the alternative of having people provide a platform to anyone without any choice in the matter, whose visibility gets multiplied proportional to their own reach and quality, sucks IMO a lot more.
On the contrary, this is an actively good thing, and should be encouraged. “If you write about your ideas on a public discussion forum, you also thereby provide a platform to your critics, in proportion to the combination of your own reach and the critics’ popularity with the forum’s membership[1]” is precisely the correct sort of dynamic to enable optimal truth-seeking.
Think about it from the reader’s perspective: if I read some popular, interesting, apparently-convincing idea, the first thing—the first thing!—that I want to know, after doing a “first-pass” evaluation of the idea myself, is “what do other people think about it”? This is not a matter of majoritarianism, note, but rather:
something akin to “many eyes make all bugs shallow” (are there problems I missed, but that other people have pointed out?)
other people are often more knowledgeable than I am, and more qualified to notice and point out serious problems with an idea or a work
heuristic evaluation on the basis of seeing how the author responds to serious criticism
And various similar considerations. I am well served if all of this is available to me as a reader, and as easily accessible as the work itself. The harder you make it for readers to access this information, the greater a disservice you do to readers.
(This is why Wikipedia pages about ideas have “Criticisms” sections—and this is a good thing. This is why the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy enumerates major critiques of ideas, and rebuttals to them, on the pages describing said ideas—and this is also a good thing.)
We want serious, effective critics to be given visibility in proportion to a work itself. That is unambiguously a positive good!
(Of course this assumes that the critics in question aren’t engaging in vulgar name-calling / doxxing / spamming / whatever. I think we can take all of those basics of online interaction as a given.)
Via some combination of the LW karma system and comment sorting in the forum UI, visibility enabled by linking, visibility enabled by comment activity, etc., etc.
I agree with many of these things, but of course, bad commenters have driven away many more commenters and authors than banning has driven good commenters away. I don’t think the current ban-system is generally causing serious, effective critics to be banned, and on-net is increasing the number of serious and effective critics.
If we had a better karma system, I think there are some tools that I might want to make available to people that are better than banning. Maybe things like karma thresholds, or some other way of making it so a user needs to be in particular good standing to leave a comment. But unfortunately, our current karma system is not robust enough for that, and indeed, leaving many bad comments, is still unfortunately a way to get lots of karma.
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.
On the contrary, this is an actively good thing, and should be encouraged. “If you write about your ideas on a public discussion forum, you also thereby provide a platform to your critics, in proportion to the combination of your own reach and the critics’ popularity with the forum’s membership[1]” is precisely the correct sort of dynamic to enable optimal truth-seeking.
Think about it from the reader’s perspective: if I read some popular, interesting, apparently-convincing idea, the first thing—the first thing!—that I want to know, after doing a “first-pass” evaluation of the idea myself, is “what do other people think about it”? This is not a matter of majoritarianism, note, but rather:
something akin to “many eyes make all bugs shallow” (are there problems I missed, but that other people have pointed out?)
other people are often more knowledgeable than I am, and more qualified to notice and point out serious problems with an idea or a work
heuristic evaluation on the basis of seeing how the author responds to serious criticism
And various similar considerations. I am well served if all of this is available to me as a reader, and as easily accessible as the work itself. The harder you make it for readers to access this information, the greater a disservice you do to readers.
(This is why Wikipedia pages about ideas have “Criticisms” sections—and this is a good thing. This is why the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy enumerates major critiques of ideas, and rebuttals to them, on the pages describing said ideas—and this is also a good thing.)
We want serious, effective critics to be given visibility in proportion to a work itself. That is unambiguously a positive good!
(Of course this assumes that the critics in question aren’t engaging in vulgar name-calling / doxxing / spamming / whatever. I think we can take all of those basics of online interaction as a given.)
Via some combination of the LW karma system and comment sorting in the forum UI, visibility enabled by linking, visibility enabled by comment activity, etc., etc.
I agree with many of these things, but of course, bad commenters have driven away many more commenters and authors than banning has driven good commenters away. I don’t think the current ban-system is generally causing serious, effective critics to be banned, and on-net is increasing the number of serious and effective critics.
If we had a better karma system, I think there are some tools that I might want to make available to people that are better than banning. Maybe things like karma thresholds, or some other way of making it so a user needs to be in particular good standing to leave a comment. But unfortunately, our current karma system is not robust enough for that, and indeed, leaving many bad comments, is still unfortunately a way to get lots of karma.
You can’t possibly know that. (Especially since “driven away” includes “discouraged from posting in the first place”.)
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.