Let me try to be a bit clearer with an example. I’m saying that in, for instance, a discussion of human decisionmaking that uses utilitarian frameworks, posts like Totalitarian ethical systems and Should Effective Altruism be at war with North Korea? ought to be considered on-topic, since they discuss patterns of thinking that this framework is likely to push us towards, and point to competing considerations that are harder to express in that frame, which we might want to make sure we don’t lose sight of. Right now, on LessWrong, such posts are ambiguously permissible, in ways that cause Vanessa Kosoy to be legitimately uncertain about whether and to what extent—if she extends the interpretive labor of explaining what she thinks the problems are with Zack’s points—her work will be judged admissible.
IMO, on-topic is a strict subset of what is allowable on LW. There are plenty of topics that are about rationality (especially about group rationality and social/peer norms) but don’t work here because they’re related to topics that tend to trigger tribal or social status problems.
I’m starting to see that “on LW” is different for me than for at least some readers and moderators—it may be that I’m too restrictive in my opinion of non-promoted posts. I’m still going to downvote them.
(Only speaking as a participant, not as a moderator. The rules are currently very clear that you can downvote and upvote whatever you like.)
I do think I would prefer it if you would not downvote personal blogposts if they feel off-topic to you. You can always just uncheck the “show personal blogposts” checkbox on the frontpage. I care a lot about people being able to just explore ideas freely on the site, and you can always downvote them if we do move them to frontpage.
I think that’s fair—I don’t want to discourage exploration of ideas not yet ready for publication, but I _AM_ concerned that people other than me may take the leniency as permission to discuss overtly political topics here. I think I’ll stop voting on non-promoted posts and comments for a bit and see if my worries get worse or better.
Is there a way to tell whether a post is promoted or not, on the page that contains the voting buttons?
We just added the ability to easily identify a post as frontpage or personal on our test-server today. Should be out by early next week.
You can currently tell by hovering over a post in a list of posts, or by looking at the moderation guidelines at the bottom of the post (which will always include “frontpage moderation guidelines” if it’s a frontpage post).
Those posts are definitely permissible on LessWrong from the site-rule perspective, though there is a sense in which they are off-topic in that we didn’t promote them to the frontpage.
I do think that imbalance of frontpage vs. personal already creates some problems, though I think the distinction is doing a bunch of important work that I don’t know how to achieve in other ways.
Let me try to be a bit clearer with an example. I’m saying that in, for instance, a discussion of human decisionmaking that uses utilitarian frameworks, posts like Totalitarian ethical systems and Should Effective Altruism be at war with North Korea? ought to be considered on-topic, since they discuss patterns of thinking that this framework is likely to push us towards, and point to competing considerations that are harder to express in that frame, which we might want to make sure we don’t lose sight of. Right now, on LessWrong, such posts are ambiguously permissible, in ways that cause Vanessa Kosoy to be legitimately uncertain about whether and to what extent—if she extends the interpretive labor of explaining what she thinks the problems are with Zack’s points—her work will be judged admissible.
IMO, on-topic is a strict subset of what is allowable on LW. There are plenty of topics that are about rationality (especially about group rationality and social/peer norms) but don’t work here because they’re related to topics that tend to trigger tribal or social status problems.
I’m starting to see that “on LW” is different for me than for at least some readers and moderators—it may be that I’m too restrictive in my opinion of non-promoted posts. I’m still going to downvote them.
(Only speaking as a participant, not as a moderator. The rules are currently very clear that you can downvote and upvote whatever you like.)
I do think I would prefer it if you would not downvote personal blogposts if they feel off-topic to you. You can always just uncheck the “show personal blogposts” checkbox on the frontpage. I care a lot about people being able to just explore ideas freely on the site, and you can always downvote them if we do move them to frontpage.
I think that’s fair—I don’t want to discourage exploration of ideas not yet ready for publication, but I _AM_ concerned that people other than me may take the leniency as permission to discuss overtly political topics here. I think I’ll stop voting on non-promoted posts and comments for a bit and see if my worries get worse or better.
Is there a way to tell whether a post is promoted or not, on the page that contains the voting buttons?
Note for any GreaterWrong users who might have a similar question:
When viewing a post, you’ll see an icon under the post name, at the left. It indicates what kind of post it is, e.g.:
(In order, those are: personal, frontpage, curated, Meta, Alignment Forum.)
We just added the ability to easily identify a post as frontpage or personal on our test-server today. Should be out by early next week.
You can currently tell by hovering over a post in a list of posts, or by looking at the moderation guidelines at the bottom of the post (which will always include “frontpage moderation guidelines” if it’s a frontpage post).
Those posts are definitely permissible on LessWrong from the site-rule perspective, though there is a sense in which they are off-topic in that we didn’t promote them to the frontpage.
I do think that imbalance of frontpage vs. personal already creates some problems, though I think the distinction is doing a bunch of important work that I don’t know how to achieve in other ways.