No, you can still get traction, if your argument is good enough. It just requires that your rebuttal itself, on the basis of its own content and quality, attracts enough attention to be read, instead of you automatically getting almost as much attention as the original author got just because you are the first voice in the room.
If you give exposure to whoever first enters a conversation opened by someone with a lot of trust, then you will have a lot of people competing to just be the first ones dominating that discussion, because it gives their ideas a free platform. Bandwith is limited, and you need to allocate bandwidth by some measure of expected quality, and authors should feel free to not have their own trust and readership given to bad arguments, or to people furthering an agenda that is not aligned with what they want.
There should be some mechanisms by which the best critiques of popular content get more attention than they would otherwise, to avoid filter bubble effects, but critiques should not be able to just get attention by being aggressive in the comment section of a popular post, or by being the first comment, etc. If we want to generally incentivize critiques, then we can do that via our curation policies, and by getting people to upvote critiques more, or maybe by other technical solutions, but the current situation does not strike me as remotely the best at giving positive incentives towards the best critiques.
If a nobody disagrees with, being less wrong than, Yudkowsky, they’ll be silenced for all practical purposes. And I do think there was a time when people signalled by going against him, which was the proof of non-phyggishness. Phygs are bad.
You could try red-letter warnings atop posts saying, “there’s a rebuttal by a poster banned from this topic: [link]”, but I don’t expect you will, because the particular writer obviously won’t want that.
No, you can still get traction, if your argument is good enough. It just requires that your rebuttal itself, on the basis of its own content and quality, attracts enough attention to be read, instead of you automatically getting almost as much attention as the original author got just because you are the first voice in the room.
If you give exposure to whoever first enters a conversation opened by someone with a lot of trust, then you will have a lot of people competing to just be the first ones dominating that discussion, because it gives their ideas a free platform. Bandwith is limited, and you need to allocate bandwidth by some measure of expected quality, and authors should feel free to not have their own trust and readership given to bad arguments, or to people furthering an agenda that is not aligned with what they want.
There should be some mechanisms by which the best critiques of popular content get more attention than they would otherwise, to avoid filter bubble effects, but critiques should not be able to just get attention by being aggressive in the comment section of a popular post, or by being the first comment, etc. If we want to generally incentivize critiques, then we can do that via our curation policies, and by getting people to upvote critiques more, or maybe by other technical solutions, but the current situation does not strike me as remotely the best at giving positive incentives towards the best critiques.
If a nobody disagrees with, being less wrong than, Yudkowsky, they’ll be silenced for all practical purposes. And I do think there was a time when people signalled by going against him, which was the proof of non-phyggishness. Phygs are bad.
You could try red-letter warnings atop posts saying, “there’s a rebuttal by a poster banned from this topic: [link]”, but I don’t expect you will, because the particular writer obviously won’t want that.