Frontpage mod note: This felt slightly edge-casey re: “is it Frontpage?”. I think it’s pretty timeless and will still be relevant in a few years and am frontpaging it, but wanted to leave some notes about it for people modeling the frontpage rules.
The post seems to be doing two things:
Be a detailed recounting / postmortem of a process of internal governmance (i.e. information)
Being kind of social move of “hey, FYI I think Google Deepmind fucked up here and should be socially punished”.
The latter is a totally fine kind of post to write but makes it somewhat less the sort of thing I want people’s “training data for what LW is primarily about” to be dominantly seeded by, which is part of what the frontpage/personal distinction is for.
There isn’t a hard rule here, but I think “is a significant point of the post to be a social move?” is something that counts at least a bit against frontpageness, on-the-margin (it’s not the primary determinant, which is still “timelessness”).
Other moderators might have somewhat different takes here, I didn’t run this by everyone.
(We were behind on moderating new posts and the “frontpage or no?” call here is mostly about whether it’ll show up in the recommendations feel in the future. Although it does have enough karma that’ll still have some impact on views for the next few days)
It would have been an outrage IMO to not frontpage this, so I’m glad it’s frontpaged. It’s super timeless and valuable, and the opinions were tactfully conveyed and necessary for the post.
To not express strong opinions about Google Alex would have to self-censor, which is counter to the entire spirit of the post and would make it substantially harder to follow his strategic and moral thinking.
edit: on reflection “outrage” is too strong a word but I still endorse the rest
Frontpage mod note: This felt slightly edge-casey re: “is it Frontpage?”. I think it’s pretty timeless and will still be relevant in a few years and am frontpaging it, but wanted to leave some notes about it for people modeling the frontpage rules.
The post seems to be doing two things:
Be a detailed recounting / postmortem of a process of internal governmance (i.e. information)
Being kind of social move of “hey, FYI I think Google Deepmind fucked up here and should be socially punished”.
The latter is a totally fine kind of post to write but makes it somewhat less the sort of thing I want people’s “training data for what LW is primarily about” to be dominantly seeded by, which is part of what the frontpage/personal distinction is for.
There isn’t a hard rule here, but I think “is a significant point of the post to be a social move?” is something that counts at least a bit against frontpageness, on-the-margin (it’s not the primary determinant, which is still “timelessness”).
Other moderators might have somewhat different takes here, I didn’t run this by everyone.
(We were behind on moderating new posts and the “frontpage or no?” call here is mostly about whether it’ll show up in the recommendations feel in the future. Although it does have enough karma that’ll still have some impact on views for the next few days)
It would have been an outrage IMO to not frontpage this, so I’m glad it’s frontpaged. It’s super timeless and valuable, and the opinions were tactfully conveyed and necessary for the post.
To not express strong opinions about Google Alex would have to self-censor, which is counter to the entire spirit of the post and would make it substantially harder to follow his strategic and moral thinking.
edit: on reflection “outrage” is too strong a word but I still endorse the rest
I didn’t want this to turn into a sprawling meta-discussion isn’t really about this post, so I replied over on the open thread: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MHi9yrQgXupYJni6n/open-thread-summer-2026?commentId=6oYk7rt4tf9GyYoXv