I think it’s part of the culture, and not something that’s easily changed. You guys can be ruthless.
I think that the problem with the Less Wrong communal lack of ruth is that ruth serves a purpose—it protects a community from hurling abuse that is unwarranted.
One idea: have a setting in the preferences where you can declare yourself to be operating under Crocker’s Rules (or some modified version if we decide it needs any updating for this context). If you enable this, a small badge would appear on your posts (maybe next to your name, or somewhere up there) to indicate this to potential repliers. It would be off by default, so the default would be politeness (exception: people who are really dumb/unintentionally disruptive, won’t take a hint, and need to be corrected more ruthlessly or asked to leave), but new people would be made aware of it and encouraged to develop the mental discipline to take part in such communications. (How? I’m not quite sure yet.)
I don’t think the problem is something that can be patched with Crocker’s Rules—I think the problem is lazy reading. That many dedicated contributors are lazy was shown off by the responses to MBlume’s “The Fundamental Question”: a substantial fraction of top-level responses interpreted the post as community-building instead of philosophy, a misinterpretation which only makes sense if they completely missed the entire first paragraph. Given that regular comments are read with even less care as a rule, anyone who doesn’t make what they say sound obviously true to this community will get slammed, correct or not.
I think that the problem with the Less Wrong communal lack of ruth is that ruth serves a purpose—it protects a community from hurling abuse that is unwarranted.
Heh, “ruth” as a unit. I like it.
One idea: have a setting in the preferences where you can declare yourself to be operating under Crocker’s Rules (or some modified version if we decide it needs any updating for this context). If you enable this, a small badge would appear on your posts (maybe next to your name, or somewhere up there) to indicate this to potential repliers. It would be off by default, so the default would be politeness (exception: people who are really dumb/unintentionally disruptive, won’t take a hint, and need to be corrected more ruthlessly or asked to leave), but new people would be made aware of it and encouraged to develop the mental discipline to take part in such communications. (How? I’m not quite sure yet.)
I don’t think the problem is something that can be patched with Crocker’s Rules—I think the problem is lazy reading. That many dedicated contributors are lazy was shown off by the responses to MBlume’s “The Fundamental Question”: a substantial fraction of top-level responses interpreted the post as community-building instead of philosophy, a misinterpretation which only makes sense if they completely missed the entire first paragraph. Given that regular comments are read with even less care as a rule, anyone who doesn’t make what they say sound obviously true to this community will get slammed, correct or not.