I think there are few people who have beliefs as considered on this topic as I do! And maybe no one who has as much evidence as I do (which doesn’t mean I am right, people come to dumb beliefs while being exposed to lots of evidence all the time).
I’ve conducted informal surveys, have done hundreds of user interviews, have had conversations about their LessWrong posting experienes with almost every core site contributor over the years, have had conversations with hundreds of people who decided not to post on LW but instead post somewhere else, conversations with people who moved from other platforms to LW, conversations with people who moved from LW to other platforms, and many more.
I have interviewed people in charge of handling these tradeoffs at many of the other big content platforms out there, as well as dozens of people who run smaller forums and online communities. I have poured over analytics and stats and graphs trying to understand what causes people to write here instead of other places, and what causes them to grow as both a commenter and writer.
All of these form a model of how things work that suggests to me that yes, it is true that bad commenters drive away many more good critics than our current threat of banning does.
I have been working on understanding the dynamics here now for almost a full decade, with really a lot of my time. I absolutely could know that, in the same way we know many many things that we cannot directly observe.
I didn’t put an explicit probability on this, and the exact probability would differ based on the exact operationalization, but IDK, it’s my current belief with like 85% probability.
Again, I don’t really want to continue this conversation with you, so please choose somewhere else to make this kind of comment.
I think there are few people who have beliefs as considered on this topic as I do! And maybe no one who has as much evidence as I do (which doesn’t mean I am right, people come to dumb beliefs while being exposed to lots of evidence all the time).
I’ve conducted informal surveys, have done hundreds of user interviews, have had conversations about their LessWrong posting experienes with almost every core site contributor over the years, have had conversations with hundreds of people who decided not to post on LW but instead post somewhere else, conversations with people who moved from other platforms to LW, conversations with people who moved from LW to other platforms, and many more.
I have interviewed people in charge of handling these tradeoffs at many of the other big content platforms out there, as well as dozens of people who run smaller forums and online communities. I have poured over analytics and stats and graphs trying to understand what causes people to write here instead of other places, and what causes them to grow as both a commenter and writer.
All of these form a model of how things work that suggests to me that yes, it is true that bad commenters drive away many more good critics than our current threat of banning does.
I have been working on understanding the dynamics here now for almost a full decade, with really a lot of my time. I absolutely could know that, in the same way we know many many things that we cannot directly observe.
I didn’t put an explicit probability on this, and the exact probability would differ based on the exact operationalization, but IDK, it’s my current belief with like 85% probability.
Again, I don’t really want to continue this conversation with you, so please choose somewhere else to make this kind of comment.