A summary at the top would help an awful lot. I confess I didn’t read the whole thing to figure out exactly what’s going on.
It seems like perhaps the most relevant thing to say is that the Less Wrong rules allow you to post unlimited amounts of AI-generated text as long as you tag it as such by including it in the correct formatting, a special section marker that tags it as such.
Just put the whole interview in one of those sections and you’re fine. I recommend starting with your explanation of the interview, outside of that section, so it’s not dismissed out of hand as purely AI written.
Yes! My rejection note explained the policy that I was being rejected on the basis of, and the tools that exist to comply.
Once I knew the tools existed I added the tagging and hit the bug and bounced off.
Just now I have tried again to fix the version that I can see, and got this message (the little thing in red) instead:
This is consistent with my mental model of how the site has handled censorship in the past: with minimal QA and robustness.
I think they are slightly ashamed of censoring things, and it doesn’t pull their enthusiastic attention and desire to make it work well, and so it doesn’t get the dev and PM efforts that would go into, for example, an April Fools event?
(Like the font isn’t even the right size! It is the only thing that matters on that page, and it is so tiny as to seem an afterthought… except that it is red so they clearly don’t intend it to be an afterthought. The programmer who set the color was thinking it should be big and obvious, and the programmer who set the font size had a different intent.)
And I think it is probably a bug to not let changes be published? (Though maybe they are afraid of some kind of adversarial dynamic and this is correct in order to make things hardened? Security is hard and has nonobvious constraints and so maybe this makes sense to them somehow in ways I don’t see?)
But it is at least it is a bug to accept edits (which consume time) and then refuse to let them be published (with no warning or explanation of this)? It isn’t predictable (and predictability is a key desiderata in a Justice System) and it doesn’t teach (though maybe they assume incorrigibility in humans by default and have given up on hoping for understanding and then repentance and then improved behavior)?
I guess in a deeper sense, maybe their own policy is not actually be well articulated, plausibly because it was designed by a committee to satisfice the not-perfectly-compatible desires of various stakeholders, some of whom likely had incompatible mental models?
Such things rarely arise from a well understood vision of an ideal, and then the coherently agentic approximation of this ideal (subject to the resource constraints inherent to finitude).
Mere outcomes-of-hasty-negotiation tend to look like a triple point in a Voronoi diagram… only the positions of the dots make sense (metaphorically: the minds of those who had input into the negotiation), and the triple points at the boundaries of their cares tend to be random as shit, and to exist in places governed by Hades...
But it is at least it is a bug to accept edits (which consume time) and then refuse to let them be published (with no warning or explanation of this)? It isn’t predictable (and predictability is a key desiderata in a Justice System) and it doesn’t teach (though maybe they assume incorrigibility in humans by default and have given up on hoping for understanding and then repentance and then improved behavior)?
Yeah, this could be better. It’s intentional for us to not accept edits to rejected posts, because the edits wouldn’t cause a post to be re-evaluated, but the current experience is pretty miserable.
I think we’ll have to redo some of our internal systems here. The auto-rejections are built on top of the system that we built for manual rejections, and in those cases it made sense for the rejection to be final. But this makes less sense when it’s an automated system, and when the rejection reason is easy to fix.
I don’t know how to say this but I very much doubt you’re actually being censored… This sounds like a bug. Maybe not but I think you should probably be a touch more restrained before claiming censorship… Loudly.
I strongly suggest you copy your content into a new post and use the proper formatting and hit publish. You were clearly in dramatic violation of policy the first time, now you’re clearly compliant. So try again.
And maybe get some more sleep. You mentioned needing it in comments and you do sound stressed in a way sleep often helps.
I got a censorship notice (via a process that is itself a buggy mess) with an email providing a link to a DM that doesn’t show up in my list of DMs that are with “the normal kind of user User” instead of with “Lesswrong itself” (whose avatar has been bodged into the User category).
Here is the policy that I violated. I don’t know what other possible policies exist, that I could hypothetically have violated, but didn’t violate, as communicated via text that itself read to me as a kind of slop:
LessWrong aims for particularly high quality (and somewhat oddly-specific) discussion quality. We get a lot of content from new users and sadly can’t give detailed feedback on every piece we reject, but I generally recommend checking out our New User’s Guide, in particular the section on how to ensure your content is approved.
Your content didn’t meet the bar for at least the following reason(s):
This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, assisted/co-written, or edited work. An LLM-detection service flagged your post as likely to have been substantially written or edited by an LLM. We’ve been having a wave of LLM written, co-written, or edited work that doesn’t meet our quality standards. LessWrong has fairly specific standards, and your first LessWrong post is sort of like the application to a college. It should be optimized for demonstrating that you can think clearly without AI assistance. See here for a more detailed explanation of our policy on using LLM generated content on LessWrong.
As such, we reject LLM generated posts. We also reject work that falls into some categories that are difficult to evaluate that typically turn out to not make much sense, which LLMs frequently steer people toward.*
“English is my second language, I’m using this to translate”
If English is your second language and you were using LLMs to help you translate, try writing the post yourself in your native language without any LLM assistance (for the writing itself) and using a different, preferably non-LLM translation software to translate it directly.
“What if I think this was a mistake?”
If you receive this rejection notice but think it was a mistake, if all 3 of the following criteria are true, you can message us on Intercom or at team@lesswrong.com and ask for reconsideration.
You wrote this yourself, without using LLMs to help you write or edit your content.
You did not chat extensively with LLMs to help you generate the ideas. (Using it briefly the way you’d use a search engine is fine. But, if you’re treating it more like a coauthor or test subject, we will not reconsider your post.)
Your post is not about AI consciousness/recursion/emergence, or novel interpretations of physics.
If any of those are false, sorry, we will not accept your post.
* (examples of work we don’t evaluate because it’s too time costly: case studies of LLM sentience, emergence, recursion, novel physics interpretations, or AI alignment strategies that you developed in tandem with an AI coauthor – AIs may seem quite smart but they aren’t actually a good judge of the quality of novel ideas.)
Also, Ollie seems to me to concur that there is a bunch of technical debt here (though he doesn’t use that keyword).
I think we’ll have to redo some of our internal systems here. The auto-rejections are built on top of the system that we built for manual rejections, and in those cases it made sense for the rejection to be final. But this makes less sense when it’s an automated system, and when the rejection reason is easy to fix.
Oh but also… thank you for this <3
And maybe get some more sleep. You mentioned needing it in comments and you do sound stressed in a way sleep often helps.
I think the stress is related to the world being on fire, and full of moral horror, and this topic being very close to the central causal mechanism (related to unclear thinking and feelings around Justice processes) in the preeminent institution that possibly could or would ever hope to fix the ambient problems in the world.
I appreciate your attempt to point to my mental state as being in need of care, though, because that’s a kind motion, and valid in itself <3
I think they are slightly ashamed of censoring things, and it doesn’t pull their enthusiastic attention and desire to make it work well, and so it doesn’t get the dev and PM efforts that would go into, for example, an April Fools event?
No, not particularly. It is true that working on improving the user experience here is not especially motivating, but this cluster of bugs + bad UX is near the top of my internal to-do list of relatively important things to work on; there are just a lot of things to do (and that list seems to be growing rather than shrinking).
(Like the font isn’t even the right size! It is the only thing that matters on that page, and it is so tiny as to seem an afterthought… except that it is red so they clearly don’t intend it to be an afterthought. The programmer who set the color was thinking it should be big and obvious, and the programmer who set the font size had a different intent.)
The error message color and font size is one of the few remaining artifacts of the original framework that LessWrong 2.0 was built on (VulcanJS). Our story for correctly surfacing legible errors to users is quite bad, across the codebase.
And I think it is probably a bug to not let changes be published? (Though maybe they are afraid of some kind of adversarial dynamic and this is correct in order to make things hardened?
I made this change because I wanted to prevent people from making the contents of the rejected posts displayed on lesswrong.com/moderation misleading (with respect to the actual content that caused them to be rejected). The rejection feature was not designed with “post is modified to be un-rejected” in mind; this is not well-communicated in the UI. You should simply make a new post.
But it is at least it is a bug to accept edits (which consume time) and then refuse to let them be published (with no warning or explanation of this)?
Yes, this is basically an oversight.
I guess in a deeper sense, maybe their own policy is not actually be well articulated, plausibly because it was designed by a committee to satisfice the not-perfectly-compatible desires of various stakeholders, some of whom likely had incompatible mental models?
The policy about what users should (and should not) do is clearly described in the post that Seth linked above. There is no English-language description of all of its downstream technical consequences because we don’t have the (truly absurd) bandwidth that would be needed to satisfy that requirement in full generality, across all of the site rules (and other things that might motivate moderator action).
The policy was “designed” by me marinating in the ways in which the previous policy was inadequate over the course of many months of moderation work, writing up a new policy, running it by Habryka, adjusting the wording slightly, and then publishing that post. LessWrong sees regular engineering and moderation contributions from 6-7 people, and usually only 2-3 people on any given week. We do not have the people to form a committee.
Then report the bug, duh? You are overthinking this. I also had a weird bug not long ago with my drafts, was swiftly resolved and underlying problem fixed, like in 24 hours.
I did report the bug (verbally in writing in my email, and now verbally again in this very post and the comments). It hasn’t been fixed. Maybe there is a bureaucratic and half-automated procedure for filing bugs that will never be addressed, and that is broken too? Do you know of a way to do this that is somehow “canonical”?
I do not see any emails from you to team@lesswrong.com, which should be automatically forwarded to our Intercom inbox. What email address did you send the bug reports to?
On Tuesday July 7th I sent an email with the subject “JenniferRM asks: What’s The Best Way To Talk About Fable-As-An-Author?” to team@lesswrong.com that contained this text:
> You wrote this yourself, without using LLMs to help you write or edit your content.
I didn’t automate ANY of my authorial work. However, there are quotes from Fable that Fable authored, and those are clearly marked...
BUT… maybe the automated editorial decision kicked in because I didn’t initially use the tags to mark the content that Fable generated and that might have triggered automatic action? I forgot those existed.
When I tracked down the style guide and figured out how to use the ”/ editor tool” to mark LLM content I ran into a website bug: I can’t actually save edits!
This is a bug because if I can’t SAVE edits, the UI should not even allow me to START MAKING THEM.
This is the error message (the little bit in red) that I see when I try to save my changes:
The canonical bug report mechanism is the Intercom widget at the bottom right of each page. It looks like this. (Coloration may vary based on light/dark mode.)
A summary at the top would help an awful lot. I confess I didn’t read the whole thing to figure out exactly what’s going on.
It seems like perhaps the most relevant thing to say is that the Less Wrong rules allow you to post unlimited amounts of AI-generated text as long as you tag it as such by including it in the correct formatting, a special section marker that tags it as such.
The details are in New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
Just put the whole interview in one of those sections and you’re fine. I recommend starting with your explanation of the interview, outside of that section, so it’s not dismissed out of hand as purely AI written.
And we want to read it.
Yes! My rejection note explained the policy that I was being rejected on the basis of, and the tools that exist to comply.
Once I knew the tools existed I added the tagging and hit the bug and bounced off.
Just now I have tried again to fix the version that I can see, and got this message (the little thing in red) instead:
This is consistent with my mental model of how the site has handled censorship in the past: with minimal QA and robustness.
I think they are slightly ashamed of censoring things, and it doesn’t pull their enthusiastic attention and desire to make it work well, and so it doesn’t get the dev and PM efforts that would go into, for example, an April Fools event?
(Like the font isn’t even the right size! It is the only thing that matters on that page, and it is so tiny as to seem an afterthought… except that it is red so they clearly don’t intend it to be an afterthought. The programmer who set the color was thinking it should be big and obvious, and the programmer who set the font size had a different intent.)
And I think it is probably a bug to not let changes be published? (Though maybe they are afraid of some kind of adversarial dynamic and this is correct in order to make things hardened? Security is hard and has nonobvious constraints and so maybe this makes sense to them somehow in ways I don’t see?)
But it is at least it is a bug to accept edits (which consume time) and then refuse to let them be published (with no warning or explanation of this)? It isn’t predictable (and predictability is a key desiderata in a Justice System) and it doesn’t teach (though maybe they assume incorrigibility in humans by default and have given up on hoping for understanding and then repentance and then improved behavior)?
I guess in a deeper sense, maybe their own policy is not actually be well articulated, plausibly because it was designed by a committee to satisfice the not-perfectly-compatible desires of various stakeholders, some of whom likely had incompatible mental models?
Such things rarely arise from a well understood vision of an ideal, and then the coherently agentic approximation of this ideal (subject to the resource constraints inherent to finitude).
Mere outcomes-of-hasty-negotiation tend to look like a triple point in a Voronoi diagram… only the positions of the dots make sense (metaphorically: the minds of those who had input into the negotiation), and the triple points at the boundaries of their cares tend to be random as shit, and to exist in places governed by Hades...
Yeah, this could be better. It’s intentional for us to not accept edits to rejected posts, because the edits wouldn’t cause a post to be re-evaluated, but the current experience is pretty miserable.
I think we’ll have to redo some of our internal systems here. The auto-rejections are built on top of the system that we built for manual rejections, and in those cases it made sense for the rejection to be final. But this makes less sense when it’s an automated system, and when the rejection reason is easy to fix.
I don’t know how to say this but I very much doubt you’re actually being censored… This sounds like a bug. Maybe not but I think you should probably be a touch more restrained before claiming censorship… Loudly.
I strongly suggest you copy your content into a new post and use the proper formatting and hit publish. You were clearly in dramatic violation of policy the first time, now you’re clearly compliant. So try again.
And maybe get some more sleep. You mentioned needing it in comments and you do sound stressed in a way sleep often helps.
It is easy for me to say that you’re wrong.
I got a censorship notice (via a process that is itself a buggy mess) with an email providing a link to a DM that doesn’t show up in my list of DMs that are with “the normal kind of user User” instead of with “Lesswrong itself” (whose avatar has been bodged into the User category).
Here is the policy that I violated. I don’t know what other possible policies exist, that I could hypothetically have violated, but didn’t violate, as communicated via text that itself read to me as a kind of slop:
Also, Ollie seems to me to concur that there is a bunch of technical debt here (though he doesn’t use that keyword).
Oh but also… thank you for this <3
I think the stress is related to the world being on fire, and full of moral horror, and this topic being very close to the central causal mechanism (related to unclear thinking and feelings around Justice processes) in the preeminent institution that possibly could or would ever hope to fix the ambient problems in the world.
I appreciate your attempt to point to my mental state as being in need of care, though, because that’s a kind motion, and valid in itself <3
No, not particularly. It is true that working on improving the user experience here is not especially motivating, but this cluster of bugs + bad UX is near the top of my internal to-do list of relatively important things to work on; there are just a lot of things to do (and that list seems to be growing rather than shrinking).
The error message color and font size is one of the few remaining artifacts of the original framework that LessWrong 2.0 was built on (VulcanJS). Our story for correctly surfacing legible errors to users is quite bad, across the codebase.
I made this change because I wanted to prevent people from making the contents of the rejected posts displayed on lesswrong.com/moderation misleading (with respect to the actual content that caused them to be rejected). The rejection feature was not designed with “post is modified to be un-rejected” in mind; this is not well-communicated in the UI. You should simply make a new post.
Yes, this is basically an oversight.
The policy about what users should (and should not) do is clearly described in the post that Seth linked above. There is no English-language description of all of its downstream technical consequences because we don’t have the (truly absurd) bandwidth that would be needed to satisfy that requirement in full generality, across all of the site rules (and other things that might motivate moderator action).
The policy was “designed” by me marinating in the ways in which the previous policy was inadequate over the course of many months of moderation work, writing up a new policy, running it by Habryka, adjusting the wording slightly, and then publishing that post. LessWrong sees regular engineering and moderation contributions from 6-7 people, and usually only 2-3 people on any given week. We do not have the people to form a committee.
Then report the bug, duh? You are overthinking this. I also had a weird bug not long ago with my drafts, was swiftly resolved and underlying problem fixed, like in 24 hours.
I did report the bug (verbally in writing in my email, and now verbally again in this very post and the comments). It hasn’t been fixed. Maybe there is a bureaucratic and half-automated procedure for filing bugs that will never be addressed, and that is broken too? Do you know of a way to do this that is somehow “canonical”?
When I google [lesswrong bug reports] I land here, and I see a plethora of ways to report bugs, several of which I have already used.
I do not see any emails from you to team@lesswrong.com, which should be automatically forwarded to our Intercom inbox. What email address did you send the bug reports to?
On Tuesday July 7th I sent an email with the subject “JenniferRM asks: What’s The Best Way To Talk About Fable-As-An-Author?” to team@lesswrong.com that contained this text:
Then there is a screenshot.
The canonical bug report mechanism is the Intercom widget at the bottom right of each page. It looks like this. (Coloration may vary based on light/dark mode.)