Fine. I’m convinced now. The line has been replaced by a summary-style line that is clearly not a call to action.
The pattern seems to be, if one spends 1600 words on analysis, then one sentence suggesting one might aim to avoid the mistakes pointed out in the analysis, then one is viewed as “doing two things” and/or being a call to action, and then is guilty if the call-to-action isn’t sufficiently well specified and doesn’t give concrete explicit paths to making progress that seem realistic and to fit people’s incentives and so on?
Which itself seems like several really big problems, and an illustration of the central point of this piece!
Call to action, and the calling thereof, is an action, and thus makes one potentially blameworthy in various ways for being insufficient, whereas having no call to action would have been fine. You’ve interacted with the problem, and thus by CIE are responsible for not doing more. So one must not interact with the problem in any real way, and ensure that one isn’t daring to suggest anything get done.
I’m viewing this thing more through the lens of Tales of Alice Almost, where there’s a legitimate hard question of “what should be incentivized on LessWrong”, which depends a lot on what the average skills and tendencies of the typical LessWrong user is, as well as what the skills/tendencies of particular users are.
Longterm, there’s a quite high bar we want LessWrong to be aspiring to. Because newcomers frequently arrive at LessWrong who won’t yet have a bunch of skills, there needs to be some fairly simple guidelines to get them started (allowing them to get positively rewarded for contributing).
But I do want the tail end of users to also have incentive to continue to improve.
Because I’m not 100% sure what the right collection of skills and norms for LessWrong to encourage are, there also needs to be an incentive for the collective culture (and the mod team in particular) to improve our understanding of “what things should be incentivized” so we don’t get stuck in a weird lost purpose.
(If the current mod team got hit by a truck and new people took over and tried to implement our “no calls to action on frontpage” rule without understanding it, I predict they wouldn’t get the nuances right).
Posts by Zvi are reliably much more interesting to me than the average post, tackling issues that are thorny with interesting insight that I respect quite a bit. If the collection of incentives we had resulted in Zvi posting less, that would be quite bad.
But Zvi posts also tend to be include a particular kind of rhetorical flourish that feels out of place for LessWrong – it feels like I’m listening to a political rally. So a) I don’t want new users to internalize that style as something they should emulate (part of what the frontpage is for), and b) I genuinely want the frontpage to be a place where people can engage with ideas without feeling incentivized to think about those ideas through the lens of “how is this affecting the social landscape?”
(this is not because it’s not important to think about how things affect the social landscape, but because that’s ‘hard mode’, and requires trust to do well while training your rationality skill. The current best-guess of myself and most of the mods is that it’s best if people separate out your posts about models and principles, from the posts about ‘here’s what’s wrong with the social landscape and how to fix it’)
There’s a range of what I’d consider “calls to action”. The call to action “here are some models, I think they’re important and you probably should have considered them and maybe do something about them” is pretty fine for frontpage. Where it gets dicey is when it has this particular undercurrent of politics-rah-rah-rah, which I think the original version of this post had (a bit of)
I did change the post on the blog as well, not only the LW version, to the new version. This wasn’t a case of ‘I shouldn’t have to change this but Raemon is being dense’ but rather ‘I see two of the best people on this site focusing on this one sentence in massively distracting ways so I’m clearly doing something wrong here’ and reaching the conclusion that this is how humans read articles so this line needs to go. And indeed, to draw a clear distinction between the posts where I am doing pure model building, from the posts with action calls.
I got frustrated because it feels like this is an expensive sacrifice that shouldn’t be necessary. And because I was worried that this was an emergent pattern and dilemma against clarity, where if your call to clarity hints at a call to action people focus on the call to action, and if you don’t call to action then people (especially outside of LW) say “That was nice and all but you didn’t tell me what to do with that so what’s the point?” and/or therefore forget what said. And the whole issue of calls to action vs. clarity has been central to some recent private discussions recently. where very high-level rationalists have repeatedly reacted to calls for clarity as if they are calls to action, in patterns that seem optimized for preventing clarity and common knowledge. All of which I’m struggling to figure out how to explain.
There’s also the gaslighting thing where people do politics while pretending they’re not doing that, then accuse anyone who calls them out on it of doing politics (and then, of course, the worry where it goes deeper and someone accuses someone of accusing someone of playing politics, which can be very true and important but more frequently is next-level gaslighting).
We also need to do a better job of figuring out how to do things that require a lot of groundwork—to teach the hard mode advanced class. There was a time when everyone was expected to have read the sequences and understand them, which helped a lot here. But at the time, I was actively terrified of commenting let alone posting, so it certainly wasn’t free.
(If the current mod team got hit by a truck and new people took over and tried to implement our “no calls to action on frontpage” rule without understanding it, I predict they wouldn’t get the nuances right).
A corollary of 1.3 is that we often prefer descriptive language (including language describing your current beliefs, emotional state, etc.) over prescriptive language, all else being equal.
Which seems pretty far from “no calls to action on frontpage” and isn’t even in the “Things to keep to a minimum” or “Off-limits things” section.
(If I had been aware of this rule and surrounding discussions about it, maybe I would have been more sensitive about “accusing” someone of making a call to action, which to be clear wasn’t my intention at all since I didn’t even know such a rule existed.)
I think the phrase “call to action” might get used internally more than externally (although I have a blogpost brewing that delves into it a bit, as well as another phrase “call to conflict.”)
But a phrase used in both our Frontpage Commenting guidelines, and on the tooltip for when you mark a post as ‘allow moderators to promote’ is ‘aim to explain, not persuade’, where calls to action are a subset of persuading.
(Note that both of those site-elements might not appear on GreaterWrong. I think GreaterWrong also doesn’t really have the frontpage distinction anyhow, instead just showing all new posts in order of appearance)
I actually think the “aim to explain, not persuade” framing is generally clearer than the “no call to action” framing. Like, if you explain something to someone that strongly implies some action, then some people might call that a “call to action” but I would think that’s totally fine.
Agreed. And I think I was implicitly focusing on whether the post gave a sufficient explanation for its (original) conclusion, and was rather confused why others were so focused on whether there was a call to action or not (which without knowing the context of your private discussions I just interpreted to mean any practical suggestion)
So, this post has netted for Zvi a few hundred karma, which SEEMS to be encouraging the right thing. Even with some confusion and controversy, it’s clearly positive value. I apologize for my asymmetric commenting style, especially if my focus on points of disagreement makes it seem like I don’t value the topic and everyone’s thoughts on it.
I want to ask about your dual preferences: you want high-quality as an absolute and you want people to improve from their current capabilities, as a relative. Are there different ways of encouraging these two goals, or are they integrated enough that you think of them as the same?
No need to apologize for focusing on points of disagreement. And I’m grateful for the commentary and confusion, because it pointed to important questions about how to have good discourse and caused me to notice something I do frequently that is likely a mistake. It’s like finally having an editor, in the good way.
I’m not on the moderation team, but my perspective is that the two goals overlap and are fully compatible but largely distinct and need to be optimized for in different ways (see Tale of Alice Almost). And this is the situation in which you get a conflict between them, because norms are messy and you can’t avoid what happens in hard mode threads bleeding into other places.
Fine. I’m convinced now. The line has been replaced by a summary-style line that is clearly not a call to action.
The pattern seems to be, if one spends 1600 words on analysis, then one sentence suggesting one might aim to avoid the mistakes pointed out in the analysis, then one is viewed as “doing two things” and/or being a call to action, and then is guilty if the call-to-action isn’t sufficiently well specified and doesn’t give concrete explicit paths to making progress that seem realistic and to fit people’s incentives and so on?
Which itself seems like several really big problems, and an illustration of the central point of this piece!
Call to action, and the calling thereof, is an action, and thus makes one potentially blameworthy in various ways for being insufficient, whereas having no call to action would have been fine. You’ve interacted with the problem, and thus by CIE are responsible for not doing more. So one must not interact with the problem in any real way, and ensure that one isn’t daring to suggest anything get done.
I’m viewing this thing more through the lens of Tales of Alice Almost, where there’s a legitimate hard question of “what should be incentivized on LessWrong”, which depends a lot on what the average skills and tendencies of the typical LessWrong user is, as well as what the skills/tendencies of particular users are.
Longterm, there’s a quite high bar we want LessWrong to be aspiring to. Because newcomers frequently arrive at LessWrong who won’t yet have a bunch of skills, there needs to be some fairly simple guidelines to get them started (allowing them to get positively rewarded for contributing).
But I do want the tail end of users to also have incentive to continue to improve.
Because I’m not 100% sure what the right collection of skills and norms for LessWrong to encourage are, there also needs to be an incentive for the collective culture (and the mod team in particular) to improve our understanding of “what things should be incentivized” so we don’t get stuck in a weird lost purpose.
(If the current mod team got hit by a truck and new people took over and tried to implement our “no calls to action on frontpage” rule without understanding it, I predict they wouldn’t get the nuances right).
Posts by Zvi are reliably much more interesting to me than the average post, tackling issues that are thorny with interesting insight that I respect quite a bit. If the collection of incentives we had resulted in Zvi posting less, that would be quite bad.
But Zvi posts also tend to be include a particular kind of rhetorical flourish that feels out of place for LessWrong – it feels like I’m listening to a political rally. So a) I don’t want new users to internalize that style as something they should emulate (part of what the frontpage is for), and b) I genuinely want the frontpage to be a place where people can engage with ideas without feeling incentivized to think about those ideas through the lens of “how is this affecting the social landscape?”
(this is not because it’s not important to think about how things affect the social landscape, but because that’s ‘hard mode’, and requires trust to do well while training your rationality skill. The current best-guess of myself and most of the mods is that it’s best if people separate out your posts about models and principles, from the posts about ‘here’s what’s wrong with the social landscape and how to fix it’)
There’s a range of what I’d consider “calls to action”. The call to action “here are some models, I think they’re important and you probably should have considered them and maybe do something about them” is pretty fine for frontpage. Where it gets dicey is when it has this particular undercurrent of politics-rah-rah-rah, which I think the original version of this post had (a bit of)
Right.
I did change the post on the blog as well, not only the LW version, to the new version. This wasn’t a case of ‘I shouldn’t have to change this but Raemon is being dense’ but rather ‘I see two of the best people on this site focusing on this one sentence in massively distracting ways so I’m clearly doing something wrong here’ and reaching the conclusion that this is how humans read articles so this line needs to go. And indeed, to draw a clear distinction between the posts where I am doing pure model building, from the posts with action calls.
I got frustrated because it feels like this is an expensive sacrifice that shouldn’t be necessary. And because I was worried that this was an emergent pattern and dilemma against clarity, where if your call to clarity hints at a call to action people focus on the call to action, and if you don’t call to action then people (especially outside of LW) say “That was nice and all but you didn’t tell me what to do with that so what’s the point?” and/or therefore forget what said. And the whole issue of calls to action vs. clarity has been central to some recent private discussions recently. where very high-level rationalists have repeatedly reacted to calls for clarity as if they are calls to action, in patterns that seem optimized for preventing clarity and common knowledge. All of which I’m struggling to figure out how to explain.
There’s also the gaslighting thing where people do politics while pretending they’re not doing that, then accuse anyone who calls them out on it of doing politics (and then, of course, the worry where it goes deeper and someone accuses someone of accusing someone of playing politics, which can be very true and important but more frequently is next-level gaslighting).
We also need to do a better job of figuring out how to do things that require a lot of groundwork—to teach the hard mode advanced class. There was a time when everyone was expected to have read the sequences and understand them, which helped a lot here. But at the time, I was actively terrified of commenting let alone posting, so it certainly wasn’t free.
When did this rule come into effect and where is it written down? The closest thing I can find in Frontpage Posting and Commenting Guidelines is:
Which seems pretty far from “no calls to action on frontpage” and isn’t even in the “Things to keep to a minimum” or “Off-limits things” section.
(If I had been aware of this rule and surrounding discussions about it, maybe I would have been more sensitive about “accusing” someone of making a call to action, which to be clear wasn’t my intention at all since I didn’t even know such a rule existed.)
I think the phrase “call to action” might get used internally more than externally (although I have a blogpost brewing that delves into it a bit, as well as another phrase “call to conflict.”)
But a phrase used in both our Frontpage Commenting guidelines, and on the tooltip for when you mark a post as ‘allow moderators to promote’ is ‘aim to explain, not persuade’, where calls to action are a subset of persuading.
(Note that both of those site-elements might not appear on GreaterWrong. I think GreaterWrong also doesn’t really have the frontpage distinction anyhow, instead just showing all new posts in order of appearance)
I actually think the “aim to explain, not persuade” framing is generally clearer than the “no call to action” framing. Like, if you explain something to someone that strongly implies some action, then some people might call that a “call to action” but I would think that’s totally fine.
Agreed. And I think I was implicitly focusing on whether the post gave a sufficient explanation for its (original) conclusion, and was rather confused why others were so focused on whether there was a call to action or not (which without knowing the context of your private discussions I just interpreted to mean any practical suggestion)
So, this post has netted for Zvi a few hundred karma, which SEEMS to be encouraging the right thing. Even with some confusion and controversy, it’s clearly positive value. I apologize for my asymmetric commenting style, especially if my focus on points of disagreement makes it seem like I don’t value the topic and everyone’s thoughts on it.
I want to ask about your dual preferences: you want high-quality as an absolute and you want people to improve from their current capabilities, as a relative. Are there different ways of encouraging these two goals, or are they integrated enough that you think of them as the same?
No need to apologize for focusing on points of disagreement. And I’m grateful for the commentary and confusion, because it pointed to important questions about how to have good discourse and caused me to notice something I do frequently that is likely a mistake. It’s like finally having an editor, in the good way.
I’m not on the moderation team, but my perspective is that the two goals overlap and are fully compatible but largely distinct and need to be optimized for in different ways (see Tale of Alice Almost). And this is the situation in which you get a conflict between them, because norms are messy and you can’t avoid what happens in hard mode threads bleeding into other places.