The moderators sound like a tech-savvy group of folks. Which makes the situation you describe all the more disappointing—the mods sound collectively like they are bikeshedding things to death. You can’t reach any agreement among the mods? Then fork and experiment! Let factions run their own particular subforum and see what happens. Code is Law and many things can be reversed.
Discussion of almost every item on your list could be moved forward with simple experiments little more complex than were required to develop the models that the group is devoted to.
non-paying
Srsly? But, are you not sure whether the off-topic area should be public or not? Then set it public on alternating months until the data (post numbers, post quality, etc.) is clear on which way works better.
You have problems with people not being willing to update models/simulations? This sounds like they are rat’s nests of copy-paste balls of dirt, and you have collectively failed to develop good abstractions or domain-specific languages for the bosses. (My suspicions are further heightened by the mention of spreadsheets—as we Haskellers like to say, Excel is the world’s most popular zeroth-order functional programming language.) I doubt the dungeons are that complex, so you should be able to refactor and abstract until the models/spreadsheets are so transparent any fool could update them.
Or maybe you lack good tutorials, going step by step from nothing to a working model. These can be written by one of the regulars developing a new model (you just need to copy all the intermediate steps and later you can write down the justifications and motivations behind each transformation; I flatter myself that myHaskelltutorialsare good examples of this.
People are penalized for criticizing models without iron-clad evidence? Then figure out how it make it cheaper & easier to test the models, or offer anonymous forms of feedback. Voting & polls come to mind as things supported by many forum software for exactly this sort of purpose.
Even in WoW, hard problems remain that resist quantification—How do you motivate 25 people to keep battling a dragon that’s been killing them for the last 2 hours? How do you identify the recruits that will best fit into an existing group and its culture? How do you balance redundancy and responsibility in leadership?
WoW seems to offer good data on player activities, so that means it offers good data to experiment with. Maybe you can motivate people by swapping them out. Maybe good recruits can be identified by slowly rising in level per hour played (eg. because they are spending time building social bonds and exploring the world, not level-grinding and burning out). Maybe you can just download player profiles and turn ML software loose on the data to see what tendencies correlate with ‘being part of many boss-slaying groups’. These problems may resist quantification, but you look like you haven’t even tried!
I fear I’ve fallen into the historian’s trap of implying intentionality in the course of presenting a selection of events as a narrative. Your underlying assertion is that we did a poor job planning our application architecture in advance of the grand project of modeling WoW; the reality is that we didn’t know we had undertaken such a project until we were in the middle of it, until the community consensus had emerged that Elitist Jerks is where the theorycrafting happens.
A good comparison is open-source software. There’s no editorial control preventing someone from developing a piece of software for their own use, written in whatever language and idioms suit them best. If the author then chooses to share this tool with the community, do we turn it away because it didn’t follow the specifications for an existing modeling platform? There are at least 3, in C++, C#, and Python. Perhaps if the EJ administration had thrown its weight behind one of them, we’d have the standard platform you advocate—or perhaps we would have splintered our community.
Going back to the meta level, NancyLebovitz touched on one point that I was hoping to make in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5gg/entropy_and_social_groups/ - trading one kind of community equilibrium for a different kind, with its own advantages and disadvantages, through consistent application of rules. The more general point is the difficulty of predicting any specific outcome when it comes to group action.
I fear I’ve fallen into the historian’s trap of implying intentionality in the course of presenting a selection of events as a narrative. Your underlying assertion is that we did a poor job planning our application architecture in advance of the grand project of modeling WoW; the reality is that we didn’t know we had undertaken such a project until we were in the middle of it,
Not quite. The historian’s fallacy is entirely to one side—all of my suggestions could be implemented at any time. In fact, some of them require you to have already formed a community around a project (you can’t write a DSL for the models until you have experience and repeated code and can see what abstractions the DSL should capture; you can’t alternate or A/B test the offtopic forums without traffic in the first place).
I could not care less about how you formed the community or how you did or did not plan ahead well. To repeat myself, ‘These problems may resist quantification, but you look like you haven’t even tried!’
Perhaps if the EJ administration had thrown its weight behind one of them, we’d have the standard platform you advocate—or perhaps we would have splintered our community.
If you had tried you would have learned something either way.
Perhaps your post does the community an injustice and omits all sorts of experiments and initiatives, but to me this reads less as a story of overactive moderation as one of underactive moderation—moderation sufficient to stifle new activity and insufficient to actually try new things. Hence, I do agree with your last paragraph that it’s an interesting example of being in a bad equilibrium.
The moderators sound like a tech-savvy group of folks. Which makes the situation you describe all the more disappointing—the mods sound collectively like they are bikeshedding things to death. You can’t reach any agreement among the mods? Then fork and experiment! Let factions run their own particular subforum and see what happens. Code is Law and many things can be reversed.
Discussion of almost every item on your list could be moved forward with simple experiments little more complex than were required to develop the models that the group is devoted to.
Srsly? But, are you not sure whether the off-topic area should be public or not? Then set it public on alternating months until the data (post numbers, post quality, etc.) is clear on which way works better.
You have problems with people not being willing to update models/simulations? This sounds like they are rat’s nests of copy-paste balls of dirt, and you have collectively failed to develop good abstractions or domain-specific languages for the bosses. (My suspicions are further heightened by the mention of spreadsheets—as we Haskellers like to say, Excel is the world’s most popular zeroth-order functional programming language.) I doubt the dungeons are that complex, so you should be able to refactor and abstract until the models/spreadsheets are so transparent any fool could update them.
Or maybe you lack good tutorials, going step by step from nothing to a working model. These can be written by one of the regulars developing a new model (you just need to copy all the intermediate steps and later you can write down the justifications and motivations behind each transformation; I flatter myself that my Haskell tutorials are good examples of this.
People are penalized for criticizing models without iron-clad evidence? Then figure out how it make it cheaper & easier to test the models, or offer anonymous forms of feedback. Voting & polls come to mind as things supported by many forum software for exactly this sort of purpose.
WoW seems to offer good data on player activities, so that means it offers good data to experiment with. Maybe you can motivate people by swapping them out. Maybe good recruits can be identified by slowly rising in level per hour played (eg. because they are spending time building social bonds and exploring the world, not level-grinding and burning out). Maybe you can just download player profiles and turn ML software loose on the data to see what tendencies correlate with ‘being part of many boss-slaying groups’. These problems may resist quantification, but you look like you haven’t even tried!
How long long did it take me to think of this new thing? “Less than a minute, sensei...”
I fear I’ve fallen into the historian’s trap of implying intentionality in the course of presenting a selection of events as a narrative. Your underlying assertion is that we did a poor job planning our application architecture in advance of the grand project of modeling WoW; the reality is that we didn’t know we had undertaken such a project until we were in the middle of it, until the community consensus had emerged that Elitist Jerks is where the theorycrafting happens.
A good comparison is open-source software. There’s no editorial control preventing someone from developing a piece of software for their own use, written in whatever language and idioms suit them best. If the author then chooses to share this tool with the community, do we turn it away because it didn’t follow the specifications for an existing modeling platform? There are at least 3, in C++, C#, and Python. Perhaps if the EJ administration had thrown its weight behind one of them, we’d have the standard platform you advocate—or perhaps we would have splintered our community.
Going back to the meta level, NancyLebovitz touched on one point that I was hoping to make in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5gg/entropy_and_social_groups/ - trading one kind of community equilibrium for a different kind, with its own advantages and disadvantages, through consistent application of rules. The more general point is the difficulty of predicting any specific outcome when it comes to group action.
Not quite. The historian’s fallacy is entirely to one side—all of my suggestions could be implemented at any time. In fact, some of them require you to have already formed a community around a project (you can’t write a DSL for the models until you have experience and repeated code and can see what abstractions the DSL should capture; you can’t alternate or A/B test the offtopic forums without traffic in the first place).
I could not care less about how you formed the community or how you did or did not plan ahead well. To repeat myself, ‘These problems may resist quantification, but you look like you haven’t even tried!’
If you had tried you would have learned something either way.
Perhaps your post does the community an injustice and omits all sorts of experiments and initiatives, but to me this reads less as a story of overactive moderation as one of underactive moderation—moderation sufficient to stifle new activity and insufficient to actually try new things. Hence, I do agree with your last paragraph that it’s an interesting example of being in a bad equilibrium.
What’s “dogshedding” in this context?
I’m pretty sure he meant bikeshedding.