I like your analysis before the "--".
It depends on (p) the probability of an uncivil and inarticulate post being correct. If p is very low, the risk of misplacing status outweighs the possible benefit of truth. If p is very high, vice versa.
What is your p? At what value of p is the boundary between the two policies?
(Allow me to treat "p(correct)" as "a general measure of (probable) goodness of content" so as to not be distracted.)
Both the appreciation of a post and the inclination to award status can (, usually are and probably ought to) be dependent on other factors than correctness. This may either be because having pleasant conversation (civility and articulateness) is a terminal value or because civility and articulateness are instrumental in achieving a goal beyond the scope of the immediate calculation. Either way, p = 1 can be easily dominated by other concerns. p is insufficient for the representation you are aiming for. Consider adding a direct weighting.
It depends on (p) the probability of an uncivil and inarticulate post being correct.
Again on this part, I am not sure whether you mean:
Should we priviledge a over b or vice versa?
I personally tend to weigh them approximately equally. At least, I can't guess which of the two I privilege more. (Again, I am using 'correct' extremely liberally.)
I like your analysis before the "--".
Ok. I thought about my post on a walk earlier and realized that it is flimsy after the '--'. a vs. b is the important part.
civility and articulateness are instrumental in achieving a goal beyond the scope of the immediate calculation
A community where posts are forced to meet a certain treshold of civility and articulateness, and if they don't, ignored even when correct and the poster punished. But above the treshold only correctness matters... Maybe such a community does produce more truth than a free-f...
There was recently a submission here posing criticism a well-known contributor, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Admittedly, whatever question the poster intended to ask was embedded within a post which was evidently designed to be a test of our rationality. Eliezer didn't seem to care too much, stating that the issue was
I asked Eliezer why mormon2's post belonged on the SIAI blog and not here. He responded thus:
This response is unsatisfactory. Either certain posts belong on the SIAI blog and not here, or they don't and can be posted here. It can't be both ways
Note that I do not approve of mormon2's submission, as of the recent statement he made in an edit. I do, however, approve of the idea of such a submission. Somebody should be able to make a top-level post directing questions and criticism towards another author, under certain circumstances. I can't fully pin down just what the precise circumstances should be - it's not up for me to decide in any case.
But consider a high-profile contributor, who already has many posts about himself (several self-submitted) and his work, who has at times responded to off-site comments with top-level posts on Less Wrong, and who has recently given his blessing to a post entitled Less Wrong Q&A With Eliezer Yudkowsky - when such a person suggests that a submission concerning himself and his work belongs as a comment in the monthly Open Thread, or as a comment on an off-site blog, I find it very outlandish.
Eliezer is not an ordinary contributor. In the beginning, it was apparently envisioned that there would be a limit to the number of non-Yudkowsky/Hanson posts submitted per day. Obviously that policy has not been enacted. In any case, by my count there have been 682 submissions to Less Wrong as of December 14th. Eliezer has contributed 108 of those (the median number of posts per author being 2.5)1. He is not a "specific person" being asked to justify "specific decisions", as he would hypothetically suggest if his intent were to be manipulative. It's actually quite difficult for me to characterize Eliezer's role here. Mostly he's a great author and commenter. Sometimes he comments as the site editor. At other times, he seems to submit as though this were his personal blog, Yahoo! Answers, or the comment thread on an entirely different site. He seems to have developed into a sort of community icon at Less Wrong.
So it occurs to me (after having expended my google-fu and searched the LW-Wiki), that there are no posted rules for appropriate top-level topics on Less Wrong. If there are, please correct me. At Overcoming Bias we submitted articles to the editors and they decided whether to publish them (I assume there were few or no restrictions for the editors' own work). The only restriction I know of on Less Wrong is that you need a Karma Score of at least 20 or 40 to submit posts. This is clearly insufficient, since if you have 8000 Karma you can submit anything. How many moderators do we have? I have yet to find a list.
I feel that we must address these issues, either presently or ultimately. I know of no other decent community with Less Wrong's stated goal. And yet I am very much vexed by these inconsistencies I perceive between the stated purpose and the site's actual operation.
1I put the date marking the beginning of LessWrong.com as an open community at March 5th, 2009. This was the date of the first post by someone other than Eliezer / Robin after Eliezer's announcement that a beta version of the site had been launched.