top-level contributions *ought *to be rewarded with a certain social status
What? Why? This doesn’t make any sense.
For one thing, what’s so special about “top-level contributions”? Surely contributions are valuable if… they’re valuable? No matter where they’re written (as posts, as comments, as shortform entries, etc.)?
For another thing, surely only good contributions (top-level or otherwise!) ought to be rewarded with “a certain social status”? Surely you shouldn’t reward people just for making top-level posts, regardless of quality, or usefulness, or relevance…?
Commenting is easy, whereas writing posts is hard but has much larger potential upside (in terms of reach, timelessness, etc). Therefore, the more challenging task deserves a much higher baseline of credit, from which one then adjusts up or down depending on criteria like “quality, or usefulness, or relevance”.
First of all, this is obviously wrong. It makes no difference if you post something as a post or a comment. Posts can be short; comments can be long. Posts can be bad; comments can be good. Posts can be useless; comments can be useful. And so forth. Posts and comments on Less Wrong differ in some technical ways (posts have titles and tags; comments do not), but that’s all. The distinction is otherwise arbitrary.
(Take a look at gwern’s LW posting history, for example, and then tell me that his comments, like for instance this comment which has 328 karma and is over 3,000 words long, are somehow inferior to posts. And that comment is immediately followed by another one which is ~1,500 words long and has 65 karma, and then another comment which is ~1,900 words long and has 112 karma… oh, but you see they’re comments, not posts, so clearly… they don’t matter? They’re less useful? What?)
Second, of course a “more challenging” task does not deserve a higher baseline of credit! There is no value in doing something which is “challenging” or “hard”! There is no value in “effort”! Indeed, the conflation of “high effort” and “high value”, or the valuing of effort directly, is a very serious mistake, and a major problem.
I mean perhaps it is wrong in theory, but in practice the effort that people put into a post vs a comment is typically 10-100x different. We can find manymanymany posts on this website that took many 10s of hours of work to write, and many comments that take less than a minute; there’s a very strong distinction in the distribution of effort that these two contribution types come from.
Gwern is a very poor counterexample, both because he’s also/primarily an extraordinarily prolific top-level poster (e.g. all of gwern.net), and because he’s such a noncentral example of a commenter. The typical (or average or median or whatever) comment on the Internet, or on LW, is not Gwern-level, so why bring him into this if not to muddy the waters?
Also, the distinction between comments and posts is not arbitrary. Writing top-level posts is much closer to creating, commenting is much closer to critique. No-one would argue that a movie director produces the same kind of value as a movie critic; the same applies to posts vs. comments. Or as another comparison, writing top-level posts is closer to shipping software features (like your work on gwern.net?), while commenting is closer to submitting bug reports, and usually ones that aren’t about critical issues like crashes. Again, both activities have their place, but they’re not at all interchangeable.
Regarding the LW discussion on effort, I am fully aware of it. In my comment I clearly claimed “is hard but has much larger potential upside”, i.e. I’m claiming writing top-level posts produces more value in expectation, and thus just the attempt to do so already deserves some credit. Whereas if a site treats its new creators too harshly, eventually all it’s left with are its critics.
Finally, a meta comment: Your comment here is a good example of what I meant by commenting being easier than making top-level posts: if it had been a top-level post by someone else, and you had read it, I expect you would have rightly criticized the OP for bringing up Gwern despite him being such a noncentral example. But your comment lacks the very rigor you expect in others.
In fact, if comments and posts are no different, then I dare you to put your words into practice. Make this very topic (or another one like your work on gwern.net) a full post and open it up to the kinds of critique only top-level posts are subject to.
I expect you would have rightly criticized the OP for bringing up Gwern despite him being such a noncentral example.
Hmmm… I’m not too sure of this. My own intuition is that it’s more of an “isolated demands for rigour” thing, and that he would applaud such a post due to his own agreement with it, and not look into its quality too closely. I’d love to be wrong, but over years of dealing with people of this sort*, I have found that even my least charitable interpretations of their behaviour tend to be overly optimistic to the point of seeming outright naive in hindsight.
*meaning, to an approximation: stereotypical redditors of the r/atheism kind. This has to be understood rather broadly though since many people of this sort have been turning into neo-tradcaths or orthobros lately, and don’t seem to be any better for the change.
Gwern is a very poor counterexample, both because he’s also/primarily an extraordinarily prolific top-level poster (e.g. all of gwern.net)
Is he, now?
As it happens, we recently built a “blog” feature for gwern.net, which has allowed Gwern to quickly add a lot of content to the site. I say “add”, and not “write”, because a lot of the “blog posts” on that list are, in fact… commentsthatGwernwroteonLessWrong.
Again: good writing is good writing. It could be a comment, or a post. It could start as a comment, and become a post. It could start as a post, and be expanded in comments. It could start on LW, and be re-posted on a personal site, or vice versa. It makes zero sense to reward good and useful writing differently depending on whether it currently happens to be formatted as a “post” or as a “comment”.
The typical (or average or median or whatever) comment on the Internet, or on LW, is not Gwern-level
What difference does that make? Why do we care about the typical/average/median comment? It’s the best contributions that matter. We’re talking about rewarding things with social status—that’s not going to be the average stuff that gets rewarded!
Writing top-level posts is much closer to creating, commenting is much closer to critique.
Where are you getting this? I mean, really, where is this even coming from? What’s it based on? This claim seems to just be totally arbitrary.
Did you read the comments I linked? Do they really strike you as “critique”? What are they “critique” of?
No-one would argue that a movie director produces the same kind of value as a movie critic; the same applies to posts vs. comments.
Of course the same doesn’t apply. Movie directors make movies. Movie critics do not make movies. Movies and movie reviews are not remotely the same thing. You don’t go to the theater to watch a movie review with surround sound. Movies and reviews thereof are radically different artifacts, in radically different mediums.
Posts and comments are both text. And the same kind of text, on the same forum, written by the same people, on the same topics.
Like, you understand that any piece of text that you can post as a post, you can also post as a comment, right? (I mean, of course you do, it’s such an obvious point. But then how can you make these claims?) I’ve linked examples of turning comments into posts, and obviously you can do the reverse as well. The “Shortform” feature blurs the line between them as well.
Just… this is so very, very obviously a mostly-arbitrary technical distinction that is imposed by this specific design of forum software. It exists for convenience of organizing discussions. It cannot possibly support anything remotely resembling the dichotomy that you’re trying to portray.
Or as another comparison, writing top-level posts is closer to shipping software features (like your work on gwern.net?), while commenting is closer to submitting bug reports, and usually ones that aren’t about critical issues like crashes.
No, writing essays is closer to shipping software features, regardless of whether they are formatted/designated as “posts” or as “comments”.
Maybe that’s the disconnect? Maybe when you say “post”, you mean “essay” (with some thesis, arguments, etc.)? But there are lots of posts that aren’t essays, and lots of essays that are comments and not posts.
I’m claiming writing top-level posts produces more value in expectation, and thus just the attempt to do so already deserves some credit.
By no means! Producing value deserves credit. Trying to produce value does not deserve credit. (I trust that the incentive-based argument for this is obvious?)
Your comment here is a good example of what I meant by commenting being easier than making top-level posts: if it had been a top-level post by someone else, and you had read it, I expect you would have rightly criticized the OP for bringing up Gwern despite him being such a noncentral example.
I absolutely would not have made such a criticism, because it’s deeply mistaken.
In fact, if comments and posts are no different, then I dare you to put your words into practice. Make this very topic (or another one like your work on gwern.net) a full post and open it up to the kinds of critique only top-level posts are subject to.
Your wish is (retroactively) my command: my recent post is the first of what will be a series of top-level posts based on comments that I’ve previously written.
Maybe that’s the disconnect? Maybe when you say “post”, you mean “essay” (with some thesis, arguments, etc.)? But there are lots of posts that aren’t essays, and lots of essays that are comments and not posts.
Funny how I’ve been saying “top-level contributions” (a category which includes essays, but also guides, overviews, etc.) rather than “posts” this whole time.
In other words, even if we admit MondSemmel’s wording to have been an error, I at least did not make the same error. But did that save me from your scummy behaviour? No, you simply pretended as if I had said “posts” and proceeded to engage in the same “what about Gwern’s comments” tactic, despite it being completely irrelevant when my initial argument never once made a distinction between posts and comments. But you used sleights of hand so much that I kept being distracted from the fact that your entire line of argument was based on putting words in my mouth and interpreting my argument through the lens of a distinction I didn’t make, but which you simply foisted on me.
Not only is it utterly disgusting behaviour, it also shows that it would’ve made no difference if MondSemmel had said “essay” instead of “post”, and that that diagnosis of the “disconnect” is merely another attempt at one-upmanship.
Funny how I’ve been saying “top-level contributions” (a category which includes essays, but also guides, overviews, etc.) rather than “posts” this whole time.
However, perhaps those were merely slips, or you replied quickly and didn’t write what you meant to write, etc.; fine, these things happen.
But then your comments in this thread seem quite perplexing. For instance, you wrote:
top-level contributions ought to be rewarded with a certain social status
I expressed puzzlement, asking:
what’s so special about “top-level contributions”? Surely contributions are valuable if… they’re valuable? No matter where they’re written (as posts, as comments, as shortform entries, etc.)?
You replied:
Sure, you could write a top-level contribution but post it as a comment rather than a post to prove some point. But when I’m talking about “top-level contributions”, it is pretty clear I am talking about the nature of the contribution itself, its suitability for sparking discussion, etc., and the fact that it is technically possible to make such a contribution in a comment section rather than as a post… is really not a very insightful objection.
To which I replied:
It’s not just “technically possible”, it’s a thing that happens all the time.
Do you… agree? Disagree?
If you disagree, then we’re back to talking about posts vs. comments.
If you agree, then it’s not clear to me what your initial point even was. Remember, all of this is in the context of a reply to a post which contained the following text:
But would a commenter who had never written “top-level” posts thereby be a worse commenter? It’s hard to see why that would be the case. In the analogy, coaching is an activity that depends on playing, but comment-writing doesn’t seem to depend on post-writing to nearly the same extent or even in the same way, in large part because it’s not even clear to what extent comment-writing and post-writing are even different activities, rather than just being the same activity, writing. (It’s not uncommon that text that was originally drafted with the intent of being a “comment”, ends up being revised into a “post.”)
OP is clearly using the term “top-level” to refer to posts, as distinct from comments. You wrote “top-level contribution” in your initial comment; it’s a strange word choice, if you really were not trying to point to the post vs. comment distinction… and also, why were you not trying to point to the post vs. comment distinction? That’s what the OP was talking about!
But it’s actually even weirder than that—in your initial comment, you also wrote:
If people who never write top-level posts proceed to engage in snark and smugness towards people who do, that’s a problem
… which is indeed talking about “posts”, not just “top-level contributions” which may or may not be posts.
Obviously, only you know what you meant to say. But I really don’t think that I can be accused of putting words in your mouth. I think that what you have written is genuinely, deeply unclear, and apparently contradictory. Perhaps now would be a good time to clarify just what your position is.
I have been saying top-level contributions from the start. The very first comment I made in this discussion made no mention of either posts or comments. You disingenuously reframed my argument and I made the mistake of borrowing your terms instead of insisting on mine.
However, perhaps those were merely slips, or you replied quickly and didn’t write what you meant to write, etc.; fine, these things happen.
Yes, you foisted a distinction on me that I did not make, and I slipped up in accepting the reframing of my argument. I should have been more suspicious of your antics from the outset.
I expressed puzzlement
Not quite what you expressed.
Do you… agree? Disagree?
I haven’t looked into it, because as I’ve already made quite clear, it is flat out not relevant to the point I am making.
If you agree, then it’s not clear to me what your initial point even was. Remember, all of this is in the context of a reply to a post which contained the following text:
But that text was itself written in the context of prior history between Duncan Sabien and another member. You know this, because you are that other member. Zack was critiquing Duncan’s viewpoint, and I was defending it. Both I and Zack were referencing Duncan’s viewpoint when we referred to top-level contributions. I grant that Duncan did also refer explicitly to posts, but that was for convenience and not actually essential to his argument, and his post was quite clearly an essay, not a logical proof, so it really shouldn’t read “autistically” (for lack of a better word)
Obviously, only you know what you meant to say. But I really don’t think that I can be accused of putting words in your mouth. I think that what you have written is genuinely, deeply unclear, and apparently contradictory. Perhaps now would be a good time to clarify just what your position is.
My position is that there is a type of person conventionally known as a subversive, who portray themselves as crusaders of the truth or justice or some such, but who are clearly nothing of the sort, and who are deeply corrosive to civility, good faith interactions, high-trust communities, etc.
They convince themselves that they are insightful critics, but their analyses show persistent biases that manifest as epistemic inconsistencies. They are often driven by a visceral need to always be the smartest person in the room, or at any rate to show off their brains at others’ expense, or their virtue at others’ expense (bible thumpers are another manifestation of this personality type, as are hippies).
They do sometimes argue in good faith, but even when they are being intensely eristic, they think they are still in good faith, because they take deontological view of good faith, where it can be reduced to following a bunch of rules, like, “if I don’t straw man the other person, don’t poison the well, don’t engage in ad hominems, etc., then I am in good faith”. It does not however take a particularly firm grasp of psychology to realize that there is an affective dimension to good faith, and that while it might theoretically be possible to be in good faith while also being intensely standoffish, it pretty much never happens.
Moreover, when they are in this eristic mood, they almost always make the interaction as unpleasant for the other person as they possibly can without making it too obvious what they are doing. Everything that can be weaponized will be weaponized, the tone will be as full of hidden venom as possible, and almost every sentence is goal-oriented towards making the other person lose face. And the other person, unless exceptionally skilled in dealing with these people, has little choice but either let himself be humiliated, or respond in kind.
Outside of subversive spheres, this pattern of behaviour tends to be met with punishment of some sort, but this is deemed unacceptable in subversive spheres, whose social norms are goal-oriented towards enabling exactly this pattern of behaviour, making it especially difficult to deal with. Incidentally, this same dynamic is what brought down the monarchies of Europe, since they could not simply crack down on subversion without being deemed tyrannical.
Fyodor Dostoevsky has written more about this than probably anybody else ever has. I used to be much more fluent in dealing with this dynamic, but that can only come at the cost of assimilating to it. Instead I’ve been distancing myself from it, which has made me less and less fluent in dealing with subversives. I will probably deactivate my LessWrong account one of these days.
So basically my position is that decent contributors shouldn’t have to deal with subversives.
The very first comment I made in this discussion made no mention of either posts or comments.
Sorry, but this is unambiguously false. Indeed, I quoted you, in the comment to which you are responding:
But it’s actually even weirder than that—in your initial comment, you also wrote:
If people who never write top-level posts proceed to engage in snark and smugness towards people who do, that’s a problem
… which is indeed talking about “posts”, not just “top-level contributions” which may or may not be posts.
Anyhow:
If you agree, then it’s not clear to me what your initial point even was. Remember, all of this is in the context of a reply to a post which contained the following text:
But that text was itself written in the context of prior history between Duncan Sabien and another member. You know this, because you *are *that other member. Zack was critiquing Duncan’s viewpoint, and I was defending it. Both I and Zack were referencing Duncan’s viewpoint when we referred to top-level contributions. I grant that Duncan did also refer explicitly to posts
So the OP was about posts vs. comments, and it was written in the context of something else which was also about posts vs. comments, and your own initial comment mentioned posts…
… and yet it’s weird and somehow blameworthy for me to think that we’re talking about posts vs. comments?
My position is …
… and what does any of that have to do with the OP?
So the OP was about posts vs. comments, and it was written in the context of something else which was also about posts vs. comments, and your own initial comment mentioned posts…
No, that was literally never the salient point. Duncan Sabien’s post was literally called “Killing Socrates” and was drawing analogies to the sophists vs the Socratics. That should be enough to show you that the post vs. comment distinction is not the salient issue.
Yes, Duncan Sabien did map it to posts versus comments, but that is because that distinction — far from being an arbitrary feature of this kind of forum — is intended precisely to accommodate two different modes of engagement. The correlation between the mode of engagement and the medium (posts vs comments) may not be perfect, or even all that strong, but if so, by the same principle, Duncan’s mapping of the two modes of engagement to posts versus comments also isn’t all that strong. The salient point was always about the modes of engagement, hence why it is even possible to draw an analogy to Socrates. It was always about contributors versus disparagers.
And it is not like this is some subtle argument that is difficult to follow, so yes, your repeated failure to grasp what is being talked about is blameworthy.
… and what does any of that have to do with the OP?
You are a subversive and Duncan Sabien was a decent contributor who should never have had to put up with you. That’s what.
The argument he’s making, and the argument I am making, is not actually very hard to understand, and, to confirm your suspicion: it does not in fact come from a lack of awareness that the same text can be posted as either a comment or post.
Just… this is so very, very obviously a mostly-arbitrary technical distinction that is imposed by this specific design of forum software.
No, this technical distinction was deliberately created, and forum software was deliberately selected as opposed to, say, an IRC chat or a discord server. It is not arbitrary at all. You might as well say that the distinction between opening statements and rebuttals in an Oxford debate is arbitrary since both of them are basically open form in practice and you can say the exact same words in either segment (you won’t be arrested or anything). The point, however, is that there are clear patterns that differ between opening statements and rebuttals. The LessWrong distinction between posts and commnets is not an arbitrary distinction that stems from technological limitations and can be traced no further back, it stems ultimately from a psychological desire. I see no indication that you have even attempted to understand the psychological angle.
By no means! Producing value deserves credit. Trying to produce value does not deserve credit. (I trust that the incentive-based argument for this is obvious?)
True, but trying in ways that will likely lead to value down the line, even if the first few posts are a miss, does deserve credit, or at least a level of courtesy which you seem hellbent on opposing. But even then, it is in fact possible to write deeply critical comments without taking on a smug tone or coming across as being on a high horse. Have you examined the psychological mechanisms underlying your apparent insistence on hostility to people who make posts which you, in your capacity as epistemic arbiter or some such, deem to be unmeritorious? Again, I see not the slightest indication.
Posts and comments on Less Wrong differ in some technical ways (posts have titles and tags; comments do not), but that’s all.
No, posts and comments on LessWrong do not in fact differ only in technical ways. Posts are longer than comments on average, for one, and there are many, many other non-technical ways in which they differ. Even the style of writing tends to differ, in no small part because comments tend to be written to address a single person (the poster) whereas posts only occasionally are.
If you’re gonna take this angle of trying to be technically correct while completely missing the point, you ought to at least get it right, and not rely on arguments that are clearly technically false. And your claim that posts and comments differ in technical ways only is flatly false, yet that false claim is what your whole stance rests on.
That’s not serious engagement. That’s Reddit-tier at best. (inb4 an argument about how comments on LessWrong and comments on Reddit differ in some technical ways, but that’s all)
Important or not, it is a non-technical difference, and you just deflected it. I call that a clear-cut case of blatant bad faith on your part.
Name three.
Comments are usually addressed to the author of that which they are commenting on. This is sometimes true of top-level posts too, but not as often.
And the linguistic register of posts is more formal on average than that of comments.
Along with the difference in average length, that’s three, which is generous of me considering you have yet to write a single comment in good faith in this entire discussion.
Important or not, it *is *a non-technical difference
that’s three
It’s zero.
The average (or median, etc.) comment or the average post is irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion that we’re actually having here, which is about whether it makes sense to reward contributors differently based on whether they have written a post or a comment. In such a case, the only thing that could matter is that actual post or comment. And so the only kinds of properties that could be relevant are those which attach to any post or any comment—not aggregate statistical measures of all posts on LW and all comments on LW!
(Before you call “bad faith”, consider checking whether you understand what your interlocutor is saying.)
It is literally a technical difference, and you were the person who started doing the asinine literalism in the first place. I guess it’s cool when you do it, but not when your interlocutors do?
Accusing you of “bad faith” did not go nearly far enough, evidently.
Edit: just noticed how you deflected only one of three examples, and then simply ignored the two others to tell me I had given zero. Constant sleight of hand. Crazy.
Top-level contributions provide initiative that keeps a community alive and fresh. Sure, you could write a top-level contribution but post it as a comment rather than a post to prove some point. But when I’m talking about “top-level contributions”, it is pretty clear I am talking about the nature of the contribution itself, its suitability for sparking discussion, etc., and the fact that it is technically possible to make such a contribution in a comment section rather than as a post… is really not a very insightful objection.
surely only good contributions
A contribution that brings effort and real learning to the table, and either comes from an author who habitually make insightful posts, or itself is likely to be insightful (from the perspective of the author or the community), or sums up or otherwise explicates positions that are widely held in the community and merit discussion (even if those positions, and the contribution itself, are simply wrong) do merit a certain courtesy, and it is unwise to alienate authors who are in the habit of making such posts.
This is true even if some troublemaker can convince himself that the post is incorrect and therefore ba, and can convince himself to feel certain enough of it to set aside all epistemic humility, which is a frequent problem not only on LessWrong but in, to put it bluntly, Reddit-adjacent communities more broadly.
Qualifying my statement by limiting it to “good contributions” gives license to exactly the people I am trying to call out here. But I am obviously not therefore saying that somebody who makes top-level posts to spam or to advertise some garbage product or other should be rewarded with social status.
It really takes quite an irritating literalism to read my previous comment and be like “Surely you shouldn’t reward people just for making top-level posts, regardless of quality, or usefulness, or relevance…?”. I don’t think that kind of interpretation is likely to occur naturally out of a sincere attempt to understand the point I am making. It reads to me more like an attempt to come up with a “technically correct” interpretation of my words that justifies dismissing them as absurd.
Sure, you could write a top-level contribution but post it as a comment rather than a post to prove some point. But when I’m talking about “top-level contributions”, it is pretty clear I am talking about the nature of the contribution itself, its suitability for sparking discussion, etc., and the fact that it is technically possible to make such a contribution in a comment section rather than as a post… is really not a very insightful objection.
It’s not just “technically possible”, it’s a thing that happens all the time. I gave examples! Why are you ignoring them?
A contribution that brings effort and real learning to the table
What in the world does this mean? What is “real learning” in this context, and how does it get “brought to the table”?
sums up or otherwise explicates positions that are widely held in the community and merit discussion (even if those positions, and the contribution itself, are simply wrong) do merit a certain courtesy
Are you saying that explanations which are “simply wrong”… are… good? Why?
it is unwise to alienate authors who are in the habit of making such posts
It’s unwise to alienate authors who are in the habit of making posts that explain positions or sum up discussions, but whose explanations/summaries are wrong? I beg to differ! Indeed, such posts can be spectacularly harmful.
This is true even if some troublemaker can convince himself that the post is incorrect and therefore [bad]
Are you suggesting that incorrect posts are actually good? Or denying the possibility of a post being incorrect? Or something else?
(Frankly, the idea that someone who says “this post is incorrect” is thereby a “troublemarker” is an attitude so egregiously corrosive to truth-seeking that I… should be shocked to see it on Less Wrong… I’m not actually shocked, I regret to say; but that is itself a judgment of the state of LW, more than anything.)
But I am obviously not therefore saying that somebody who makes top-level posts to spam or to advertise some garbage product or other should be rewarded with social status.
Obviously. Nobody suggested otherwise.
It really takes quite an irritating literalism to read my previous comment and be like “Surely you shouldn’t reward people just for making top-level posts, regardless of quality, or usefulness, or relevance…?”. I don’t think that kind of interpretation is likely to occur naturally out of a sincere attempt to understand the point I am making.
This is a very weird thing to say, given that in this very comment you’ve reiterated the claim that contributions should be rewarded even if they’re wrong and bad.
It’s not just “technically possible”, it’s a thing that happens all the time. I gave examples! Why are you ignoring them?
Just noticed another bit of sleight of hand here. Even if I had seen those examples at the time of making the post, there was no need to address them since they have zero relevance to the point. Those comments by Gwern are top-level contributions. Or, if they aren’t, then they are not examples of top-level contributions made as comments. It’s one or the other, but Said Achmiz is here trying to have it both ways. Why? To justify being an asshole.
(Frankly, the idea that someone who says “this post is incorrect” is thereby a “troublemarker” is an attitude so egregiously corrosive to truth-seeking that I… should be shocked to see it on Less Wrong… I’m not actually shocked, I regret to say; but that is itself a judgment of the state of LW, more than anything.)
Not even remotely what I said. Your own “truth-seeking” cred does not look very pristine if you are going to engage in straw manning as blatant as that.
Edit: funny how when called on a blatant straw man, he just ignores the callout and moves on.
It’s not just “technically possible”, it’s a thing that happens all the time. I gave examples! Why are you ignoring them?
Nice sleight of hand there, but I wrote that comment before you posted those examples.
Are you suggesting that incorrect posts are actually good? Or denying the possibility of a post being incorrect? Or something else?
I suggested that there are ways in which a post can be good despite its thesis being incorrect. I named specific ways. Why are you ignoring them?
I think it is becoming increasingly clear that your only purpose here is one-upmanship, not good faith discussion. Also, I think you are scum.
Edit: just spotted this
This is a very weird thing to say, given that in this very comment you’ve reiterated the claim that contributions should be rewarded even if they’re wrong and bad.
Never said any such thing. Obviously contributions should not be rewarded if they’re bad. But I guess Said isn’t above even lying outright about the contents of a publicly visible comment. And this:
Nice sleight of hand again, but the examples you are referring to were clearly the ones in this comment, which contained actual examples of precisely the thing you were claiming takes place.
But now you conveniently pretend you were referring to an earlier comment, which did not provide any such examples but was just gesturing broadly to Gwern’s comment history to make a point about its quality.
And even if you had been referring to that comment (again, implausible), it would still be sleight of hand, because that comment wasn’t written in response to me, and you had not given examples to me in any reasonable sense.
You are clearly profoundly dishonest, and you are clearly only in this for the sake of one-upmanship. Again, reddit-tier engagement (although even redditors are rarely as bad as this)
I rather think that I know best what I was referring to, thank you.
an earlier comment, which did not provide any such examples but was just gesturing broadly to Gwern’s comment history
False. That comment linked to a specific comment thread and identified three specific comments.
that comment wasn’t written in response to me
Indeed, in accordance with a point which I have made many times, including directly in response to you, in this very discussion, that comments on a public discussion forum are often written as a one-to-many communication, not a one-to-one missive.
I rather think that I know best what I was referring to, thank you
Indeed, which is why I am confident in claiming that you are lying outright and not merely making a mistake.
False. That comment linked to a specific comment thread and identified three specific comments.
Three comments which constitute a single work and therefore only a single example of your point, and a dubious one at that, but I am getting tired of calling out what appears to be an endless stream of attempts at one-upmanship. On some level, you know exactly what you are doing, or it would not be possible for your behaviour to be so goal-oriented towards it. You know that, too. I suppose your modus operandi is that if you can win this asinine contest of one-upmanship, it justifies you in completely setting aside any critique of what it reveals about your character (that you have the soul of a Redditor)
Many such cases. You fit the stereotype to a T. Do you know that?
What? Why? This doesn’t make any sense.
For one thing, what’s so special about “top-level contributions”? Surely contributions are valuable if… they’re valuable? No matter where they’re written (as posts, as comments, as shortform entries, etc.)?
For another thing, surely only good contributions (top-level or otherwise!) ought to be rewarded with “a certain social status”? Surely you shouldn’t reward people just for making top-level posts, regardless of quality, or usefulness, or relevance…?
Commenting is easy, whereas writing posts is hard but has much larger potential upside (in terms of reach, timelessness, etc). Therefore, the more challenging task deserves a much higher baseline of credit, from which one then adjusts up or down depending on criteria like “quality, or usefulness, or relevance”.
First of all, this is obviously wrong. It makes no difference if you post something as a post or a comment. Posts can be short; comments can be long. Posts can be bad; comments can be good. Posts can be useless; comments can be useful. And so forth. Posts and comments on Less Wrong differ in some technical ways (posts have titles and tags; comments do not), but that’s all. The distinction is otherwise arbitrary.
(Take a look at gwern’s LW posting history, for example, and then tell me that his comments, like for instance this comment which has 328 karma and is over 3,000 words long, are somehow inferior to posts. And that comment is immediately followed by another one which is ~1,500 words long and has 65 karma, and then another comment which is ~1,900 words long and has 112 karma… oh, but you see they’re comments, not posts, so clearly… they don’t matter? They’re less useful? What?)
Second, of course a “more challenging” task does not deserve a higher baseline of credit! There is no value in doing something which is “challenging” or “hard”! There is no value in “effort”! Indeed, the conflation of “high effort” and “high value”, or the valuing of effort directly, is a very serious mistake, and a major problem.
I mean perhaps it is wrong in theory, but in practice the effort that people put into a post vs a comment is typically 10-100x different. We can find many many many posts on this website that took many 10s of hours of work to write, and many comments that take less than a minute; there’s a very strong distinction in the distribution of effort that these two contribution types come from.
As I say in my other comment, the average/median/typical comment or post isn’t the important thing here. The important things are:
The best posts and comments; and…
The specific posts and/or comments under discussion in any given case.
Gwern is a very poor counterexample, both because he’s also/primarily an extraordinarily prolific top-level poster (e.g. all of gwern.net), and because he’s such a noncentral example of a commenter. The typical (or average or median or whatever) comment on the Internet, or on LW, is not Gwern-level, so why bring him into this if not to muddy the waters?
Also, the distinction between comments and posts is not arbitrary. Writing top-level posts is much closer to creating, commenting is much closer to critique. No-one would argue that a movie director produces the same kind of value as a movie critic; the same applies to posts vs. comments. Or as another comparison, writing top-level posts is closer to shipping software features (like your work on gwern.net?), while commenting is closer to submitting bug reports, and usually ones that aren’t about critical issues like crashes. Again, both activities have their place, but they’re not at all interchangeable.
Regarding the LW discussion on effort, I am fully aware of it. In my comment I clearly claimed “is hard but has much larger potential upside”, i.e. I’m claiming writing top-level posts produces more value in expectation, and thus just the attempt to do so already deserves some credit. Whereas if a site treats its new creators too harshly, eventually all it’s left with are its critics.
Finally, a meta comment: Your comment here is a good example of what I meant by commenting being easier than making top-level posts: if it had been a top-level post by someone else, and you had read it, I expect you would have rightly criticized the OP for bringing up Gwern despite him being such a noncentral example. But your comment lacks the very rigor you expect in others.
In fact, if comments and posts are no different, then I dare you to put your words into practice. Make this very topic (or another one like your work on gwern.net) a full post and open it up to the kinds of critique only top-level posts are subject to.
Hmmm… I’m not too sure of this. My own intuition is that it’s more of an “isolated demands for rigour” thing, and that he would applaud such a post due to his own agreement with it, and not look into its quality too closely. I’d love to be wrong, but over years of dealing with people of this sort*, I have found that even my least charitable interpretations of their behaviour tend to be overly optimistic to the point of seeming outright naive in hindsight.
*meaning, to an approximation: stereotypical redditors of the r/atheism kind. This has to be understood rather broadly though since many people of this sort have been turning into neo-tradcaths or orthobros lately, and don’t seem to be any better for the change.
Edit: yep, it’s isolated demands for rigour
Is he, now?
As it happens, we recently built a “blog” feature for gwern.net, which has allowed Gwern to quickly add a lot of content to the site. I say “add”, and not “write”, because a lot of the “blog posts” on that list are, in fact… comments that Gwern wrote on Less Wrong.
Again: good writing is good writing. It could be a comment, or a post. It could start as a comment, and become a post. It could start as a post, and be expanded in comments. It could start on LW, and be re-posted on a personal site, or vice versa. It makes zero sense to reward good and useful writing differently depending on whether it currently happens to be formatted as a “post” or as a “comment”.
What difference does that make? Why do we care about the typical/average/median comment? It’s the best contributions that matter. We’re talking about rewarding things with social status—that’s not going to be the average stuff that gets rewarded!
Where are you getting this? I mean, really, where is this even coming from? What’s it based on? This claim seems to just be totally arbitrary.
Did you read the comments I linked? Do they really strike you as “critique”? What are they “critique” of?
What about this comment? Is it “critique”?
Of course the same doesn’t apply. Movie directors make movies. Movie critics do not make movies. Movies and movie reviews are not remotely the same thing. You don’t go to the theater to watch a movie review with surround sound. Movies and reviews thereof are radically different artifacts, in radically different mediums.
Posts and comments are both text. And the same kind of text, on the same forum, written by the same people, on the same topics.
Like, you understand that any piece of text that you can post as a post, you can also post as a comment, right? (I mean, of course you do, it’s such an obvious point. But then how can you make these claims?) I’ve linked examples of turning comments into posts, and obviously you can do the reverse as well. The “Shortform” feature blurs the line between them as well.
Just… this is so very, very obviously a mostly-arbitrary technical distinction that is imposed by this specific design of forum software. It exists for convenience of organizing discussions. It cannot possibly support anything remotely resembling the dichotomy that you’re trying to portray.
No, writing essays is closer to shipping software features, regardless of whether they are formatted/designated as “posts” or as “comments”.
Maybe that’s the disconnect? Maybe when you say “post”, you mean “essay” (with some thesis, arguments, etc.)? But there are lots of posts that aren’t essays, and lots of essays that are comments and not posts.
By no means! Producing value deserves credit. Trying to produce value does not deserve credit. (I trust that the incentive-based argument for this is obvious?)
I absolutely would not have made such a criticism, because it’s deeply mistaken.
Your wish is (retroactively) my command: my recent post is the first of what will be a series of top-level posts based on comments that I’ve previously written.
Funny how I’ve been saying “top-level contributions” (a category which includes essays, but also guides, overviews, etc.) rather than “posts” this whole time.
In other words, even if we admit MondSemmel’s wording to have been an error, I at least did not make the same error. But did that save me from your scummy behaviour? No, you simply pretended as if I had said “posts” and proceeded to engage in the same “what about Gwern’s comments” tactic, despite it being completely irrelevant when my initial argument never once made a distinction between posts and comments. But you used sleights of hand so much that I kept being distracted from the fact that your entire line of argument was based on putting words in my mouth and interpreting my argument through the lens of a distinction I didn’t make, but which you simply foisted on me.
Not only is it utterly disgusting behaviour, it also shows that it would’ve made no difference if MondSemmel had said “essay” instead of “post”, and that that diagnosis of the “disconnect” is merely another attempt at one-upmanship.
Not true.
However, perhaps those were merely slips, or you replied quickly and didn’t write what you meant to write, etc.; fine, these things happen.
But then your comments in this thread seem quite perplexing. For instance, you wrote:
I expressed puzzlement, asking:
You replied:
To which I replied:
Do you… agree? Disagree?
If you disagree, then we’re back to talking about posts vs. comments.
If you agree, then it’s not clear to me what your initial point even was. Remember, all of this is in the context of a reply to a post which contained the following text:
OP is clearly using the term “top-level” to refer to posts, as distinct from comments. You wrote “top-level contribution” in your initial comment; it’s a strange word choice, if you really were not trying to point to the post vs. comment distinction… and also, why were you not trying to point to the post vs. comment distinction? That’s what the OP was talking about!
But it’s actually even weirder than that—in your initial comment, you also wrote:
… which is indeed talking about “posts”, not just “top-level contributions” which may or may not be posts.
Obviously, only you know what you meant to say. But I really don’t think that I can be accused of putting words in your mouth. I think that what you have written is genuinely, deeply unclear, and apparently contradictory. Perhaps now would be a good time to clarify just what your position is.
I have been saying top-level contributions from the start. The very first comment I made in this discussion made no mention of either posts or comments. You disingenuously reframed my argument and I made the mistake of borrowing your terms instead of insisting on mine.
Yes, you foisted a distinction on me that I did not make, and I slipped up in accepting the reframing of my argument. I should have been more suspicious of your antics from the outset.
Not quite what you expressed.
I haven’t looked into it, because as I’ve already made quite clear, it is flat out not relevant to the point I am making.
But that text was itself written in the context of prior history between Duncan Sabien and another member. You know this, because you are that other member. Zack was critiquing Duncan’s viewpoint, and I was defending it. Both I and Zack were referencing Duncan’s viewpoint when we referred to top-level contributions. I grant that Duncan did also refer explicitly to posts, but that was for convenience and not actually essential to his argument, and his post was quite clearly an essay, not a logical proof, so it really shouldn’t read “autistically” (for lack of a better word)
My position is that there is a type of person conventionally known as a subversive, who portray themselves as crusaders of the truth or justice or some such, but who are clearly nothing of the sort, and who are deeply corrosive to civility, good faith interactions, high-trust communities, etc.
They convince themselves that they are insightful critics, but their analyses show persistent biases that manifest as epistemic inconsistencies. They are often driven by a visceral need to always be the smartest person in the room, or at any rate to show off their brains at others’ expense, or their virtue at others’ expense (bible thumpers are another manifestation of this personality type, as are hippies).
They do sometimes argue in good faith, but even when they are being intensely eristic, they think they are still in good faith, because they take deontological view of good faith, where it can be reduced to following a bunch of rules, like, “if I don’t straw man the other person, don’t poison the well, don’t engage in ad hominems, etc., then I am in good faith”. It does not however take a particularly firm grasp of psychology to realize that there is an affective dimension to good faith, and that while it might theoretically be possible to be in good faith while also being intensely standoffish, it pretty much never happens.
Moreover, when they are in this eristic mood, they almost always make the interaction as unpleasant for the other person as they possibly can without making it too obvious what they are doing. Everything that can be weaponized will be weaponized, the tone will be as full of hidden venom as possible, and almost every sentence is goal-oriented towards making the other person lose face. And the other person, unless exceptionally skilled in dealing with these people, has little choice but either let himself be humiliated, or respond in kind.
Outside of subversive spheres, this pattern of behaviour tends to be met with punishment of some sort, but this is deemed unacceptable in subversive spheres, whose social norms are goal-oriented towards enabling exactly this pattern of behaviour, making it especially difficult to deal with. Incidentally, this same dynamic is what brought down the monarchies of Europe, since they could not simply crack down on subversion without being deemed tyrannical.
Fyodor Dostoevsky has written more about this than probably anybody else ever has. I used to be much more fluent in dealing with this dynamic, but that can only come at the cost of assimilating to it. Instead I’ve been distancing myself from it, which has made me less and less fluent in dealing with subversives. I will probably deactivate my LessWrong account one of these days.
So basically my position is that decent contributors shouldn’t have to deal with subversives.
Sorry, but this is unambiguously false. Indeed, I quoted you, in the comment to which you are responding:
Anyhow:
So the OP was about posts vs. comments, and it was written in the context of something else which was also about posts vs. comments, and your own initial comment mentioned posts…
… and yet it’s weird and somehow blameworthy for me to think that we’re talking about posts vs. comments?
… and what does any of that have to do with the OP?
No, that was literally never the salient point. Duncan Sabien’s post was literally called “Killing Socrates” and was drawing analogies to the sophists vs the Socratics. That should be enough to show you that the post vs. comment distinction is not the salient issue.
Yes, Duncan Sabien did map it to posts versus comments, but that is because that distinction — far from being an arbitrary feature of this kind of forum — is intended precisely to accommodate two different modes of engagement. The correlation between the mode of engagement and the medium (posts vs comments) may not be perfect, or even all that strong, but if so, by the same principle, Duncan’s mapping of the two modes of engagement to posts versus comments also isn’t all that strong. The salient point was always about the modes of engagement, hence why it is even possible to draw an analogy to Socrates. It was always about contributors versus disparagers.
And it is not like this is some subtle argument that is difficult to follow, so yes, your repeated failure to grasp what is being talked about is blameworthy.
You are a subversive and Duncan Sabien was a decent contributor who should never have had to put up with you. That’s what.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/zpCiuR4T343j9WkcK
The argument he’s making, and the argument I am making, is not actually very hard to understand, and, to confirm your suspicion: it does not in fact come from a lack of awareness that the same text can be posted as either a comment or post.
No, this technical distinction was deliberately created, and forum software was deliberately selected as opposed to, say, an IRC chat or a discord server. It is not arbitrary at all. You might as well say that the distinction between opening statements and rebuttals in an Oxford debate is arbitrary since both of them are basically open form in practice and you can say the exact same words in either segment (you won’t be arrested or anything). The point, however, is that there are clear patterns that differ between opening statements and rebuttals. The LessWrong distinction between posts and commnets is not an arbitrary distinction that stems from technological limitations and can be traced no further back, it stems ultimately from a psychological desire. I see no indication that you have even attempted to understand the psychological angle.
True, but trying in ways that will likely lead to value down the line, even if the first few posts are a miss, does deserve credit, or at least a level of courtesy which you seem hellbent on opposing. But even then, it is in fact possible to write deeply critical comments without taking on a smug tone or coming across as being on a high horse. Have you examined the psychological mechanisms underlying your apparent insistence on hostility to people who make posts which you, in your capacity as epistemic arbiter or some such, deem to be unmeritorious? Again, I see not the slightest indication.
No, posts and comments on LessWrong do not in fact differ only in technical ways. Posts are longer than comments on average, for one, and there are many, many other non-technical ways in which they differ. Even the style of writing tends to differ, in no small part because comments tend to be written to address a single person (the poster) whereas posts only occasionally are.
If you’re gonna take this angle of trying to be technically correct while completely missing the point, you ought to at least get it right, and not rely on arguments that are clearly technically false. And your claim that posts and comments differ in technical ways only is flatly false, yet that false claim is what your whole stance rests on.
That’s not serious engagement. That’s Reddit-tier at best. (inb4 an argument about how comments on LessWrong and comments on Reddit differ in some technical ways, but that’s all)
See here.
Name three.
False of the example I gave in the comment you’re responding to. (False in many other cases, too.)
Unsupported claim. Produce the rebuttal, please.
Important or not, it is a non-technical difference, and you just deflected it. I call that a clear-cut case of blatant bad faith on your part.
Comments are usually addressed to the author of that which they are commenting on. This is sometimes true of top-level posts too, but not as often.
And the linguistic register of posts is more formal on average than that of comments.
Along with the difference in average length, that’s three, which is generous of me considering you have yet to write a single comment in good faith in this entire discussion.
It’s zero.
The average (or median, etc.) comment or the average post is irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion that we’re actually having here, which is about whether it makes sense to reward contributors differently based on whether they have written a post or a comment. In such a case, the only thing that could matter is that actual post or comment. And so the only kinds of properties that could be relevant are those which attach to any post or any comment—not aggregate statistical measures of all posts on LW and all comments on LW!
(Before you call “bad faith”, consider checking whether you understand what your interlocutor is saying.)
It is literally a technical difference, and you were the person who started doing the asinine literalism in the first place. I guess it’s cool when you do it, but not when your interlocutors do?
Accusing you of “bad faith” did not go nearly far enough, evidently.
Edit: just noticed how you deflected only one of three examples, and then simply ignored the two others to tell me I had given zero. Constant sleight of hand. Crazy.
Top-level contributions provide initiative that keeps a community alive and fresh. Sure, you could write a top-level contribution but post it as a comment rather than a post to prove some point. But when I’m talking about “top-level contributions”, it is pretty clear I am talking about the nature of the contribution itself, its suitability for sparking discussion, etc., and the fact that it is technically possible to make such a contribution in a comment section rather than as a post… is really not a very insightful objection.
A contribution that brings effort and real learning to the table, and either comes from an author who habitually make insightful posts, or itself is likely to be insightful (from the perspective of the author or the community), or sums up or otherwise explicates positions that are widely held in the community and merit discussion (even if those positions, and the contribution itself, are simply wrong) do merit a certain courtesy, and it is unwise to alienate authors who are in the habit of making such posts.
This is true even if some troublemaker can convince himself that the post is incorrect and therefore ba, and can convince himself to feel certain enough of it to set aside all epistemic humility, which is a frequent problem not only on LessWrong but in, to put it bluntly, Reddit-adjacent communities more broadly.
Qualifying my statement by limiting it to “good contributions” gives license to exactly the people I am trying to call out here. But I am obviously not therefore saying that somebody who makes top-level posts to spam or to advertise some garbage product or other should be rewarded with social status.
It really takes quite an irritating literalism to read my previous comment and be like “Surely you shouldn’t reward people just for making top-level posts, regardless of quality, or usefulness, or relevance…?”. I don’t think that kind of interpretation is likely to occur naturally out of a sincere attempt to understand the point I am making. It reads to me more like an attempt to come up with a “technically correct” interpretation of my words that justifies dismissing them as absurd.
It’s not just “technically possible”, it’s a thing that happens all the time. I gave examples! Why are you ignoring them?
What in the world does this mean? What is “real learning” in this context, and how does it get “brought to the table”?
Are you saying that explanations which are “simply wrong”… are… good? Why?
It’s unwise to alienate authors who are in the habit of making posts that explain positions or sum up discussions, but whose explanations/summaries are wrong? I beg to differ! Indeed, such posts can be spectacularly harmful.
Are you suggesting that incorrect posts are actually good? Or denying the possibility of a post being incorrect? Or something else?
(Frankly, the idea that someone who says “this post is incorrect” is thereby a “troublemarker” is an attitude so egregiously corrosive to truth-seeking that I… should be shocked to see it on Less Wrong… I’m not actually shocked, I regret to say; but that is itself a judgment of the state of LW, more than anything.)
Obviously. Nobody suggested otherwise.
This is a very weird thing to say, given that in this very comment you’ve reiterated the claim that contributions should be rewarded even if they’re wrong and bad.
Just noticed another bit of sleight of hand here. Even if I had seen those examples at the time of making the post, there was no need to address them since they have zero relevance to the point. Those comments by Gwern are top-level contributions. Or, if they aren’t, then they are not examples of top-level contributions made as comments. It’s one or the other, but Said Achmiz is here trying to have it both ways. Why? To justify being an asshole.
Not even remotely what I said. Your own “truth-seeking” cred does not look very pristine if you are going to engage in straw manning as blatant as that.
Edit: funny how when called on a blatant straw man, he just ignores the callout and moves on.
Nice sleight of hand there, but I wrote that comment before you posted those examples.
I suggested that there are ways in which a post can be good despite its thesis being incorrect. I named specific ways. Why are you ignoring them?
I think it is becoming increasingly clear that your only purpose here is one-upmanship, not good faith discussion. Also, I think you are scum.
Edit: just spotted this
Never said any such thing. Obviously contributions should not be rewarded if they’re bad. But I guess Said isn’t above even lying outright about the contents of a publicly visible comment. And this:
Truly incredible.
The examples: posted at 10:43 AM EST.
Your comment: posted at 4:55 PM EST.
Nice sleight of hand again, but the examples you are referring to were clearly the ones in this comment, which contained actual examples of precisely the thing you were claiming takes place.
But now you conveniently pretend you were referring to an earlier comment, which did not provide any such examples but was just gesturing broadly to Gwern’s comment history to make a point about its quality.
And even if you had been referring to that comment (again, implausible), it would still be sleight of hand, because that comment wasn’t written in response to me, and you had not given examples to me in any reasonable sense.
You are clearly profoundly dishonest, and you are clearly only in this for the sake of one-upmanship. Again, reddit-tier engagement (although even redditors are rarely as bad as this)
I rather think that I know best what I was referring to, thank you.
False. That comment linked to a specific comment thread and identified three specific comments.
Indeed, in accordance with a point which I have made many times, including directly in response to you, in this very discussion, that comments on a public discussion forum are often written as a one-to-many communication, not a one-to-one missive.
Indeed, which is why I am confident in claiming that you are lying outright and not merely making a mistake.
Three comments which constitute a single work and therefore only a single example of your point, and a dubious one at that, but I am getting tired of calling out what appears to be an endless stream of attempts at one-upmanship. On some level, you know exactly what you are doing, or it would not be possible for your behaviour to be so goal-oriented towards it. You know that, too. I suppose your modus operandi is that if you can win this asinine contest of one-upmanship, it justifies you in completely setting aside any critique of what it reveals about your character (that you have the soul of a Redditor)
Many such cases. You fit the stereotype to a T. Do you know that?