Davis_Kingsley

• Davis_Kingsley 12 Jul 2019 21:45 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Diver­sify Your Friend­ship Portfolio

  The ti­tle is mostly like that be­cause it’s funny. I strongly be­lieve that peo­ple should cul­ti­vate closer friend­ships than is the de­fault in mod­ern so­ciety—but I also be­lieve one shouldn’t put “all their eggs in one bas­ket” in terms of who all you cul­ti­vate those friend­ships with.

• Davis_Kingsley 11 Jul 2019 12:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  I think of the change from Ju­daism to Chris­ti­an­ity as too sig­nifi­cant to be viewed as merely a schism. Similarly, it would seem strange to clas­sify Is­lam or Mor­monism as “Chris­tian schisms” in the same way that one would clas­sify, say, the Old Catholic Church as a schism from the main Catholic Church—it’s cer­tainly true that Is­lam and Mor­monism both take Chris­ti­an­ity and then add a new prophet and his book on top of it, but that seems too sig­nifi­cant to qual­ify as just a schism. To me, schisms are of­ten no­table for the rel­a­tively small na­ture of the differ­ences that they are split­ting over, and by the time you’re adding new holy books and sub­stan­tially rein­ter­pret­ing the past teach­ings you’ve gone be­yond that phase.

  (To give a non­re­li­gious ex­am­ple, I would say “we’re go­ing to make a new fo­rum with ex­actly the same purview, tar­get au­di­ence, and board struc­ture as the old fo­rum but with differ­ent mod­er­a­tors” is a schism, while “we’re go­ing to make a new fo­rum that ad­dresses sub­stan­tially differ­ent top­ics while still in­clud­ing some of the old stuff” is not.)

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 21:50 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: elityre's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  Some­times things are bad or (or much worse than they could be) in some group or com­mu­nity. When that’s the case, one can 1) try and change the com­mu­nity from the in­side, or 2) get a group of his/​her friends to­gether to do [thing] the way they think they should do it, or 3) give up and ac­cept the cur­rent situ­a­tion.

  When you’re will­ing to put in the work to make 2 hap­pen, it some­times re­sults in a new healthier group. If (some) on­look­ers can dis­t­in­guish be­tween bet­ter and worse on the rele­vant axis, it will at­tract new mem­bers.

  It seems to me that tak­ing op­tion 2, in­stead of op­tion 1, is co­op­er­a­tive. You leave the other group do­ing it their way, in peace, and also cre­ate some­thing good in the world in ad­di­tion.

  I agree that op­tion 2 can be co­op­er­a­tive, but I want to point out that tak­ing op­tion 1 is also co­op­er­a­tive. If the other group or com­mu­nity is, as you say, much worse than it could be, helping to im­prove it from the in­side makes things bet­ter for the peo­ple already in­volved, while go­ing and start­ing your own group might leave them in the lurch. In gen­eral I think you should prob­a­bly at least ini­tially try to re­form things, though if it doesn’t work well there’s a point where you might have to say “sorry, the time has come, we’re mak­ing our own group now”.

  Granted, I think the situ­a­tion may be im­por­tantly differ­ent in on­line com­mu­ni­ties, speci­fi­cally be­cause the ac­ti­va­tion en­ergy for set­ting up a new on­line group is com­par­a­tively small. In that case, it is too easy to found a new group, and ac­cord­ingly they splin­ter to reg­u­larly for any sin­gle group to be good.

  Yeah, I think on­line the cost of just cre­at­ing an­other site is im­por­tantly too low. On Dis­cord it takes like 10 sec­onds to make a new server, these days you can set up a ba­sic web fo­rum very quickly with­out even hav­ing to pay for host­ing, and so on. In real life it’s harder to cre­ate new or­ga­ni­za­tions, events, etc. in a way that can ac­tu­ally help avoid split­ting com­mu­ni­ties.

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 20:52 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  There’s a sig­nifi­cant differ­ence be­tween “open dis­agree­ment” and “open dis­agree­ment, re­fusal to co­op­er­ate with the mechanisms for set­tling this, de­nun­ci­a­tion of the le­gi­t­i­macy of au­thor­ity, and call­ing for oth­ers to leave the group”. LessWrong can deal with open dis­agree­ment, but if the front page con­stantly had peo­ple de­nounc­ing the mod­er­a­tors and call­ing oth­ers to go and join their new com­mu­nity that would be some­thing else.

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 20:22 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Slider's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  I’m very “MtG white”, yes. (Well, white-blue, but yeah.) :P

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 20:21 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Pedro Carvalho's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  1. This post seems to take for granted that schisms are bad with­out ac­tu­ally ar­gu­ing why. Even if it is the case that schisms beget more schisms, that in it­self (or that + point­ing at Protes­tantism) is not ac­tu­ally an ex­pla­na­tion of why that’s ac­tu­ally bad; it just claims so. It does im­ply that the bad­ness is in the co­or­di­na­tion costs that are in­creased by a di­as­pora over a cen­tral­ised lo­ca­tion, but if a di­as­pora hap­pened in the first place that is strong ev­i­dence that what­ever cen­tral place it spawned from was not only in­ca­pable of mak­ing this level of co­or­di­na­tion hap­pen but also its mem­bers judged it was in­ca­pable of hang­ing into a place that can do co­or­di­na­tion.

  I’m not sure that it’s the case that peo­ple cor­rectly judged that it was in­ca­pable of chang­ing. Re­form­ing an ex­ist­ing space is of­ten harder than just tak­ing your ball and go­ing home, but the benefits are shared across the en­tire group.

  2. Two of your main ex­am­ples are re­li­gion and poli­tics, where one can’t re­ally be­long to mul­ti­ple sub­groups. For things like the LW di­as­pora or Dis­cord servers or w/​e, schisms aren’t schis­matic – one can be­long to mul­ti­ple so­cial groups and Dis­cord servers and what-have-you (which can even be de­sir­able, as you your­self have ar­gued in your post about di­ver­sify­ing your friend­ship port­fo­lio).

  Belong­ing to mul­ti­ple so­cial groups and Dis­cord servers and the like is nice, but be­long­ing to a bunch of differ­ent groups that are all sort of do­ing fun­da­men­tally the same thing (and claim that oth­ers are try­ing to do the same thing but do­ing it worse) isn’t as good. When peo­ple found servers that are like “this is the same as <SERVER X> but with bet­ter mod­er­a­tion>” that tends to split the com­mu­nity (and in­deed things like this have hap­pened mul­ti­ple times with Dis­cord, on­line fo­rums, etc.).

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 20:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  I do think that some­times peo­ple stay in things that they should split off from. How­ever, I’ve no­ticed that lo­cally there seems to be a lot of praise for the “archipelago” and the like, and also that the com­mu­nity seems to have been se­ri­ously dam­aged by splin­ter­ing too much and los­ing its unity and sense of shared progress. I think these things are con­nected and that at least around here, peo­ple should be more wary about split­ting off than they are by de­fault.

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 20:06 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: PeterMcCluskey's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  Fair points. That said, I don’t think the split be­tween CFAR and MIRI is a de­struc­tive schism, they’re still in very close al­ign­ment with one an­other and part of the same broader pro­ject. Same for FHI, FLI, BERI, etc. -- but if some­one had founded a “new MIRI” say­ing that MIRI was failing and their paradigms were fun­da­men­tally de­struc­tive and ev­ery­one should with­draw their sup­port of MIRI and back the new or­ga­ni­za­tion, that would be schis­matic in the way I warn about.

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Jul 2019 5:24 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Schism Begets Schism

  It may be su­pe­rior for the in­di­vi­d­ual, but it is of­ten worse for the group’s abil­ity to co­or­di­nate and get stuff done. Similarly, when the di­as­pora first started, many peo­ple had the choice of whether to con­tinue post­ing on LW or whether to cre­ate their own blog, gain­ing per­sonal sta­tus/​in­fluence but dam­ag­ing the unity of the group. The lat­ter broadly won out, to the detri­ment of the pro­ject as a whole.

  Now ob­vi­ously mak­ing your own blog wasn’t just defect­ing—there were se­ri­ous is­sues with LessWrong’s cul­ture and stan­dards that made post­ing there feel like a chore. But ideally we would have fixed that such that the lo­cally in­cen­tivized be­hav­ior was that which was bet­ter for the pro­ject as a whole rather than that which helped the in­di­vi­d­ual at the cost of the group. Sadly, we missed the op­por­tu­nity, at least when the is­sue first came up.

Schism Begets Schism

Diver­sify Your Friend­ship Portfolio

• Davis_Kingsley 8 Jul 2019 22:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: LW au­thors: How many clusters of norms do you want?

  Hmm, per­haps an­other way to put it would be that I would like there to be one “stan­dard of dis­course” across the site, and mul­ti­ple types of con­ver­sa­tions that can be had within that stan­dard.

• Davis_Kingsley 8 Jul 2019 9:12 UTC

  5 points

  on: LW au­thors: How many clusters of norms do you want?

  I ideally want ~one set of norms, even if it doesn’t agree with my prefer­ences on all points. The cost of illeg­i­bil­ity and de­cen­tral­iza­tion is not in my view worth the benefit of be­ing able to fid­dle with ev­ery­thing.

  I do think it’s pos­si­ble for one set of norms to ba­si­cally in­clude all the stuff you men­tioned as differ­ent knobs, though.

• Davis_Kingsley 1 Jul 2019 20:15 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  Yeah, that post hasn’t much matched up with my ex­pe­rience. It feels like a relic of an older era, be­fore the cur­tain went up on just how crazy things re­ally can be at the top.

The Com­pe­tence Myth

• Davis_Kingsley 17 Jun 2019 19:09 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  Agreed that there hasn’t been bul­ly­ing but has been nit­pick­ing. I think the com­ments here have gone se­ri­ously off-track from the main in­tent of my post and I in­tend to write an­other post that deals with the “is it OK to ban Nazis” is­sue more di­rectly; I’m un­sure whether I’ll write a new ver­sion of this post.

  This situ­a­tion has made me less likely to want to write on LW in the fu­ture, but it’s not to the point where I’m quit­ting or what­ever.

• Davis_Kingsley 17 Jun 2019 5:48 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  Yes, that’s my view. My model of what went wrong with LW 1.0 cul­turally was some­thing like:

  1. Nit­picky stan­dards get into the culture

  2. Many of the strongest con­trib­u­tors dis­like in­ter­act­ing with the nit­picky stan­dards and move elsewhere

  3. Many of the re­main­ing con­trib­u­tors don’t have as good con­tent to contribute

  4. LW is per­ceived as mediocre and no longer “the place to go”, re­in­forc­ing mi­gra­tion away from the site

• Davis_Kingsley 16 Jun 2019 18:34 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  I mean peo­ple who liter­ally, ac­tu­ally sup­port the Nazi party.

• Davis_Kingsley 16 Jun 2019 13:47 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson's comment on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  When I say Nazis I am, in fact, refer­ring to ac­tual Nazis. I’m not val­i­dat­ing “de­nun­ci­a­tion”, I’m say­ing you have no obli­ga­tion to provide a space for cer­tain forms of ob­jec­tion­able con­tent, and in­deed you shouldn’t. I do not con­sider such re­stric­tions to com­pro­mise the rule of law—part of the rule of law in­volves es­tab­lish­ing clear bound­aries for what con­tent is and isn’t out of bounds, and Nazi stuff is on the wrong side of those bounds.

• Davis_Kingsley 16 Jun 2019 13:37 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  As Scott writes:

  The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own lit­tle utopian com­mu­nity where witch-hunts will never hap­pen, your new so­ciety will end up con­sist­ing of ap­prox­i­mately three prin­ci­pled civil liber­tar­i­ans and seven zillion witches. It will be a ter­rible place to live even if witch-hunts are gen­uinely wrong.

  You have to ban some things to im­ple­ment ba­sic stan­dards. For in­stance, here are the list of banned top­ics from a space I used to mod­er­ate (well, still do but it’s mostly quiet now):

  -Racism, viru­lent poli­ti­cal ide­olo­gies, etc. - even if they’re clothed in “sci­en­tific” guises. “HBD” and the like are ex­plic­itly not wel­come.

  -Harsh, in­sult­ing lan­guage. Tel­ling some­one you think they’re wrong is fine, curs­ing them out isn’t.

  -Pornog­ra­phy or any other sex­u­ally ex­plicit or highly sug­ges­tive con­tent.

  -Any form of “doxxing”, offsite ha­rass­ment, etc. ex­cept in cases of pre­vent­ing se­ri­ous crimes—and if we ever get to that point things will have gone deeply wrong here!

  Th­ese sorts of re­stric­tions have not in my view led to bul­ly­ing—in­stead, in many re­spects they’ve led to there be­ing a safer space, where peo­ple don’t have to worry about cer­tain types of bad con­tent that can be preva­lent on­line.