Open Thread: January 2010

Kaj_Sotala

And happy new year to everyone.

After pondering the adefinitemaybe case for a bit, I can't shake the feeling that we really screwed this one up in a systematic way, that Less Wrong's structure might be turning potential contributors off (or turning them into trolls). I have a few ideas for fixes, and I'll post them as replies to this comment.

Essentially, what it looks like to me is that adefmay checked out a few recent articles, was intrigued, and posted something they thought clever and provocative (as well as true). Now, there were two problems with adefmay's comment: first, they had an idea of the meaning of "evidence" that rules out almost everything short of a mathematical proof, and secondly, the comment looked like something that a troll could have written in bad faith.

But what happened next is crucial, it seems to me. A bunch of us downvoted the comment or (including me) wrote replies that look pretty dismissive and brusque. Thus adefmay immediately felt attacked from all sides, with nobody forming a substantive and calm reply (at best, we sent links to pages whose relevance was clear to us but not to adefmay). Is it any wonder that they weren't willing to reconsider their definition of evidence, and that they started relishing their assigned role?

It might be too late now to salvage this particular situation, but the general problem needs to be addressed. When somebody with rationalist potential first signs up for an account, I think the chances of this situation recurring are way too high if they just jump right into a current thread as seems natural, because we seem like people who talk in special jargon and dismiss the obvious counterarguments for obscure reasons. It's not clear from the outset that there are good reasons for the things we take for granted, or that we're answering in shorthand because the Big Idea the new person just presented is fully answered within an old argument we've had.

When it became clear that adefmay couldn't role with the punches there were quite a few sensitive comments with good advice and explanations for why he/she had been sent links. His/her response to those was basically to get rude, indignant and come up with as many counter-arguments as possible while not once trying to understand someone else's position or consider the possibility he/she was mistaken about something.

I don't know if adefmay was intentionally trolling but he/she was certainly deficient in rationalist virtue.

That said, I think we need to handle newcomers better anyway and an FAQ section is really important. I'd help with it.

7orthonormal16y

Partial Fix #2: I can't help but think that some people might have hesitated to downvote adefmay's first comment, or might have replied at greater length with a more positive tone, had it been obvious that this was in fact adefmay's first post. (I did realize this, but replied in a comically insulting fashion anyhow. Mea culpa.) It might be helpful if there were some visible sign that, for instance, this was among the 20 first comments from an account.

2orthonormal16y

Partial Fix #1: We put together a special forum (subset of threads and posts) for a number of old argument topics, and make sure that it is readily accessible from the main page, or especially salient for new people. We have a norm there to (as much as possible) write out our points from scratch instead of using shorthand and links as we do in discussions between LW veterans. Benefits: * It's much less of a status threat to be told that one's comment belongs in another thread than to have it dismissed as happened to adefmay. * Most of the trouble seems to happen when new people jump into a current thread and derail a conversation between LW veterans, who react brusquely as above. Separating the newest/most advanced conversations from the old objections should make everyone happier. * I find that the people who have been on LW for a few months have just the right kind of zeal for these newfound ideas that makes them eager and able to defend them against the newest people, who find them absurd. I think this would be a good thing for both groups of people, and I expect it to happen naturally should such a place be created. So if we made some collection of "FAQ threads" and made a big, obvious, enticing link to them on either the front page or the account creation page (that is, we give them a list of counterintuitive things we believe or interesting questions we've tackled, in the hopes they head there first), we might avoid more of these unfortunate calamities in the future.