As far as I know, this is the first edit-fight between humans to take place on the LW wiki, and no procedure for resolving edit-fights is currently in place. I don’t think framing this is a matter of ownership is quite right; we’d be having approximately the same discussion no matter who did the edit and reversion. It’s worth noting that Wikipedia has been struggling with this issue for its entire lifetime, and ended up with a situation that people seem mostly unhappy with.
The best outcome would be for some neutral writer to step in, receive support from both of you, and then adjust the article to accurately reflect the consensus(es) and controversy(ies), in that order.
As for the object-level discussion about group selection, I think it’s fairly obvious that group selection does happen sometimes, but there should be a very strong prior against attributing any particular trait to it.
I wish there was a way to transfer karma between LW users because all kinds of awesome social hacks become possible with point transfers. Like cake cutting algorithms :-)
For example, each person could privately commit to a karma amount they would be willing to either pay or receive in exchange for getting their way or not for a period of time (say the next six months of wiki time), the high bidder gets their way and transfers the average of the bids to the low bidder, with a public note in the transfer logs that cross references the relevant wiki page and revision. Eliezer would rightfully dominate such transactions, if he cared enough, but the facts of each case would accumulate publicly, and the basis for his preferences receiving weight would flow from the natural fact of his substantial positive contributions to the community.
It’s worth noting that Wikipedia has been struggling with this issue for its entire lifetime, and ended up with a situation that people seem mostly unhappy with.
Yes. The English Wikipedia has a set of solutions for this that a lot of people are unhappy with. And then you look at what other wikis have tried to do, and you realize that their methods create even more serious problems and that if you tried to scale them to something of the size of the English Wikipedia disaster would ensue.
This is very much not an endorsement of Wikipedia approaches to the Less Wrong wiki. The purpose is very different, the community is much more narrow, and the total size is much smaller by many orders of magnitude.
The best outcome would be for some neutral writer to step in, receive support from both of you, and then adjust the article to accurately reflect the consensus(es) and controversy(ies), in that order.
I’m not asking for resolution of this page, because I don’t expect to have time to get into an in-depth debate over group selection for at least a couple of months.
Really, I want to know a) what the legal facts are, b) who sets policy and what the policy is, and c) what the community thinks the policy should be.
I’m having trouble thinking of any halfway-plausible way that the legal facts could be relevant here. Surely (1) you wouldn’t so much as consider taking legal action to get your preferred position on group selection enshrined in the LW wiki, and (2) you wouldn’t expect Eliezer or anyone else to do so either? In which case, “what’s the legal situation?” might be an interesting question, but it basically has nothing whatever to do with your dispute about group selection. In which case, mentioning that dispute at all seems like a total distraction.
Let me put it differently. What you wrote reads to me rather like this: “My wife and I just had an argument about who should put out the garbage. In a divorce, what exactly determines who gets custody of the kids?”
I think you have or almost have a point, but it is also true that back when divorce laws favored men more than they do now, men won more of the arguments about small things like who should put out the garbage because their negotiating position was stronger. Specifically, if the husband’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) is much more comfortable (for the husband) than the wife’s BATNA is (for the wife) then the husband will tend to take most of the “surplus value” in any positive-sum transaction (and the wife will tend to pay most of the “deficit value” in any negative-sum transaction). The point is that even though divorce is extremely costly for either player (“cost” in the broad sense) it can still have a big influence on small things like who will put out the garbage.
Perhaps the point you wanted to make is that a participant who is comfortable with shades of gray and ambiguity about power relationships will tend to have more influence in this (egalitarian, non-authoritarian) community than a participant who feels the need to ask questions like “Who owns Less Wrong?”
back when divorce laws favored men more [...] men won more of the arguments about small things
I would be very interested in evidence that (1) this was true and (2) that was because of different divorce laws (rather than, e.g., because women’s status was generally lower, leading to both effects).
In any case, supposing for the sake of argument that #1 and #2 are both correct, presumably the mechanism is the one you describe—in which case what matters is not the facts about divorce law but the beliefs of the parties involved about those facts. In the present instance, it seems that what matters is not who actually “owns” the LW wiki, but Phil’s and Eliezer’s opinions about that.
I don’t think Phil’s questions seem much less weird in the light of all this.
Perhaps the point you wanted to make [...]
So far as I can see, that has nothing whatever to do with the point I wanted to make. It’s probably true, though.
b) who sets policy and what the policy is, and c) what the community thinks the policy should be.
No one has set a policy and there is no policy. There is no authority who could set policy unilaterally, but anyone could set a policy if it sounded reasonable, they put it on a wiki page, they did so at a time when no controversies that the policy would refer to were active, and no one came forward to object.
but anyone could set a policy if it sounded reasonable, they put it on a wiki page, they did so at a time when no controversies that the policy would refer to were active, and no one came forward to object.
I don’t think people are likely to approve if said someone skipped the ‘propose strategy to others’ phase and went straight to setting it. Even if they would otherwise not really care about the subject. (And their is good reason to have that sort of aversion.)
As far as I know, this is the first edit-fight between humans to take place on the LW wiki, and no procedure for resolving edit-fights is currently in place. I don’t think framing this is a matter of ownership is quite right; we’d be having approximately the same discussion no matter who did the edit and reversion. It’s worth noting that Wikipedia has been struggling with this issue for its entire lifetime, and ended up with a situation that people seem mostly unhappy with.
The best outcome would be for some neutral writer to step in, receive support from both of you, and then adjust the article to accurately reflect the consensus(es) and controversy(ies), in that order.
As for the object-level discussion about group selection, I think it’s fairly obvious that group selection does happen sometimes, but there should be a very strong prior against attributing any particular trait to it.
I wish there was a way to transfer karma between LW users because all kinds of awesome social hacks become possible with point transfers. Like cake cutting algorithms :-)
For example, each person could privately commit to a karma amount they would be willing to either pay or receive in exchange for getting their way or not for a period of time (say the next six months of wiki time), the high bidder gets their way and transfers the average of the bids to the low bidder, with a public note in the transfer logs that cross references the relevant wiki page and revision. Eliezer would rightfully dominate such transactions, if he cared enough, but the facts of each case would accumulate publicly, and the basis for his preferences receiving weight would flow from the natural fact of his substantial positive contributions to the community.
+100 for wanting to allow karma transfers!!!
This is somewhat off-topic, but have there been edit-fights between non-human agents on the LW Wiki ? … Because that sounds kind of awesome. :-)
There have been edit fights with humans on one side and automated spamming on the other. In those cases, there’s no dispute about who’s right.
Of course. Right = on our side. ;)
Aw… ok that makes more sense than any of the things that I was thinking. Oh well.
Yes. The English Wikipedia has a set of solutions for this that a lot of people are unhappy with. And then you look at what other wikis have tried to do, and you realize that their methods create even more serious problems and that if you tried to scale them to something of the size of the English Wikipedia disaster would ensue.
This is very much not an endorsement of Wikipedia approaches to the Less Wrong wiki. The purpose is very different, the community is much more narrow, and the total size is much smaller by many orders of magnitude.
I’m not asking for resolution of this page, because I don’t expect to have time to get into an in-depth debate over group selection for at least a couple of months.
Really, I want to know a) what the legal facts are, b) who sets policy and what the policy is, and c) what the community thinks the policy should be.
I’m having trouble thinking of any halfway-plausible way that the legal facts could be relevant here. Surely (1) you wouldn’t so much as consider taking legal action to get your preferred position on group selection enshrined in the LW wiki, and (2) you wouldn’t expect Eliezer or anyone else to do so either? In which case, “what’s the legal situation?” might be an interesting question, but it basically has nothing whatever to do with your dispute about group selection. In which case, mentioning that dispute at all seems like a total distraction.
Let me put it differently. What you wrote reads to me rather like this: “My wife and I just had an argument about who should put out the garbage. In a divorce, what exactly determines who gets custody of the kids?”
I think you have or almost have a point, but it is also true that back when divorce laws favored men more than they do now, men won more of the arguments about small things like who should put out the garbage because their negotiating position was stronger. Specifically, if the husband’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) is much more comfortable (for the husband) than the wife’s BATNA is (for the wife) then the husband will tend to take most of the “surplus value” in any positive-sum transaction (and the wife will tend to pay most of the “deficit value” in any negative-sum transaction). The point is that even though divorce is extremely costly for either player (“cost” in the broad sense) it can still have a big influence on small things like who will put out the garbage.
Perhaps the point you wanted to make is that a participant who is comfortable with shades of gray and ambiguity about power relationships will tend to have more influence in this (egalitarian, non-authoritarian) community than a participant who feels the need to ask questions like “Who owns Less Wrong?”
I would be very interested in evidence that (1) this was true and (2) that was because of different divorce laws (rather than, e.g., because women’s status was generally lower, leading to both effects).
In any case, supposing for the sake of argument that #1 and #2 are both correct, presumably the mechanism is the one you describe—in which case what matters is not the facts about divorce law but the beliefs of the parties involved about those facts. In the present instance, it seems that what matters is not who actually “owns” the LW wiki, but Phil’s and Eliezer’s opinions about that.
I don’t think Phil’s questions seem much less weird in the light of all this.
So far as I can see, that has nothing whatever to do with the point I wanted to make. It’s probably true, though.
In this context, I think “legal facts” translates into “established formal rules”. Not necessarily state enforced rules.
No one has set a policy and there is no policy. There is no authority who could set policy unilaterally, but anyone could set a policy if it sounded reasonable, they put it on a wiki page, they did so at a time when no controversies that the policy would refer to were active, and no one came forward to object.
I don’t think people are likely to approve if said someone skipped the ‘propose strategy to others’ phase and went straight to setting it. Even if they would otherwise not really care about the subject. (And their is good reason to have that sort of aversion.)