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?
- ^
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.
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).
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:
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.