Elizabeth

Karma: 15,541

Elizabeth 14 Apr 2024 18:20 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
First of all, thank you, this was exactly the type of answer I was hoping for. Also, if you still have the ability to comment freely on your short form, I’m happy to hop over there.
You’ve requested people stop sugarcoating so I’m going to be harsher than normal. I think the major disagreement lies here:
> But the entire point of punishment is teaching
I do not believe the mod team’s goal is to punish individuals. It is to gatekeep in service of keeping lesswrong’s quality high. Anyone who happens to emerge from that process making good contributions is a bonus, but not the goal.
How well is this signposted? The new user message says
Followed by a crippling long New User Guide.
I think that message was put in last summer but am not sure when. You might have joined before it went up (although then you would have been on the site when the equivalent post went up).
Going against the consensus is *probably* enough to get one rate-limited, even if they’re correct
For issues interesting enough to have this problem, there is no ground source of truth that humans can access. There is human judgement, and a long process that will hopefully lead to better understanding eventually. Mods or readers are not contacting an oracle, hearing a post is true, and downvoting it anyway because they dislike it. They’re reading content, deciding whether it is well formed (for regular karma) and if they agree with it (for agreement votes, and probably also regular karma, although IIRC the correlation between those was less than I expected. LessWrong voters love to upvote high quality things they disagree with).
If you have a system that is more truth tracking I would love to hear it and I’m sure the team would too. But any system will have to take into account the fact that there is no magical source of truth for many important questions, so power will ultimately rest on human judgement.
On a practical level:
My comments can be shorter or easier to understand, but not both. Most people will communicate big ideas by linking to them, linking 20 pages is much more acceptable than writing them in a comment. But these are my own ideas, there’s no links.
Easier to understand. LessWrong is more tolerant of length than most of the internet.
When I need to spend many pages on something boring and detailed, I often write a separate post for it, which I link to in the real post. I realize you’re rate limited, but rate limits don’t apply to comments on your own posts (short form is in a weird middle ground, but nothing stops you from creating your own post to write on). Or create your own blog elsewhere and link to it.

Elizabeth 9 Apr 2024 23:49 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
It feels like you want this conversation to be about your personal interactions with LessWrong. That makes sense, it would be my focus if I’d been rate limited. But having that converesation in public seems like a bad idea, and I’m not competent to do in public or private^[1].
So let me ask: how do you think conversations about norms and moderation should go, given that mod decisions will inevitably cause pain to people affected by them, and “everyone walks away happy” is not an achievable goal?
1. ^
  In part because AFAIK I haven’t read your work. I checked your user page for the first 30 commenets and didn’t see any votes in either direction. I will say that if you know your comments are “too long and ranty, and they’re also hard to understand”, those all seem good to work on.

Elizabeth 7 Apr 2024 23:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
I initially downvoted because I thought the complaint missed too many key factors. I’ve since changed to upvote, because I think the post provoked a good discussion.

Elizabeth 7 Apr 2024 22:14 UTC
8 points
11
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
AFAIK there was a wave of rate limits, not bans. I think it’s a huge error to conflate those. Most importantly, you can complain on-site about being rate limited in a way you can’t complain about being banned.
I have complaints about implementation but the theory seems sound. I’d like the team to put more work into implementation or treat false positives as more costly, but that’s easy for me to say since I’m not the one that has to do it.
Complaints:
1. the combination of imperfect filtering and no communication seems bad to me. How are people supposed to know their ban was a mistake and asking will help, instead of annoying mods further.
2. “retroactive to a year ago” sounds pretty bad to me. But I don’t think that’s the right frame. I think the team meant to intervene and not rate limit people who’d had an issue 11 months ago but have been great since. habryka described at least one ban as a mistake in comments on this post, so sounds like this was inconsistent. But conceptually I think it was supposed to be “we have a new tool for detecting people who have been below standards this entire time” not “we raised the bar”.

Elizabeth 6 Apr 2024 22:12 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Jeff Pyles’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
@Raemon told me to be aggressive with things like new lines and ellipses to alter the pacing.

Elizabeth 6 Apr 2024 21:27 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
But when rereading, I see that you don’t say what to do about these comments. You only point out negative effects. What is your proposal?
Rate limiting. If I was pope I’d make a few tweaks, but I think the concept is fundamentally sound and the implementation good enough.

Elizabeth 6 Apr 2024 1:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
It sounds like you don’t think there should be any user-focused mod response between “nothing” and “banned”. Is that correct?

Elizabeth 5 Apr 2024 19:43 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: angelinahli’s comment on: Nitric oxide for covid and other viral infections
Thanks, this is great.
Another option for the gap between in vivo and in vitro- NO is an immune system signal molecule. It’s possible it has no direct effect but stimulates the immune system enough to be useful.

Elizabeth 5 Apr 2024 19:22 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
[disclaimer here]
My comments are too long and ranty, and they’re also hard to understand. But I don’t think they’re wrong or without value.
I don’t think “wrong or without value” is or should be the bar. My personal bar is heavily based on the ratio of effort:value^[1], and how that compares to other ways I could spend my time. Assuming arguendo that your posts are correct, they may still be fall below the necessary return-on-effort.
That said, I think (and I believe the real mod team agrees) that Short Form should have a much lower bar than posts or comments on other people’s posts. That’s a lot of its purpose.
1. ^
  including the fact that rarer or more complicated views are often both more work and more valuable.

Elizabeth 5 Apr 2024 2:05 UTC
25 points
15
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
[note: I am technically a mod but in practice that means I give the team my opinions and occasionally curate something. The following is my opinion. I think it has some overlap with team members’ opinion but I don’t know how much, or how much of that opinion has made it into policy]
A counterintuitive effect is that bad comments are often worse for SNR than bad posts. Bad posts seem like they’d be worse, because posts are more important than comments and are placed higher. But karma works better (on average) on posts: bad or mediocre posts get enough downvotes, or at least not enough upvotes to compete, and gently disappear. But comments’ views scale with the viewership of the original post, so a mediocre comment on a popular post will get lots of attention regardless of its karma. If a post gets enough comments that low karma comments can’t get much attention, they still compete with new high-quality comments, and cut into the attention for the latter.
And even if no one else sees a bad comment, they are still likely to be read by the author and annoy them. If this gets bad enough, authors may stop reading their comment sections or stop posting altogether.

Elizabeth 3 Apr 2024 21:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
I’m on that list (in green) and first heard about this when I was invited, so I knew what the list meant going in. But as a general person with opinions, I felt that having an “invitee” list, especially one that mixed in confirmed attendees, was misleading and mildly manipulative. But since almost everyone finds it intuitive, including @Zack_M_Davis, most of my concerns are allayed.

Elizabeth 31 Mar 2024 22:40 UTC
23 points
5
on: How does it feel to switch from earn-to-give?
After 9 years in software, I switched to still being in software but for a noble purpose (mobile money in Africa), and then to nebulous indirectly-x-risk-related research work. My guess is my experience will not say much about yours.
When I made the change, I didn’t particularly feel like I was trusting myself more. My first reason is “the research on M-PESA in Kenya is too strong to argue with”, although the part where I’d read that research for ~fun and trusted my interpretation maybe counts as trust in myself. But also: I wasn’t happy at my old job and would have been leaving anyway, my new job had a much better set up for me even before mission considerations, everyone I knew supported the change (and my later move to independent work).
The move did improve my sense of how valuable I was and how much I was allowed to invest in myself. I think it’s good that that happened but it would have been better if I hadn’t needed a mission to justify it.
You’ve talked about “becoming an adult” and “trusting yourself (to make world-improving plans)” as almost synonyms, and I think that’s a mistake. If I was going to make a road map to impactful and responsible adulthood it would be as follows (hastily written, undoubtably missing stuff, etc):
1. be stable and functional: take care of your health, your finances, and your housing. Be capable of showing up on time and keeping comittments. Have enough savings to weather emergencies and transitions without worry.
2. Be able to be a decent friend, family member, and possibly neighbor (which includes creating enough slack in your life you have capacity to help people). Don’t be a parasite on any system.
3. Work on other people’s projects
  1. Develop valuable skills, if you haven’t done that for #1
  2. Develop the skill of being useful to a boss, who may make decisions you disagree with and won’t justify them to you.
    This includes knowing when and how to ask questions, push back on bad ideas, shut up and do work you disagree with, and refuse when necessary.
  3. Develop your sense of taste so you can figure out who is worth deferring to and who isn’t
  4. Develop your ability to coordinate with peers, without the boss/teacher managing the process.
  5. Develop your ability to work with people even when they are very annoying.
    Twice in short succession I had a big dispute with someone w/i X-risk community, and we went away thinking very poorly of each other. Not a big deal, there was no reason to think we’d ever have to work together. @Raemon (also the author of Earn-To-Save) told me that my complaints were legitimate but both people had valuable skills, and saving the world necessarily involved dealing with people at least that annoying.
    
    So I did mediation with both. One went great, we are now friendly and have a lot of respect for each other. The other was a less smashing success but was good enough that when it looked like our projects would intersect I felt annoyed but not doomed.
4. Gradually expand your sense of taste and ability to work autonomously. Any good boss wants to give you work off their plate, they will be delighted if you gradually work your way up to being an independent agent they can give vague instructions to do
5. Eventually you have the choice to your found your own thing (with or without co-founders) or work for someone, and the wisdom to know which will best accomplish your goals.

Elizabeth 31 Mar 2024 20:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Example of reactionary agency: someone who filled their house with air purifiers in 2020, but hasn’t changed the filters since.
Their reaction was correct, and in this case they’re probably net better off for it. But it would probably have been worth dropping some other expensive reaction in favor of regularly swapping air filters, or putting the purifiers aside since they’re useless at this point.
[Full disclosure: I change my air purifiers regularly but haven’t cleaned my portable AC filter in 3.5 years because I can’t figure out how]

Elizabeth 30 Mar 2024 19:07 UTC
4 points
0
on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
How do other people feel about the list of invited authors? I feel dubious about a single list with both invitees and confirmed attendees (even if they’re in different colors), but if most people don’t find it confusing or misleading it seems less important.

Suggested voting: use percentage reacts, with 0 being “I absolutely find this confusing or misleading” and 100 being “I find this extremely clear”

Elizabeth 29 Mar 2024 0:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: frankybegs’s comment on: Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them
To answer your object level question:
1. I could generate evidence at least this good for every claim in human health, including mutually contradictory ones.
2. The book title “mindspan” pattern matches to “shitty science book”
3. the paragraphs quoted pattern match to jumping around between facts, without giving straightforward numbers you can hold in your own mind. Why give percentage of childbearing women below a threshold, but averages for the ultraold?
  1. “adding tea to the diet reduces body iron and increases lifespan” really? this is what he thinks of as evidence?
  2. “a study of people who ate a Mediterranean-style diet (characterized mainly by less meat and more fish) had larger brains and key brain structures and less atrophy than frequent meat eaters.” lots of potential reasons for this, many of which are areas of deep research
  3. Data on the ultraold is useless because there’s a good chance most of them are lying about their age.
4. He didn’t cite the most relevant information I know of, that regular blood donation improves health in men. Which probably means Alex wasn’t done any investigation into this, he just read a few claims some time.

Elizabeth 29 Mar 2024 0:48 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: frankybegs’s comment on: Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them
Thank you, I appreciate that.
I’m about to give a lot of context. This is definitely a little unfair, and subjecting you to anger you are not responsible for. But I do feel like you’ve opened a can of worms, and it would be meaningful to me for you to put yourself in my shoes, which unfortunately requires a lot of context.
The context:
- The mod team^[1] and many authors believe that no one is owed a response,. Some people disagree (mostly people who comment much more than they post, but not exclusively). I think the latter is a minority, although it’s hard to tell without a proper poll and I don’t know how to weight answers.
- Beyond that: because I write about medical stuff means I get a lot of demands for answers I don’t have and don’t owe people. On one hand, this is kind of inevitable so I don’t get mad at people for the first request. On the other hand, people sometimes get really aggressive about getting a definitive answer from me, which I neither owe them nor have the ability to give. One of the biggest predictors of this is how specific the question is. Someone coming in with a lot of gears in their model is usually fun to talk to. I’ll learn things, and I can trust that they’re treating me as one source of information among many, rather than trying to outsource their judgement. The vaguer a question the more likely it is being asked by someone who is desperate but not doing their own work on the subject, and answering is likely to be costly with benefit to anyone.
  
  Your question patternmatched to the second type.
- As you note, I not only had left many comments unresponded-to, but specifically the comments above and below the comment you were referring to (but made me do the work to find). As far as I’m concerned, telling you I couldn’t find the comment and giving an overall opinion was going above and beyond.
  - Which I do because sometimes on LW it pays off, and it looks like it did here, which is heartwarming.
- You say that you find omnivores to be worse at epistemics and discourse. My experience is strongly the opposite. These aren’t incompatible- the loudest people on every side of every issue are usually the dumbest. But keep in mind that the critics of my work on vegan advocacy are drawn from that crowd.
  - You came in suspicious of me on a post where I gave vegans and vegetarians useful tests, with grant money I acquired for this purpose, and helped them find vegan supplements. One of my big frustrations with my vegan critics is that they’re treating me like a meat industry shill, when my major actions have been to help vegans stay healthily vegan. I don’t think means anyone has to agree with me, but I’ve barely been able to get critics to acknowledge this and explain why it doesn’t change anything for them.
    one person did give a satisfying answer to this. It was educational and I appreciate his response a lot, although it did not ultimately change my mind. You can see our dialogue here.
    I’ve gotten 10-30 emails and comments from vegans telling me I drove them to get tested and if merited go on supplements, and one comment from one vegan saying I was one factor among many in them restarting small amounts of fish. And in the course of getting his statistics help on this post, I talked my dad into a more ameliatarian diet. So from my perspective I have done considerably more for animals than many vegan advocates.
    You might think that people who start eating meat are less likely to tell me, but like you said, I’m detectably not likely to yell at them for it.
  - I think your implication is that I don’t care about animal suffering or don’t like vegans, and this drives me to attack them through any convenient vector. Neither is true. I care about nutrition because I care about nutrition and have for many years, as my blog will attest to. I also care about epistemics and truthseeking in full generality (and my blog will provide a paper trail for that as well). So from my perspective the story that is some people caused a lot of harm (to animals, human health, and truthseeking within EA) by being not only incorrect, but loudly using dishonest tricks to get their way, on an issue I already cared about.
    AFAIK none of my vegan critics have acknowledged either of those points, which is also quite frustrating.
  - You might ask “doesn’t this imply you [Elizabeth] should be extra charitable to vegans?”. The answer is: I am. That’s one reason I’m willing to engage with bad commenters (for one round). I’m also careful to distinguish between vegans and vegan advocates when I complain. If anyone else was this epistemically and materially harmful, in EA or LW, on an issue I cared about, I’d be much harsher.
- I find leaving a reply about comment A on comment B, which has nothing to do with comment A, to be bizarre at best and hostile at worst. Even if you didn’t know how to link to comments, just giving me the author’s name would have cut down on the effort demanded from me.
- Telling Alex “naw man, that’s not meaningful evidence” seems like it will lead to less high quality disagreement with my posts, not more.
- A detailed refutation is a lot of work.
- I saw your question to Nina questioning her self-report before I saw this comment. It is in some sense a reasonable question, but in practice I get low quality versions of it all the time and it tends to come from incurious people. Additionally, I didn’t like that you were speaking as an authority on her life, when she’d given the appropriate caveats.
So the story from my perspective is: I put in a lot of work to help vegans stay healthy and to protect the epistemic commons of two communities explicitly dedicated to strong epistemics. I bent over backwards to acknowledge animal suffering while doing so. A subset of vegan advocates have responded to this work with with overt hostility and shitty epistemics, generating additional work for me that is of no benefit to anyone. I don’t know if those comments make up a majority of comments of all comments or comments from vegans, but they are definitely a supermajority of my emotional memories from those comments.
Now someone comes in demanding answers, without making the barest effort to reduce the work that answering requires. He makes a sinister claim that I’m ignoring criticism, citing evidence that takes seconds to disprove. I know I can’t give an answer with level of confidence he seems to want, and it doesn’t sound like he’s done any homework of his own. This^[2] has historically created a lot of work for me with no benefit to anyone.
LW occasionally produces miracles, so I answer, in a way that leaves open the door to a productive exchange. But don’t put a ton of work into being nicer to the commenter than he was to me, because that’s an unreasonable burden and I have a lot of data that says no amount of work will help.
And then it turned out to be one of those LW stories where someone generally reconsiders their views and apologizes for past behavior, which is great. But I don’t regret my decision on a policy level.
1. ^
  which technically I’m on, but in practice it means I occasionally give an opinion in private or curate something. I have 0 power on a policy level
2. ^
  by which I mean “demanding sure answers w/o homework”. It happens about all kinds of topics, not just veganism.

Elizabeth 28 Mar 2024 18:49 UTC
27 points
1
on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
aZMD: Looking at “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space”, I don’t think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote,
In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not.
I think Zack’s description might be too charitable to Scott. From his description I thought the reference would be strictly about poverty. But the full quote includes a lot about genetics and ability to earn money. The full quote is
The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray. Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too. Not because I have great answers to all of the QZ article’s problems. But just because I don’t have any better ideas^1,2.
Scott doesn’t mention race, but it’s an obvious implication^[1], especially when quoting someone the NYT crowd views as anathema. I think Metz could have quoted that paragraph, and maybe given the NYT consensus view on him for anyone who didn’t know, and readers would think very poorly of Scott^[2].
I bring this up for a couple of reasons:
1. it seems in the spirit of Zack’s post to point out when he made an error in presenting evidence.
2. it looks like Metz chose to play stupid symmetric warfare games, instead of the epistemically virtuous thing of sharing a direct quote. The quote should have gotten him what he wanted, so why be dishonest about it? I have some hypotheses, none of which lead me to trust Metz.
1. ^
  ETA: If you hold the very common assumption that race is a good proxy for genetics. I disagree, but that is the default view.
2. ^
  To be clear: that paragraph doesn’t make me think poorly of Scott. I personally agree with Scott that genetics influences jobs and income. I like UBI for lots of reasons, including this one. If I read that paragraph I wouldn’t find any of the views objectionable (although a little eyebrow raise that he couldn’t find an example with a less toxic reputation- but I can’t immediately think of another example that fits either).

Elizabeth 27 Mar 2024 21:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: frankybegs’s comment on: Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them
Did you know you can link directly to comments on LW? It’s the timestamp/chainlink icon by the author’s name.
The provided evidence looked weak to me, and based on other conversations I’ve seen with Alex Chen I didn’t expect digging into it to be productive. If you’re concerned I encourage you to investigate the research yourself or just run some n=1 experiments.

Elizabeth 27 Mar 2024 18:20 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
I think Metz acted unethically here, for other reasons. But there are lots of cases of people doing bad things that are newsworthy, that can’t be covered without journalists lying to interview subjects. If you ban lying to subjects, a swath of important news becomes impossible to cover.
It’s not obvious to me what the right way to handle this is, but I wanted to mark this cost.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex by Zack_M_Davis (28 Mar 2024 18:03 UTC; 0 points)

Elizabeth 27 Mar 2024 18:15 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
Ours is a community built around the long-term value of telling the truth. Are we unable to imagine reasonable disagreement about when the benefits of revealing real names outweigh the harms? Yes, it goes against our norms, but different groups have different norms.
I think this only holds if NYT has a consistent policy of using real names. My understanding is they have repeatedly written about other people using pseudonyms only, and have not articulated a principled reason to treat Scott differently.