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Fall 2010 Meta Thread
Use this thread for discussion of Less Wrong itself and all things meta, meta-meta, meta-meta-meta, omega, etc.
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Use this thread for discussion of Less Wrong itself and all things meta, meta-meta, meta-meta-meta, omega, etc.
Comments (99)
I'm currently the only "op" on the #lesswrong IRC channel - I'm told new ops are needed. If you want to be an op, could you reply to this with your FreeNode nick? Thanks!
EDIT: added "Adelene" aka AdeleneDawner
There is an IRC channel? Does it have much of a following?
Yes, we've had some really good quality discussions there. There's 38 people logged in at the moment.
Is there a way to read past logs? I hate missing out on interesting discussions.
Not that I am aware of... Anyone know if there are logs?
There are two here but I don't know if there are more elsewhere:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chat_Logs
Here's the link
If it's just a matter of being reachable in case something goes wrong and available to kickban trolls or whatever, I can do that.
I'm Adelene, there.
I'm confused. The above post was at +2 earlier, and now it's at +1. Was it downvoted? If so, why? If someone has an objection to me being an op, I'd prefer that they actually say so, so that the issue can be dealt with (by which I mean I'll probably step down).
I wouldn't read much into it. It wasn't me, but I have sometimes used the policy of voting meta stuff that seems like it ought not to affect karma towards zero (upvote if negative, downvote if positive), and it's plausible that someone else might've used the same reasoning. There's also some noise in the voting due to occasional misclicks.
I suppose that makes sense, and thanks for the insight. I'd still like to hear from the downvoter, though.
It might have been the same person who downvoted my reply--perhaps objecting to the conversation taking place here at all?--but that would contradict jimrandomh's theory, since it brought mine to -1.
docl
I said this in channel, but in case you're keeping it organized here:
I'm available for this if it's useful to you to have someone is more experienced as an irc op than as an LW community member. I won't take it personally if not. ;) I'm relsqui there as here.
I would appreciate feedback regarding the downvote here. Was the offer itself unwelcome? (If so, how can I identify invitiations I'm not welcome to in the future?) Is it merely a vote against opping me? (If so, that's very reasonable, but I don't see what the point is in penalizing me for offering.)
Whoever else you're going to add, I'd appreciate it if you could get around to it sooner rather than later. It's getting very tiring sitting here watching trolls spam up the place when there's no one around to do anything about it.
Thanks for the prompt. Have added:
We're currently have someone working on the LW code. While we can't promise miracles, if you have any ideas, suggestions, or complaints, now might be a good time to air them.
Suggestion: Two different kinds of voting: good post/bad post, agree/disagree. Only the first would count towards karma - the second would be displayed seperately/adjacently.
Posts that argue for wrong ideas well are the worst kind; they lower the accuracy of everyone's beliefs, and they should not be encouraged. There is precedent for karma systems explicitly discouraging downvotes for well-argued wrong posts on Slashdot, and I believe that policy is partially responsible for the extremely high prevalence of inflammatory but plausible sounding falsehoods found there.
What's right and wrong is rarely as clear cut as that when you're talking about the type of topics discussed here. At any rate I'm not talking about rewarding well-written but clearly wrong posts, but rather posts that are interesting but of uncertain truth value (which is a lot of them on this site). Agree/disagree on the other hand would allow people to register whether they believe something is true/a good idea independently of how interesting it is.
I guess rather than having two ratings that could be given seperately, you could vote a post as "agree" or "interesting", both giving postive karma, or "disagree" or "bad", both giving negative karma, but with visual distinguishment. This would give posters more accurate feedback without fundamentally changing the karma system.
Right now if a post has a high rating it's unclear if people actually agree with it/think it's true or just find it useful/interesting, and similarly for low ratings.
I think my most upvoted posts have been the jokes. Perhaps there should be a fun/useful distinction.
Public expression of (dis)agreement creates emotional binding to beliefs and triggers some associated biases. Seeing how popular a belief is can bias people as well, functioning like an indirect argumentum ad populum. I would rather not know how much popular an opinion is; a well-reasoned disagreement or agreement accompanied by additional arguments are gladly accepted, but unsupported opinion expression ranges, in my opinion, from nearly worthless to actually harmful.
Now the popularity of certain beliefs can be discerned from the present karma system too, but still it doesn't "officially" hold that highly upvoted post -> probably true. The less explicit meaning karma has, the less likely it produces biases, or at least I think so.
Also, I agree with jimrandomh. To maintain that a post brings relevant, valid and good argument supporting X and simultaneously disagree with X seems irrational; rationalists are supposed to change their beliefs with new evidence. Upvoting an argument whose conclusion one doesn't accept means either that one values sophistry, or that one has an opinion (enough strong to be willing to express it by voting) in spite of accepting arguments to the contrary. I can imagine few situations when that may be appropriate, but not enough to justify existence of two voting scales.
Personally, I use comments to specify. I notice that a lot of other people do not, and wonder if I'm violating a social more against relatively informationless comments by doing it (although I've gotten upvoted for it).
I agree with the problem, though. I can't tell if the upvotes on this are meant to give me the confirmation I'm asking for, or join in the asking.
Show read/unread comments in a different color.
Before someone posts an article, let them be able to enter a guess as to what it's Karma score will be in three days. After three days reveal the guess.
I'd like to be able to sort a user's contributions when viewing them, e.g. by score or age, like the posts-by-tag view.
And that reminds me-- it would be nice to be able to tag comments.
What do people think of open tagging?
Record upvotes and downvotes separately, so that we can see the difference between "this post was polarising" and "this post was uninspiring"
ETA: Thanks to Bongo (below), I realise this suggestion is redundant, so instead I suggest that it would be nice to have upvote and downvote totals for users. Although.. I'm not sure how one would distinguish between someone with few downvotes because everything they say is awesome versus someone who is excessively conservative in their commenting (or worse, only posts applause lights)
Oh and in case it hasn't been suggested yet: it would be nice to be able to have a comment feed for single posts, or to filter out comments on posts that we really don't care about. (and while I'm at it, could I also get a pony? Thanks)
You can already "Sort By: Controversial"
For the clueless among us: how?
http://i55.tinypic.com/2ey8go4.jpg
Lo and behold, I am enlightened!
I hereby change my previous suggestion to "let users see a total of how often they've been upvoted and downvoted in total"
Never have I been so thoroughly owned in so few characters.
He could do better.
http://is.gd/fjEp7 is 16 characters shorter.
That's not very useful for comments that are replies to other comments, though.
It sorts those too, tested it.
Given that it keeps comments that are replies to other comments nested under the comments that they're replying to, I suspect that that only makes a difference when one comment has two or more replies. It's much more common for a comment to have only one immediate-child-level reply, in which case it seems that the sorting doesn't make any difference in how that reply is displayed. So it's useful in some situations, but not in the majority, hence 'not very useful'.
Could you be sure to update the instructions for reusing the code? I tried to play around with it months ago and couldn't get it working.
This is hugely awesome software so it should be made as easy as possible to adopt.
What was your roadblock? I got it up and running on MacOS, willing to help if you'll describe where things went wrong.
I don't even vaguely remember, but I'll find you if I have trouble next time.
Require new top-level posts to use a tag that indicates which facet of LW's interest it lies with. So each new post would have to choose on (or maybe more) of tags like "bayes", "selfimprovement", "philosophy". So, if I think that Lesswrong should really dedicate itself to the study of Victory and nothing else, I might read only posts with selfimprovement tags.
You mean a system like tagging?
There already is a tag system (you can see the links on the right). Do you want it to be more prominent?
I think he's actually speaking of a fixed, required taxonomy field, rather than free-tagging (to abuse Drupal terminology).
Free tagging is nice, but there's no way to structurally collapse the terms into a hierarchy, so that one can just browse "self improvement" - which might include akrasia, health, and improving personal rationality skills as subtopics.
I think this is also one of the arguments for subfora.
You could have a system where the tag "akrasia" is marked as a subtag of "self-improvement", so that any article tagged with "akrasia" is implicitly tagged with "self-improvement".
I'd like to see a larger textarea for comments. Some places have it resize depending on how much has been typed into it so far, but I'd settle for one which was simply a bit bigger (or a setting).
Of course, whether this is actually a good idea depends on how much you want to encourage me to write essays in the comments. (The bigger input field only matters when I've written a lot and want to skim back for errors.)
The bottom-right corner of the comment text-entry box can be dragged to expand the box or change its size. Or is that not what you're referring to?
That is a browser feature, not a LW feature.
Huh, I guess I'm spoiled. Apologies for contributing noise.
Browser feature to which browser? On Mac, it works in Google Chrome, Stainless, and Safari - it didn't in Firefox, but that's it.
All of the browsers you name are WebKit-based.
That would probably explain it.
If you're a Firefox user, may I recommend It's All Text?
Man, I was all excited about that plugin and then I saw the confusing, ambiguous notes about whether it would play nice on a Mac. Now I'm spooked and not sure if installing it will break something on my computer.
Ah, that will help! Thank you.
You might want to try Chrome, if you haven't. Every textarea on a page has a little grip at the bottom right with which you can resize it to however large you want. Example: http://i55.tinypic.com/w8828w.png
Edit: As noted below by Spurlock and others, this works in all WebKit browsers, which I hadn't realized.
Damn, I've been using Chrome since it was first released and I never knew about that. Thanks.
That IS nice. I've tried Chrome a couple of times and didn't take to it, but I'll put that in its "pro" column for the next time I'm thinking about trying it.
This is a feature of webkit browers in general. Which is to say, anyone who doesn't like Chrome could also use Safari.
As a related side note, Safari's "Reader" feature is a huge improvement for reading HPMoR.
I posted something which is said to belong here.
I'd like to be able to read the LW archives when I'm without internet. So, it'd be nice to have a dump.
I think best would be a git repository with a file for each article, and another file for the comments.
I would like some way to arrange to be notified by email or RSS of additions to my inbox. That way I could be responsive to PMs and replies to my comments even on days when loading LW in my browser to check for the little red envelope is too much of a temptation to procrastinate.
There has always been an "RSS feed for this page" link on the /messages/inbox page, but it has never worked.
I'd like to see a way to save comments. Of course, I could just bookmark the permalinks, but it'd be nicer to have an in-site mechanism.
In what way would it be nicer?
I think saving and viewing them in-site would be a more aesthetically pleasing experience for me. Like saving posts in-site. It's probably not important enough to put more than a small amount of effort into though.
Reminder: We have a subreddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/lesswrong
It needs reanimation.
Related: Posting things from the sequences to appropriate subreddits or conversations is easy reddit karma, and lots of our articles have never been reddited.
I commented on this post after it conveniently showed up as #1 on my logged in reddit homepage. http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/dgrpc/is_it_possible_to_believe_that_truth_is_relative/
I've gotten upvotes for recommending that there should be a recent comments for posts as well as for the whole site, and I'm not the only person who's brought up the idea.
I think a LW how-to would be a good idea. I'm not the only person who's asked about how to use basic features like the message box, and I wonder how many people are missing out on a lot of the functionality of the site.
I brought up the recent comments for posts request a few months ago. I also got a lot of upvotes and agreement, but nothing actually happened.
The difference is that now there's someone to work on such things.
Recent comments for particular posts would be a huge gain in convenience, but I think it would probably make this place less of a community, as well as less of a temptation to akrasia.
From memory: There were people who said their web connection was too slow, and they wanted to be able to read and post by email. They were blown off, but it seems plausible that we could be losing some good people that way. How hard would it be to make the site accessible by email?
Extremely. Need to set up a mail server and some sort of daemon service to reply - and reply with what? The output of
lynx -dumpon the HTML pages that make up the site?Not to mention it's implausible that email would save either time or bandwidth, considering how barebones the site is. If such people exist, they are best off being told they are idiots, to prove their cases about email being more efficient, or working on the codebase to reduce use of JavaScript (which is the principal tech that breaks textual browsers).
Actually, downloading Less Wrong via email would take longer on a slow connection, since the pages are sent with gzip compression over the web, which makes it a whopping 86% smaller. Put another way, getting it over email would take more than 7 times as long. Of course this may vary some from page to page, but the compression should be pretty consistently excellent when you consider the high redundancy of the HTML for handling comment boxes and so on.
I took a look at Less Wrong from a browsing speed standpoint, and it's doing pretty damn well. All the static files are cached for 7 days, and if you refresh a page that hasn't changed and you have it in your browser cache, the server just says "HTTP 302 That page hasn't changed" instead of sending it all over again. My only quibble is that some of the large JavaScript files, like /static/psrs.js, are not gzipped or minified. But again, they get cached for 7 days, so you only need to download them once a week.
So no, someone who's got a slow connection should not view LW over email. The web is actually faster.
My assumption was that someone who wanted to read LW by email would be reading smaller chunks-- just getting articles one at a time without the comments, not seeing the sidebar pieces unless they were specifically asked for. They'd really want a "recent comments" for specific articles.
Why not use RSS, it sounds perfectly designed just for that.
And, having just spent some minutes paging back one page at a time (for some reason, changing the comment count in the url didn't work), I'd like to have a "go back to this date" for recent comments.
I had the same problem going through my own overview to find a specific comment. As far as I can tell, if I wanted to reference my first comment on LW, I would have to page back through all the ones I've ever made.
I wrote a script to coalesce all your comments and posts into one page for easier searching.
Oh, neat. I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
That's awesome but I tried it on myself and it only goes back to February. Do I just have too many comments and posts?
Possibly, or maybe some network error occurred between LW and the server that the script is running on. Try again in a few hours, and drop me a PM if you're still not getting a full archive.
I'd like a way to track which of my comments have had recent changes to their karma. Or is there a method available which I haven't found?
I would also appreciate this.
How much of Wikimedia's "don't be a dick" policy do you think Less Wrong should import? I would quite frankly be happy to mirror the entire essay (with link and credit) onto Less Wrong Wiki and link to it in the FAQ in a "Comment Policy" section.
None. I've never usefully employed it on Wikipedia; dicks don't realize they are dicks or they value the rules over normal editing. If dicks are not dealt with through other means, you have already lost.
'Ignore all rules' is very similar - as WP:ZEN says, "Only the use of IAR that is unnoticed is a true use of IAR."
Referring people to DBAD is against DBAD, isn't it?
I think it's a good essay - that's why I want to refer people to it.
So, if it's not useful for dicks, then why are you interested? I doubt it's a useful prophylactic against becoming a dick.
I'll defer to your greater experience.
It would be nice if the top scoring all-time posts really reflected their impact. Right now there is some bias towards newer posts. Plus, Eliezer's sequences appeared at OB first, which greatly reduced LW upvotes.
Possible solution: every time a post is linked to from a new post, it gets an automatic upvote (perhaps we don't count it if linked to by same author). I don't know if it's technically feasible
And if linked to by someone who's already upvoted it.
I'd like to see a script for Chrome and possibly Firefox to suppress the appearance of the Recent Comments sidebar.
Try adding it to Adbock.
Mental note made to try it.
Software feature request: I would like the little [-] button which collapses a subthread to be duplicated in some form at the bottom of that thread. The use is that when a thread looks like this:
and I am looking at comment C, I can click the new thingy on the bottom edge of comment B's thread to collapse it and bring A in visual proximity to C. It is of course possible to scroll up and count box borders, or follow C's permalink and do 'show context', but these are both tedious.
(Then there's export to NNTP so that I could use a decent desktop UI for threaded reading. Or my 'hyperbolic threading' idea which I haven't gotten around to writing the web prototype of.)
There's desktop apps for threaded reading? New to me.
The one I used back when I was still on Usenet was MacSOUP.
It presents a single thread in a two-paned window; the top pane contains a graphical tree (replies rightward, siblings downward) of messages, highlighting unread/read, your own posts, and marked-interesting-or-worthless subthreads, and the bottom pane contains the current message. Furthermore, it's an offline reader, so every message is pre-downloaded; hit the spacebar and you are at the next message instantaneously.
While it never showed more than one message at a time (being Usenet, there were usually quotes anyway), the thread tree (which could be navigated by keyboard) combined with the speed of navigation was very effective at letting one understand the complete structure of a discussion.
I really hope that the blogs-and-feeds crowd gets threading implemented and someone writes an app like this for Atom/RSS/web pages, so that I can have that system again but with modernization of the other aspects.