with the post: it was a good idea which hadn’t been developed anywhere to the extent that it would be worth reading or referring back to, and I gave pointers to the literature he could use to develop it.
The reason I told Konk that his contributions were slightly net negative—when he specifically asked for my opinion on the matter—was exactly what Vladimir_Nesov guessed: he was flinging around and contributing all sorts of things, and just generally increasing the noise to signal ratio. I suggested he simply develop his ideas better and post less; Konk was the one who decided that he should leave/take a long break, saying that he had a lot of academic work coming up as well.
I’m not convinced his criticism is wrong. Lukeprog listed lots of substantive recent articles, but I question whether they were progress, given the current state of the community (for example, I’d like more historical analysis a la James Q Wilson)
Given the karma, it appears that the community is not convinced the criticism is wrong. Even if Konkvistador is wrong, he isn’t trivially wrong.
I think you’re shifting goalposts. ‘Progress’, whatever that is, is different from being insular, and ironically enough, genuine progress can be taken as insularity. (For example, Rational Wiki mocks LW for being so into TDT/UDT/*DT which don’t yet have proper academic credentials and insinuates they represent irrational cult-like markers, even though those are some of the few topics I think LW has made clear-cut progress on!)
I don’t like to appeal to karma. Karma is changeable, does change, and should change as time passes, the karma at any point being only a provisional estimate: I have, here and on Reddit, on occasion flipped a well-upvoted (or downvoted) comment to the other sign by a well-reasoned or researched rebuttal to some comment that is flat-out wrong.
Perhaps people simply hadn’t looked at the list of recent posts to notice that the basic claim of insularity was obviously wrong, or perhaps they were being generous and like you, read him as claiming something more interesting or subtle or not so obviously wrong like ‘LW is not working on non-LW material enough’.
Fair enough about karma. But first sentence of Konkvistador’s post (after the rhetorical question) says:
And the second paragraph of the post begins:
That looks a lot like saying, “LW is not working on non-LW material enough”
Well, look through the examples, or heck, posts since then. Do you see people refusing to update? ‘No, I refuse to believe the Greeks could have good empirical grounds for rejecting heliocentrism! I defy your data! And ditto for the possibility Glenn Beck wrote anything flattering to our beliefs!’
What I mean is that certain methodological approaches are heavily disfavored. Slightly longer version of my point here.
Edit: And who is moving the goalposts now? You said “position X” is not trivially wrong. I said, “Here’s an example of Konkvistador articulating position X.”
Since history is so often employed for political purposes (“It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view, all history will back you up”), it’s not surprising we don’t discuss it much. If, even with this disfavoring, people still think posts like http://lesswrong.com/lw/cuk/progress/ are worth posting and inspiring pseudohistory like this—then this is not a disfavoring I can disfavor.
Not that excluding one area is much evidence of insularity. If one declares one will eat only non-apples, is one an insular and picky eater?
I absolutely agree that history is filled with politically motivated bias. But there are actual historical facts (someone won the Siege of Vienna of 1529, and it wasn’t the Ottoman Empire). There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.
To put it differently, the falsity of the theory of moral progress has implications for assessing the difficulty of building a Friendly AI, doesn’t it?
And how does one do that? The problem is that most historical facts are publicly available, so how does one distinguish a theory producing by data mining and overfitting from one that wasn’t? The only historian I can think of who has anything close to an answer to that is Turchin via the usual statistics method of holding back data to test the extrapolations.
Turchin and Carrier are discussed occasionally, but not that much; why should I think this is not the right amount of discussion?
The bigger problem with most historical analysis takes the following form:
If you have successfully avoided that trap, congratulations. Society as a whole has not, and this community is not noticeably better than the greater societies we are draw from.
This is a thick problem.
Apologies for the harsh language gwern. I shouldn’t have used it. I will edit and retract to correct that.
I didn’t think so. Neither did the many posters who publicly endorsed the post.
Also Lukeprog thought the article you found so clearly deficient worthy of inclusion on his productivity list. Either you are wrong and his article isn’t crap. Or Luke’s standards on what counts as productivity are too low in which case your argument on this criticism of his notion that we aren’t making proper progress is that much weaker.
Also we have different styles of writing. Have you noticed how people are getting bored of Main? Guess what maybe that’s because its becoming a wannabe Academic ghetto dominate with only your style where new posters don’t dare contribute.
it may seem natural to a natural systematizing archiving outlier like you to spend a whole lot of time on your stuff polishing it to perfection, but all this will result in is a whole bunch of a small bag of boring posts of uniformly decent but not extraordinary quality. Isn’t it funny that nearly any old Eliezer sequence post dosen’t live up to such citation heavy, research made explicit standards you set? Such an article would be upvoted by the common poster make no mistake, but l33t busybodies like you would home in on the technicalities.
First of the community obviously disagrees aside from positive comments on his contributions that I could dig up, he has received more karma in the past 30 days than any other single poster and ~7k overall isn’t bad at all. And no this wasn’t due to mass spamming. His average post has like 5 karma or something. Fracking Nerdling on a stick he’s even currently like 50 points ahead of Eliezer HPMOR Yudkowsky who descended down from his throne to write an article answering criticism threatening his funding.
If Konkvistador flat out asked you if it would be overall better than the current situation to stop posting at all, and you responded with a yes, then you either lack a social brain, because the right answer is not “yes” but “no, but you should work harder on improving.” especially since he apparently hero worships you.
Have you heard about “saving face”? There is probably an added language and cultural barrier, misunderstandings are common even with those superficially well versed in English.
Also you dark artsily referring to him as “Konk” with faux affection to manipulate the crowd dosen’t impress me.
Edit:
2nd Edit: Toned it down.
I read your comment, and I downvoted you because it was rude towards gwern, calling him a “damn robot”. And I’m one of the guys that urged Konkvistador to stay, in a comment above. That doesn’t excuse your rudeness. So you get properly downvoted by me (and gwern got upvoted because I like that he spoke up and declared he was the “top poster” in question and also gave a clear explanation of his reasons).
That konkvistador gave gwern’s criticism more weight than he should isn’t gwern’s fault, it’s konkvistador’s.
I guess you are right ok I’ll edit away the “damn robot” part. My points however haven’t been addressed.
I have no expectations at all. But I believe that your stated goals closely match your actual goals—and swearing doesn’t advance your stated goals.
Yeah, maybe. Other possibilities include being ironic: if he objects to his inclusion on the list...
People are getting bored of Main because the best contributors like Yvain or Eliezer have other things to do, and the standard topics are hard to go over again without either repetition or going into depth beyond most readers. It happens: wells run dry or the material becomes too advanced. And everyone else isn’t stepping up the plate. So, things become less interesting.
I don’t criticize the posts because Eliezer uses cites all the time in the sequences, and where he isn’t, I often know the citations anyway from past discussions on SL4, standard transhumanist reading materials, the old SIAI Bookshelf, book & paper recommendations, etc.
I’m glad that you were able to explain why I and other chatters in
#lesswrong
sometimes called him by that shortcut: we were just manipulating the IRC crowd.Good grief. Maybe I should just put up IRC logs for the past few days so people can see for themselves what was said...
That’s not very nice. Apparently LW is big on being nice. See I’m learning.
This is the first time I heard about this conversation occurring on IRC. Ok so I’m assuming Konk is a nick people use for him over there. But why use it on LW in this context? Come now, you where trying to communicate “oh look I’m socially near to him”.
You aren’t always the intended audience. Criticism from the perspective of those unfamiliar with Yudkwosky’s arguments are more valuable don’t you agree? The point of the sequences is to bring people up to speed.
It’s both clever and a dilemma which teaches a relevant point; it may not be nice, but that doesn’t matter.
Does it matter that it was IRC as opposed to a separate forum website? If it does matter, then perhaps you were jumping to conclusions in interpreting ‘off-site’...
Sure. But that’s by definition criticism I am unable to give and an audience I am not in. Am I to be blamed for preferring the material I learn more from?