I can think of a few natural clusters that might not satisfy everyone’s every preference, but I think come close to at least letting you know which kind of space you are in. I’d be willing to compromise on my own norms if there was a nearby enough cluster that gave me 80% or better of what I want. These are based loosely on what I perceive to be the clusters people have asked for or directly expressed in commenting guidelines here and elsewhere.
Suggested norm clusters:
Debate/Argue/Combat—This is the cluster for typical ways of arguing things out, where one person says something, another who disagrees tries to refute it, and there’s a back and forth of disagreeing. I think of this as the LW 1.0 cluster: very smart people calling you out on things so we can collectively do better by highlighting mistakes and correcting them. This cluster favors direct communication with minimal concern for managing the feelings of others.
Dialectic/Inquire/Cooperate—This is the cluster for digging into things by applying maximum charity, trying to understand what someone else is saying, and helping to improve their arguments rather than tearing them down when you notice a mistake. This looks different from the first cluster in that, for example, when you think someone is wrong you don’t tell them they’re wrong bluntly, you would ask them “hey, this seems to contradict this other thing and I can’t figure out how they work together; what do you think?”. You could also skewedly think of this as the NVC cluster, where each person is making space to prevent anyone getting defensive or feeling attacked.
Discuss/Share/Chatter—This cluster doesn’t really existing on LW now because it’s not primarily optimized for truth seeking, but things like this exist all over the internet. This is the “let’s talk like nice, civilized people at a dinner party” cluster. No one says anything mean, everyone tries to help each other save face, and if you have something to say you bring it in the spirit of sharing only with no intention that you change anyone’s beliefs (other than maybe that they now believe that you believe something).
Maybe there could be an “asshole” cluster opposite the third “nice” cluster, but I’m not sure that serves any serious purpose here on LW; people already have plenty of places to talk that way to each other and it seems anti-conducive to the general LW project, whereas the “nice” cluster could serve a purpose on some kinds of posts or for some kinds of authors that would not bring down the general quality of LW (it would just be neutral in terms of truth seeking, I think).
Just to add on to this, I ignore some of the other dimensions we could cluster around, like discussions that try to accomplish something in particular or not and feedback on writing style or not. In the case of accomplishing some project I think that’s going to always be specific enough to the post to not be a regular norm and something that will have to be spelled out in the post because there’s simply too many posts here that aren’t about a project.
I generally find most people commenting on writing advice rude and in poor taste except in cases where the writing is so bad and the user is so new that not giving that advice would be an even worse option since they’d likely bounce never knowing why LW seemed to hate them OR when the author specifically requests it. Regardless of my opinions on it, though, it seems orthogonal to the other dimensions except in so far as clarity of writing interacts with understanding, but then you can address the confusion over the words directly rather than focusing on just the style and not the content.
Yeah. One of my hopes with this thread is that basically, there would turn out to be two major types of spaces people wanted, the Debate cluster and the Collaborate cluster (I don’t know what names are best for either of them).
There are some fine-tune issues where… well, for example, while I don’t expect Eliezer to show up in the comments anytime soon, my model of Eliezer prefers “debate/combat norms, but with people he respects”. But that sort of thing might be easily solvable with “who is allowed to comment” being a different axis than “what are the norms and rules if you are commenting?”
I think including something like the 3rd “nice” cluster is important because it gives a way for people to post things on LW that maybe they don’t want to receive critical feedback on, regardless of how it is delivered. These things are rare now, but things I can think of where the “nice” norm might be appropriate:
the short-form feeds
art
posts that people would otherwise be afraid to make because they personally lack the self-esteem to handle people being critical of the content but nonetheless would like to share (think stuff people hide in friends-only Facebook posts or secret Tumblers)
I think there’s also a way the Debate and Collaborate clusters interact that is worth pointing out.
Within a Collaborate space, Debate is unwelcome. If you come and start trying to Debate you’re breaking the norms in a destructive way that wrecks what Collaborate is about.
Within a Debate space, Collaborate is maybe perceived as “too nice” or “pulling punches” but doesn’t wreck Debate. If you Collaborate within a Debate space it’s like you’re imposing extra rules on yourself that mean you give up some ways you could have expressed yourself (within the debate-as-combat metaphor, it’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight, or tying your hands behind your back), and people may think you’re less serious about your point than you are because you didn’t present it as forcefully as you would have under Debate culture, but you could still get along.
Both Debate and Collaborate are problems for Nice.
If we go with my 4 clusters and include Asshole it’s like:
Nice <~ Collaborate <~ Debate <~ Asshole
You can always use a lower one in a higher one, but you can’t use a higher one in a lower one.
People playing nice and being polite don’t want their positions analyze, even in a collaborative way; they will view that as adversarial because in that way of interacting any critical consideration is viewed as adversarial. The only correct responses within nice are those that support and accept and don’t question for any purpose other than learning more and to not point out contradictions (to create cognitive dissonance in an interlocutor in nice culture would be quite rude!).
(the way this is actually handled in most in-person spaces I know of is that there is a natural progression where strangers are expected to show each other politeness, and people that know each other well are more likely to spar with each other. I think this is in fact good, and part of the problem of online spaces is that there’s a lot of ambiguity of who knows each other well enough to spar and have it be net-positive rather than just causing everyone to dig in their heels and get frustrated)
This is interesting, most especially because it’s mutable, situational, and different for different participants. There’s not a policy about the topic or space, there’s a meta-policy that you lurk long enough to understand the fine-grained expectations about which sub-topics are accepted to be discussed by which styles.
This matches my experiences with good in-person discussions (incuding business, technical, and personal friendship groups): some points are ok (and expected) to directly contradict if you disagree, some others should be questioned and expanded, but not rejected, and still others are pretty much out of bounds for the current group. And which sub-point is in which group depends BOTH on who you are and what you think.
I’m not certain that this translates well to public online discussions. I don’t know if we should TRY, even. But it should make us aware that this is harder than just selecting rules we think we want—it’s figuring out what behaviors to encourage and discourage, in what situations. It’s way more detailed than “pick an island or a subreddit that has rules you like”.
So, I would still like to know “what cluster of norms do you actually prefer?” An important part of this question was “what is there actual demand for, and/or supply of?”
Personally I only really want to engage with the collaborative norm where people act in good faith, try to discover the source of their disagreement, build context, and then transcend it via synthesizing new understanding.
I view the debate/adversarial norm cluster as strictly worse at truth seeking but necessary to support folks who aren’t up to handling the greater complexity of the collaborate norm (since it requires much more mind-modeling capability, so much so that I would think imposing it would constitute ableism), so I want an adversarial norm to exist, too.
I also want the “nice” norm cluster because it gives an easy onramp for folks who aren’t ready for critical discourse norms, but I would also be pretty disappointed if it became too prevalent or started to be used on posts with serious content I wanted to engage with.
I wonder if we should document voting norms in addition to commenting norms. Making a strong downvote early in the life of a comment (so your vote has large impact), unless you think the comment should be removed (which I presume isn’t the case here) should require some explanation, IMO.
You could post a new question “What clusters of norms/rules do you want?” and ask people to not worry about the number, just have that be a second phase where people choose/vote/explain their preferences among the suggestions so far.
Ah. What I meant to be clear (but perhaps failed to communicate, is that I wanted each author to list the norms that they personally want, rather than the norms they think other people want.
The “how many norms does everyone want” is a fact that should arise emergently from the process of everyone sharing their own individual preferences.
I can think of a few natural clusters that might not satisfy everyone’s every preference, but I think come close to at least letting you know which kind of space you are in. I’d be willing to compromise on my own norms if there was a nearby enough cluster that gave me 80% or better of what I want. These are based loosely on what I perceive to be the clusters people have asked for or directly expressed in commenting guidelines here and elsewhere.
Suggested norm clusters:
Debate/Argue/Combat—This is the cluster for typical ways of arguing things out, where one person says something, another who disagrees tries to refute it, and there’s a back and forth of disagreeing. I think of this as the LW 1.0 cluster: very smart people calling you out on things so we can collectively do better by highlighting mistakes and correcting them. This cluster favors direct communication with minimal concern for managing the feelings of others.
Dialectic/Inquire/Cooperate—This is the cluster for digging into things by applying maximum charity, trying to understand what someone else is saying, and helping to improve their arguments rather than tearing them down when you notice a mistake. This looks different from the first cluster in that, for example, when you think someone is wrong you don’t tell them they’re wrong bluntly, you would ask them “hey, this seems to contradict this other thing and I can’t figure out how they work together; what do you think?”. You could also skewedly think of this as the NVC cluster, where each person is making space to prevent anyone getting defensive or feeling attacked.
Discuss/Share/Chatter—This cluster doesn’t really existing on LW now because it’s not primarily optimized for truth seeking, but things like this exist all over the internet. This is the “let’s talk like nice, civilized people at a dinner party” cluster. No one says anything mean, everyone tries to help each other save face, and if you have something to say you bring it in the spirit of sharing only with no intention that you change anyone’s beliefs (other than maybe that they now believe that you believe something).
Maybe there could be an “asshole” cluster opposite the third “nice” cluster, but I’m not sure that serves any serious purpose here on LW; people already have plenty of places to talk that way to each other and it seems anti-conducive to the general LW project, whereas the “nice” cluster could serve a purpose on some kinds of posts or for some kinds of authors that would not bring down the general quality of LW (it would just be neutral in terms of truth seeking, I think).
Just to add on to this, I ignore some of the other dimensions we could cluster around, like discussions that try to accomplish something in particular or not and feedback on writing style or not. In the case of accomplishing some project I think that’s going to always be specific enough to the post to not be a regular norm and something that will have to be spelled out in the post because there’s simply too many posts here that aren’t about a project.
I generally find most people commenting on writing advice rude and in poor taste except in cases where the writing is so bad and the user is so new that not giving that advice would be an even worse option since they’d likely bounce never knowing why LW seemed to hate them OR when the author specifically requests it. Regardless of my opinions on it, though, it seems orthogonal to the other dimensions except in so far as clarity of writing interacts with understanding, but then you can address the confusion over the words directly rather than focusing on just the style and not the content.
Yeah. One of my hopes with this thread is that basically, there would turn out to be two major types of spaces people wanted, the Debate cluster and the Collaborate cluster (I don’t know what names are best for either of them).
There are some fine-tune issues where… well, for example, while I don’t expect Eliezer to show up in the comments anytime soon, my model of Eliezer prefers “debate/combat norms, but with people he respects”. But that sort of thing might be easily solvable with “who is allowed to comment” being a different axis than “what are the norms and rules if you are commenting?”
I think including something like the 3rd “nice” cluster is important because it gives a way for people to post things on LW that maybe they don’t want to receive critical feedback on, regardless of how it is delivered. These things are rare now, but things I can think of where the “nice” norm might be appropriate:
the short-form feeds
art
posts that people would otherwise be afraid to make because they personally lack the self-esteem to handle people being critical of the content but nonetheless would like to share (think stuff people hide in friends-only Facebook posts or secret Tumblers)
I think there’s also a way the Debate and Collaborate clusters interact that is worth pointing out.
Within a Collaborate space, Debate is unwelcome. If you come and start trying to Debate you’re breaking the norms in a destructive way that wrecks what Collaborate is about.
Within a Debate space, Collaborate is maybe perceived as “too nice” or “pulling punches” but doesn’t wreck Debate. If you Collaborate within a Debate space it’s like you’re imposing extra rules on yourself that mean you give up some ways you could have expressed yourself (within the debate-as-combat metaphor, it’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight, or tying your hands behind your back), and people may think you’re less serious about your point than you are because you didn’t present it as forcefully as you would have under Debate culture, but you could still get along.
Both Debate and Collaborate are problems for Nice.
If we go with my 4 clusters and include Asshole it’s like:
Nice <~ Collaborate <~ Debate <~ Asshole
You can always use a lower one in a higher one, but you can’t use a higher one in a lower one.
See Abram Demski’s Combat vs Nurture and Meta-Contrarianism for (what I think of) as a more fleshed out version of this thought.
How does Collaborate break Nice?
(The ordering is a great idea btw.!)
People playing nice and being polite don’t want their positions analyze, even in a collaborative way; they will view that as adversarial because in that way of interacting any critical consideration is viewed as adversarial. The only correct responses within nice are those that support and accept and don’t question for any purpose other than learning more and to not point out contradictions (to create cognitive dissonance in an interlocutor in nice culture would be quite rude!).
(the way this is actually handled in most in-person spaces I know of is that there is a natural progression where strangers are expected to show each other politeness, and people that know each other well are more likely to spar with each other. I think this is in fact good, and part of the problem of online spaces is that there’s a lot of ambiguity of who knows each other well enough to spar and have it be net-positive rather than just causing everyone to dig in their heels and get frustrated)
This is interesting, most especially because it’s mutable, situational, and different for different participants. There’s not a policy about the topic or space, there’s a meta-policy that you lurk long enough to understand the fine-grained expectations about which sub-topics are accepted to be discussed by which styles.
This matches my experiences with good in-person discussions (incuding business, technical, and personal friendship groups): some points are ok (and expected) to directly contradict if you disagree, some others should be questioned and expanded, but not rejected, and still others are pretty much out of bounds for the current group. And which sub-point is in which group depends BOTH on who you are and what you think.
I’m not certain that this translates well to public online discussions. I don’t know if we should TRY, even. But it should make us aware that this is harder than just selecting rules we think we want—it’s figuring out what behaviors to encourage and discourage, in what situations. It’s way more detailed than “pick an island or a subreddit that has rules you like”.
So, I would still like to know “what cluster of norms do you actually prefer?” An important part of this question was “what is there actual demand for, and/or supply of?”
I would post much more on lesswrong if there was a ‘no nitpicking’ norm available.
For convenience of skimming, could you post this as a top-level answer?
Personally I only really want to engage with the collaborative norm where people act in good faith, try to discover the source of their disagreement, build context, and then transcend it via synthesizing new understanding.
I view the debate/adversarial norm cluster as strictly worse at truth seeking but necessary to support folks who aren’t up to handling the greater complexity of the collaborate norm (since it requires much more mind-modeling capability, so much so that I would think imposing it would constitute ableism), so I want an adversarial norm to exist, too.
I also want the “nice” norm cluster because it gives an easy onramp for folks who aren’t ready for critical discourse norms, but I would also be pretty disappointed if it became too prevalent or started to be used on posts with serious content I wanted to engage with.
I don’t want the “asshole” norm cluster on LW.
Wow, that’s some harsh downvoting for a comment giving a directly solicited opinion.
Yeah I was like “wtf bro?”.
For context of people coming along later, I posted the comment and right away got a single −9 vote, which I found surprising enough to comment on!
I wonder if we should document voting norms in addition to commenting norms. Making a strong downvote early in the life of a comment (so your vote has large impact), unless you think the comment should be removed (which I presume isn’t the case here) should require some explanation, IMO.
LW team has discussed a few options for changing the rules for strong votes, with possibilities including:
All strong votes require a (short) explanation
Strong vote power decays if you use it all the time
You could post a new question “What clusters of norms/rules do you want?” and ask people to not worry about the number, just have that be a second phase where people choose/vote/explain their preferences among the suggestions so far.
Ah. What I meant to be clear (but perhaps failed to communicate, is that I wanted each author to list the norms that they personally want, rather than the norms they think other people want.
The “how many norms does everyone want” is a fact that should arise emergently from the process of everyone sharing their own individual preferences.