This reads to me like an indirect public airing of grievances related to some drama we have insufficient context for, at least without investigating other threads. Without this context, the post is ungrounded, difficult to make sense of, and reads to me as personally-motivated meta-level slop.
I don’t think this deserves front page status as I didn’t find anything useful, relevant, or timeless in it, much less all three.
(Frontpage is not a quality filter, it’s a topic filter. The topic is clearly timeless, and while I agree some interpretations could be too inside-baseball-y, the post is clearly at least aspiring to broader relevance.
In general, bar a fairly small set of exceptions, I think the LW habit of taking local grievances and trying to abstract the disagreement into general principles using non-politicized examples is a good one, and I would like people to keep doing it)
I’m sorry you didn’t like the post. (Please downvote if you haven’t already.) Maybe the following brief summary will help clarify what I was trying to get at, since the post as written didn’t work for you or Cole?
There’s a famous Tumblr quote complaining about situations where people strategically conflate two meanings of “respect”: saying, if you don’t “respect” me (meaning, defer to me when I claim to know something), then I won’t “respect” you (meaning, I can mistreat you). This results in conflict.
I’m saying there can also be other situations where rather than one person using two definitions of “respect” inconsistently, two people are using different definitions, with each of them being consistent in their own usage. One person thinks that “respect” means that people should defer to each other when the other person claims to know something, and the other doesn’t think that “respect” entails that, and that results in conflict.
(End summary.)
Maybe you don’t think that’s interesting, but a lot of people shared that Tumblr quote, so presumably someone is interested in this kind of social theorizing?
In retrospect, this post was not my best work. (In particular, I’m embarrassed that I misunderstood the intent of the quote that I used in the title.) I guess that’s the way it goes sometimes. (I try to write good posts and not publish bad posts, but sometimes I don’t notice that a post is bad before seeing how it lands in the comment section.)
(Most of the mod team agreed about your earlier post after it was promoted to attention, so it’s been Frontpaged. We have a norm against “inside baseball” on the frontpage: things that are focused too much on particular communities associated with LW. I think the mod who put it on Personal felt that it was verging on inside baseball. The majority dissented)
I have no power to decide what’s on the frontpage, but I’m glad these posts aren’t there because they make general points in a way that read to me as continuations of meta-discussions about the site and use examples from those discussions not so much as examples (because you could have easily made up more relatable examples, and the examples you chose are not salient to more than maybe a hundred people) but what seems to me to be a a way to make points against what’s happening in those conversations. This feature makes these posts feel like thinly-veiled drama posting to me.
To be fair, I don’t know your actual motivations, so this is just based on the vibe I’m getting reading them, but I think the vibe I (and others?) pick up reading a post is pretty important for what should be on the frontpage.
Honestly, a lot of my work on this website consists of trying to write “the generalized version” of something that’s bothering me that would not otherwise be of philosophical interest. I just think this has a pretty good track record of being philosophically productive! For example, you yourself have linked to my philosophy of language work, even though you probably don’t care about the reason I originally got so obsessed with the philosophy of language in the first place. To me, that’s an encouraging sign that I got the philosophy right (rather than the philosophy being thinly-veiled politics).
Yes, I think this instinct has mostly served you well. In this instance, though, it appears to me to cross some hard-to-define line, maybe because it’s about drama I’m tangentially involved in?
I roughly think that the previous post was more clearly on the “frontpage side” than this one, and this one is edge-casey. (I’m only one of the mods and we don’t all agree all the time, but for people modeling where the line is in mod-judgment-aggregate, uh, that’s my current take)
(I think this post deserves to be Frontpaged, because it’s trying to explain useful, relevant timeless insights about psychology. I’m saying this because I was mildly surprised that one of my posts from earlier this week was relegated to Personal.)
This reads to me like an indirect public airing of grievances related to some drama we have insufficient context for, at least without investigating other threads. Without this context, the post is ungrounded, difficult to make sense of, and reads to me as personally-motivated meta-level slop.
I don’t think this deserves front page status as I didn’t find anything useful, relevant, or timeless in it, much less all three.
(Frontpage is not a quality filter, it’s a topic filter. The topic is clearly timeless, and while I agree some interpretations could be too inside-baseball-y, the post is clearly at least aspiring to broader relevance.
In general, bar a fairly small set of exceptions, I think the LW habit of taking local grievances and trying to abstract the disagreement into general principles using non-politicized examples is a good one, and I would like people to keep doing it)
I’m sorry you didn’t like the post. (Please downvote if you haven’t already.) Maybe the following brief summary will help clarify what I was trying to get at, since the post as written didn’t work for you or Cole?
There’s a famous Tumblr quote complaining about situations where people strategically conflate two meanings of “respect”: saying, if you don’t “respect” me (meaning, defer to me when I claim to know something), then I won’t “respect” you (meaning, I can mistreat you). This results in conflict.
I’m saying there can also be other situations where rather than one person using two definitions of “respect” inconsistently, two people are using different definitions, with each of them being consistent in their own usage. One person thinks that “respect” means that people should defer to each other when the other person claims to know something, and the other doesn’t think that “respect” entails that, and that results in conflict.
(End summary.)
Maybe you don’t think that’s interesting, but a lot of people shared that Tumblr quote, so presumably someone is interested in this kind of social theorizing?
In retrospect, this post was not my best work. (In particular, I’m embarrassed that I misunderstood the intent of the quote that I used in the title.) I guess that’s the way it goes sometimes. (I try to write good posts and not publish bad posts, but sometimes I don’t notice that a post is bad before seeing how it lands in the comment section.)
Yeah the first paragraph or so was interesting, the lesswrong related examples were just too high context.
I understood your the point you just summarized, just not how it fits into the broader picture that precipitated this post.
Yeah I don’t understand what’s happening here at all.
(Most of the mod team agreed about your earlier post after it was promoted to attention, so it’s been Frontpaged. We have a norm against “inside baseball” on the frontpage: things that are focused too much on particular communities associated with LW. I think the mod who put it on Personal felt that it was verging on inside baseball. The majority dissented)
(And the LW team doesn’t exempt itself from this rule, e.g. this podcast with Habryka was considered to be a Personal Blog.)
I have no power to decide what’s on the frontpage, but I’m glad these posts aren’t there because they make general points in a way that read to me as continuations of meta-discussions about the site and use examples from those discussions not so much as examples (because you could have easily made up more relatable examples, and the examples you chose are not salient to more than maybe a hundred people) but what seems to me to be a a way to make points against what’s happening in those conversations. This feature makes these posts feel like thinly-veiled drama posting to me.
To be fair, I don’t know your actual motivations, so this is just based on the vibe I’m getting reading them, but I think the vibe I (and others?) pick up reading a post is pretty important for what should be on the frontpage.
Honestly, a lot of my work on this website consists of trying to write “the generalized version” of something that’s bothering me that would not otherwise be of philosophical interest. I just think this has a pretty good track record of being philosophically productive! For example, you yourself have linked to my philosophy of language work, even though you probably don’t care about the reason I originally got so obsessed with the philosophy of language in the first place. To me, that’s an encouraging sign that I got the philosophy right (rather than the philosophy being thinly-veiled politics).
Yes, I think this instinct has mostly served you well. In this instance, though, it appears to me to cross some hard-to-define line, maybe because it’s about drama I’m tangentially involved in?
I roughly think that the previous post was more clearly on the “frontpage side” than this one, and this one is edge-casey. (I’m only one of the mods and we don’t all agree all the time, but for people modeling where the line is in mod-judgment-aggregate, uh, that’s my current take)