I do not like seeing material on this on LessWrong. This might be me being a grumpy old-timer, but I feel like we fought a rather extended battle a long time ago to get PUA-adjacent content out of here, we (mostly) succeeded, but in the last few years it’s been kinda seeping back into the community and I would really prefer that not happen. We even have people linking to PUA blogs in the comments here!
This is LessWrong. If you want something gone, argue that it’s false, or link to previous arguments that it’s false, don’t just come kvetching about how you don’t personally like it.
I am more than happy to update in response to evidence, that’s what I want. I write about dating because I want people to tell me what I’m missing. Complaining that this is all vaguely bad somehow is not that.
Wrong argument. If people started posting videos of cats on LessWrong, they would not be “false”, but I’d downvote them just the same. Being false is not the only reason to keep them off LessWrong.
(I did find this post interesting and upvoted it.)
There are adjacent things besides just truth which apply in that case—e.q. arguments that something will not lead to any intellectual progress in any domain, or (in the case of advice posts) arguments that the advice is harmful.
I feel like Davis is making a fine argument (in structure) here. In as much as there was an extended battle to get PUA-adjacent content off of LW, and some kind of consensus formed among long-time contributors to the site that this kind of content is bad to post on LW, then that would be a reasonable thing to bring up. Ideally it would include links to past arguments and discussions about the merits, but it’s at least a pointer.
I am genuinely curious what arguments people have made in the past. I have a whole lot of my own arguments about what kind of content seems good or bad here, and my current guess is stuff like this is fine (and to some degree good because it prevents us becoming a soulless professional space, though there are also attractors for LW to become a pathological contrarian/edgy place, so it’s definitely possible to go wrong here).
It is valid to say something is not topical for lesswrong, or that the focus of lesswrong is shifting in a negative way, so I think the standard that you (John) request is not good. Personally, I would like to see more posts on your research! But I’m guessing that the dating stuff doesnt really take away from that (and for the most part, I just don’t read it).
On LessWrong, if you want to say that something is negative, you should provide a rational argument for why you think something is negative, if you want another person to listen. I do want a LessWrong that’s primarily about rational argumentation, where we might agree what’s rational but where we strive to convince each other with rational arguments.
I disagree, in this very particular case. I was trying to say something similar a day ago and really struggled to come up with a better word.
The point is that the argument is supposed to be about the object-level thing, about whether the object-level claim is true or the object-level advice will have the effects it is claimed to have. The argument is not supposed to be things like “saying this will offend some people” or “you’re a bad person for saying this”. I struggle to come up with a better word or short phrase for that than “rational”; the standard connotations seem basically correct.
I don’t mind the original comment, and think it should exist.
My model is that it’s a kinda of “ultra-strong downvote”, that also appears to the side’s moderators in keeping dating-adjacent topics off of frontpage, as well as discouraging them in general.
I also think you should keep posting whatever you’d like, and we let karma sort out what people see. But I also think the correct number of almost-persuasive comments that are merely ultra-strong downvotes/upvotes is nonzero.
Huh, I guess the PUA fights happened before my time? FWIW, I think dating discourse is fine on LW. I can imagine it having a big effect on the culture if it became much more prominent, but it’s currently very far away from that, and dating/romance/sex and all of that stuff is a big part of people’s lives. Strongly discouraging discussion of it seems like it would introduce pretty huge blindspots into our maps of the world (and to leave much low-hanging fruit of applying the art of rationality on the table).
Of course people should vote how they want, but in as much as people are trying to claim some kind of consensus against this kind of content on the site, at least I as site admin can report that I am not currently on board with that supposed consensus![1]
My personal experience is that reading this kind of stuff feels kind of uncomfortable for me in the moment, while I also (at the end of the day) think it’s relatively useful for me to read. I am mostly glad for the people who think about this kind of stuff more.
I was only 14 or 15 when it was happening and I don’t remember it in too much detail, but I’m surprised it completely passed you by.
I am failing to find many top-level posts about it, mostly asides and then comment sections about it[1], but in 2009 Eliezer wrote Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics. In it, he’s mostly making a point I believe is true and have thought of many times since, similar to “You Don’t Exist, Duncan”, that one of the key issues with gendered language is that it explicitly excludes the reader from it, in a way that the author and many readers don’t notice, but the excluded reader immediately does, and this is other-ing.
Then relevantly, as something of an aside, he gives this account of “PUA”:
And if someone decides that all discussion of the PUA (pickup artist) community, makes her feel excluded...?
Er… I have to say… I sort of get that one. I too can feel the locker-room ambiance rising off it. Now, yes, we have a lot of men here who are operating in gender-imbalanced communities, and we have men here who are nerds; and if you’re the sort of person who reads Less Wrong, there is a certain conditional probability that you will be the sort of person who tries to find a detailed manual that solves your problems...
...while not being quite sane enough to actually notice you’re driving away the very gender you’re trying to seduce from our nascent rationalist community, and consequentially shut up about PUA...
...oh, never mind. Gender relations much resembles the rest of human existence, in that it largely consists of people walking around with shotguns shooting off their own feet. In the end, PUA is not something we need to be talking about here, and if it’s giving one entire gender the wrong vibes on this website, I say the hell with it.
And if someone decides that it’s not enough that a comment has been downvoted to −5; it needs to be banned, or the user needs to be banned, in order to signify that this website is sufficiently friendly...?
Sorry—downvoting to −5 should be enough to show that the community disapproves of this lone commenter.
As he was the head moderator and founder of the site, I think this is probably as clear a sense of the cultural attitude at the time. And indeed, 4 years later when someone wrote a defense of PUA, it received −44 karma (but was not censored).
(It also received 95 comments! This was back when LW was sorted by chronological order, so downvoted posts got the same intense attention as upvoted posts, and got as much discussion, which the current LW team would consider a poor allocation of users’ attention.)
On this 2009 post on dating advice, it’s mentioned 40 times.
Alicorn mentions it a little in her 2009 post Sayeth the Girl, and with the comments it’s mentioned 74 times.
In 2011 Lukeprog talks here and mentioned he interviewed to be a contestant on a tv show titled “The Pick-Up Artist”, and the comments mention the string “PUA” 82 times.
The 2013 post “LW Women: LW Online” has 596 comments (!) and PUA is mentioned 21 times.
Nice, this is very helpful. I remember reading the Eliezer post, but not much of any surrounding discussion.
I personally am reasonably sympathetic to the top commenter, and also we have better mechanisms for people to hide this kind of stuff from their site experience now. But I do think it makes Davis’s argument pretty forceful in that the last moderation action (even if over a decade ago) on this topic was to decide not to have that kind of stuff around. I’ll think about whether I’ll want to change that decision, or release new guidance, or whatever.
FWIW my current stance is that this content is good for the reasons you mention, but that I (and I suspect many others) would like slightly better ability to filter it out of our day-to-day site experience.
My first idea is that standard NSFW content (i.e. explicitly sexual) should be able to be flagged by readers as such (not relying on the author to get it right). For posts it should let you know at the top of the post, either in the tags or beside the author name and date) and that NSFW comments should be click-to-view, like how Reddit does with many images.
And of course, users like Wentworth should easily be able to hit a toggle in their user settings for “don’t blur NSFW content for me”.
Yes, it was a prominent debate early on and I think the eventual conclusion was that permitting PUA-type stuff can make the space really unwelcoming for some people (especially women) and can potentially lead to very negative consequences (sexual harassment/assault, etc.), so it was better avoided. I’m not sure if it was ever formally banned but it kinda became one of those “we don’t do that here” sorts of things.
I do not like seeing material on this on LessWrong. This might be me being a grumpy old-timer, but I feel like we fought a rather extended battle a long time ago to get PUA-adjacent content out of here, we (mostly) succeeded, but in the last few years it’s been kinda seeping back into the community and I would really prefer that not happen. We even have people linking to PUA blogs in the comments here!
This is LessWrong. If you want something gone, argue that it’s false, or link to previous arguments that it’s false, don’t just come kvetching about how you don’t personally like it.
I am more than happy to update in response to evidence, that’s what I want. I write about dating because I want people to tell me what I’m missing. Complaining that this is all vaguely bad somehow is not that.
Wrong argument. If people started posting videos of cats on LessWrong, they would not be “false”, but I’d downvote them just the same. Being false is not the only reason to keep them off LessWrong.
(I did find this post interesting and upvoted it.)
There are adjacent things besides just truth which apply in that case—e.q. arguments that something will not lead to any intellectual progress in any domain, or (in the case of advice posts) arguments that the advice is harmful.
I feel like Davis is making a fine argument (in structure) here. In as much as there was an extended battle to get PUA-adjacent content off of LW, and some kind of consensus formed among long-time contributors to the site that this kind of content is bad to post on LW, then that would be a reasonable thing to bring up. Ideally it would include links to past arguments and discussions about the merits, but it’s at least a pointer.
I am genuinely curious what arguments people have made in the past. I have a whole lot of my own arguments about what kind of content seems good or bad here, and my current guess is stuff like this is fine (and to some degree good because it prevents us becoming a soulless professional space, though there are also attractors for LW to become a pathological contrarian/edgy place, so it’s definitely possible to go wrong here).
It is valid to say something is not topical for lesswrong, or that the focus of lesswrong is shifting in a negative way, so I think the standard that you (John) request is not good. Personally, I would like to see more posts on your research! But I’m guessing that the dating stuff doesnt really take away from that (and for the most part, I just don’t read it).
On LessWrong, if you want to say that something is negative, you should provide a rational argument for why you think something is negative, if you want another person to listen.
I do want a LessWrong that’s primarily about rational argumentation, where we might agree what’s rational but where we strive to convince each other with rational arguments.
I think that “rational“ is an applause light here.
I disagree, in this very particular case. I was trying to say something similar a day ago and really struggled to come up with a better word.
The point is that the argument is supposed to be about the object-level thing, about whether the object-level claim is true or the object-level advice will have the effects it is claimed to have. The argument is not supposed to be things like “saying this will offend some people” or “you’re a bad person for saying this”. I struggle to come up with a better word or short phrase for that than “rational”; the standard connotations seem basically correct.
I don’t think so in this context. There’s a huge difference between appeal to “I don’t like X” and providing rational arguments.
There are plenty of arguments that might be made in an attempt to convince beyond just trying to shut off conversation with social pressure.
I don’t mind the original comment, and think it should exist.
My model is that it’s a kinda of “ultra-strong downvote”, that also appears to the side’s moderators in keeping dating-adjacent topics off of frontpage, as well as discouraging them in general.
I also think you should keep posting whatever you’d like, and we let karma sort out what people see. But I also think the correct number of almost-persuasive comments that are merely ultra-strong downvotes/upvotes is nonzero.
Huh, I guess the PUA fights happened before my time? FWIW, I think dating discourse is fine on LW. I can imagine it having a big effect on the culture if it became much more prominent, but it’s currently very far away from that, and dating/romance/sex and all of that stuff is a big part of people’s lives. Strongly discouraging discussion of it seems like it would introduce pretty huge blindspots into our maps of the world (and to leave much low-hanging fruit of applying the art of rationality on the table).
Of course people should vote how they want, but in as much as people are trying to claim some kind of consensus against this kind of content on the site, at least I as site admin can report that I am not currently on board with that supposed consensus![1]
My personal experience is that reading this kind of stuff feels kind of uncomfortable for me in the moment, while I also (at the end of the day) think it’s relatively useful for me to read. I am mostly glad for the people who think about this kind of stuff more.
I was only 14 or 15 when it was happening and I don’t remember it in too much detail, but I’m surprised it completely passed you by.
I am failing to find many top-level posts about it, mostly asides and then comment sections about it[1], but in 2009 Eliezer wrote Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics. In it, he’s mostly making a point I believe is true and have thought of many times since, similar to “You Don’t Exist, Duncan”, that one of the key issues with gendered language is that it explicitly excludes the reader from it, in a way that the author and many readers don’t notice, but the excluded reader immediately does, and this is other-ing.
Then relevantly, as something of an aside, he gives this account of “PUA”:
As he was the head moderator and founder of the site, I think this is probably as clear a sense of the cultural attitude at the time. And indeed, 4 years later when someone wrote a defense of PUA, it received −44 karma (but was not censored).
(It also received 95 comments! This was back when LW was sorted by chronological order, so downvoted posts got the same intense attention as upvoted posts, and got as much discussion, which the current LW team would consider a poor allocation of users’ attention.)
On this 2009 post on dating advice, it’s mentioned 40 times.
Alicorn mentions it a little in her 2009 post Sayeth the Girl, and with the comments it’s mentioned 74 times.
In 2011 Lukeprog talks here and mentioned he interviewed to be a contestant on a tv show titled “The Pick-Up Artist”, and the comments mention the string “PUA” 82 times.
The 2013 post “LW Women: LW Online” has 596 comments (!) and PUA is mentioned 21 times.
Nice, this is very helpful. I remember reading the Eliezer post, but not much of any surrounding discussion.
I personally am reasonably sympathetic to the top commenter, and also we have better mechanisms for people to hide this kind of stuff from their site experience now. But I do think it makes Davis’s argument pretty forceful in that the last moderation action (even if over a decade ago) on this topic was to decide not to have that kind of stuff around. I’ll think about whether I’ll want to change that decision, or release new guidance, or whatever.
FWIW my current stance is that this content is good for the reasons you mention, but that I (and I suspect many others) would like slightly better ability to filter it out of our day-to-day site experience.
My first idea is that standard NSFW content (i.e. explicitly sexual) should be able to be flagged by readers as such (not relying on the author to get it right). For posts it should let you know at the top of the post, either in the tags or beside the author name and date) and that NSFW comments should be click-to-view, like how Reddit does with many images.
And of course, users like Wentworth should easily be able to hit a toggle in their user settings for “don’t blur NSFW content for me”.
Yes, it was a prominent debate early on and I think the eventual conclusion was that permitting PUA-type stuff can make the space really unwelcoming for some people (especially women) and can potentially lead to very negative consequences (sexual harassment/assault, etc.), so it was better avoided. I’m not sure if it was ever formally banned but it kinda became one of those “we don’t do that here” sorts of things.
I wasn’t around for the first LW PUA wars, though I “experienced” them in reading the threads in retrospect.
What’s your sense of why one side won, and the other didn’t, back then? I’m curious how the consensus was reached.