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Attention Less Wrong: We need an FAQ
Less Wrong is extremely intimidating to newcomers and as pointed out by Academian something that would help is a document in FAQ form intended for newcomers. Later we can decide how to best deliver that document to new Less Wrongers, but for now we can edit the existing (narrow) FAQ to make the site less scary and the standards more evident.
Go ahead and make bold edits to the FAQ wiki page or use this post to discuss possible FAQs and answers in agonizing detail.
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Comments (108)
So, am I the only one who thinks new users shouldn't be expected to read the sequences before participating? There are works of brilliance there but there are also posts that are far from required reading.
I mean, if a cognitive psychologist shows up and wants to teach us about some cool bias why the hell would she need to read about many worlds or Eliezer's coming of age as a rationalist?
What the FAQ should do is say what topics we've covered, what we think about them and from there link to posts in the sequences where our positions on those topics are covered in more depth. So if someone shows up they can look over the material, decide they want to talk to us about physics and read the posts on physics, and then say what they want to say.
Besides, if someone is just reading the new posts as they come they'll eventually pick up most of what is in the sequences just from links and repetition.
If I comment on Less Wrong, it's because factors conspire to make it worthwhile for me. That is, I participate because I find it fun or helpful. Often, I also find reading background material fun or helpful. But my response when I'm caught not having reading something -- this is thought but not spoken -- is that I will be dutiful about reading all the background material when I am being 'paid by the hour'. I am willing to suffer the down votes; the links that come with them are most efficient for me in the long run and help others who also don't have a mental map of all that has been discussed here.
I have a "matching effort" policy, here and in life in general, where I exert more and more effort on a task as I find that the effort is rewarded. Expecting people to do a lot of work upfront, even before they have formed a positive opinion about Less Wrong, is unrealistic. Some people like to lurk for a while, but I presume there are others like me that want to immediately engage in the active experience of Less Wrong, or not bother. This is probably just a personality difference, whether people prefer to prepare first or just dive in.
In the current state of the FAQ as I read it, reading the sequences is a strong suggestion, and new users are warned that posting without reading the sequences first may result in downvotes and links to the relevant posts, if something is missed that we consider obvious.
That said, I think we should have a simple, short-inferential-distance version of the main points of the relevant sequences (ideally without distracting crosslinking) that someone could skim over to make sure there aren't any major gaps in knowledge to worry about.
You are far from the only such user - I agree with the edits you made to remove this propositional content from the FAQ.
I had just posted this on the same topic in the simultaneous and somewhat overlapping discussion on the Proposed New Features thread.
I agree that new readers will come in with different interests and areas of expertise, and strongly suggesting that all of them read all of the sequences before posting (or even reading!) Less Wrong doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, if we're really trying to grow the community. It seems like a good idea to edit the FAQ in the way you suggested. I also suggested thread discussions for answering questions and directing new readers to reading that would be particularly useful to them; at least, I would suggest that if it turns out people here are generally willing to contribute to that sort of thread.
Just thought I'd jump in to say that, when I was a newcomer, the most confusing thing for me were constant references to AI and FAI. To be honest, I am still left puzzled by such discussions. I would suggest the FAQ contain a brief outline of what FAI is, and if anybody knows a basic-level post about it, I'd be personally obliged.
This is Eliezer's baby... but making the second question about him kind of screams "cult!" Objections to changing it?
Wholeheartedly agree. I doubt most people would care who he is upon encountering the site, though it should be somewhere on the FAQ, if only because his karma is so high my first hypothesis would be that he's a bot that's learned to game the system.
Why is "claim an objective morality" on the list of things you shouldn't post against consensus about? I'm a moral realist; historically this has gotten me only slightly heckled, not decried as an obvious amateur.
How about "claim a universally compelling morality"?
Sure. Related: there are no universally compelling arguments
What exactly would the domain for a universally compelling morality be? Too large a domain and it is trivially false, too small a domain and it might even be true.
Wait, doesn't Eliezer claim there's an objective morality?
I would describe Eliezer's position as
standard relativism,
minus the popular confusion that relativism means that you would or could choose to find no moral arguments compelling,
plus the belief that nearly all humans would, with sufficient reflection, find nearly the same moral arguments compelling because of our shared genetic heritage.
Eliezer objects to being called a relativist, but I think that this is just semantics.
The third bullet goes so far beyond relativism that it seems quite justified to deny the word. If just about everyone everywhere is observed to have a substantial commonality in what they think right or wrong (whether or not genetic heritage has anything to do with it), then that's enough to call it objective, even if we do not know why it is so, how it came to be, or how it works. Knowledge may be imperfect, and people may disagree about it, but that does not mean that there is nothing that it is knowledge about.
We can imagine Paperclippers, Pebblesorters, Baby Eaters, and Superhappies, but I don't take these imagined beings seriously except as interesting thought experiments, to be trumped if and when we actually encounter intelligent aliens.
(BTW, regarding accessibility to newcomers: I just made four references that will be immediately obvious to any long-time reader, but completely opaque to any newcomer. A glossary page would be a good idea.)
Paperclippers
Pebblesorters
Baby Eaters and Superhappies
He's a subjectivist as well.
I think that's what Tyrrell means by standard relativism
Well they're different.
And Eliezer is both.
This partially depends on where you place 'ethics'. If ethics is worried about "what's right" in Eliezer's terms, then it's not relativist at all - the pebble-sorters are doing something entirely different from ethics when they argue.
However, if you think the pebble-sorters are trying to answer the question "what should I do" and properly come up with answers that are prime, and you think that answering that question is what ethics is about, then Eliezer is some sort of relativist.
And the answers to these questions will inform the question about subjectivism. In the first case, clearly what's right doesn't depend upon what anybody thinks about what's right. - it's a non-relativist objectivism.
In the second case, there is still room to ask whether the correct answer to the pebblesorters asking "what should I do" depends upon their thoughts on the matter, or if it's something non-mental that determines they should do what's prime; thus, it could be an objective or subjective relativism.
I've don't know of any relativists who aren't subjectivists. That article points out that non-subjectivist relativism is a logical possibility, but the article doesn't give any actual examples of someone defending such a position. I wonder if any exist.
Hobbes might be a candidate if you're okay with distinguishing laws and dictates from the mental states of rulers.
The article does give an example: cultural relativism. Its objective in that it doesn't depend on the mind of the individual, but it's still relative to something: the culture you are in.
That is not how I read it. There's a big parenthetical aside breaking up the flow, but excising that leaves
(Bolding added.) So, either individualistic or cultural relativisms can be subjectivist. That leaves the possibility, in principle, that either could be non-subjectivist, but the article gives no example of someone actually staking out such a position.
You continue:
I think that cultural relativism is mind-dependent in the sense that the article uses the term.
ok, location relativism then. It's doesn't depend on your what's going on inside your head, but it's still relative.
I'm confused by the terminology, but I think I would be a relativist objectivist.
I certainly think that morality is relative -- what is moral is agent-dependent -- but whether or not the agent is behaving morally is an objective fact about that agent's behavior, because the behavior either does or doesn't conform with that agent's morality.
But I don't think the distinction between a relativist objectivist and a relativist subjectivist is terribly exciting: it just depends on whether you consider an agent 'moral' if it conforms to its morality (relativist objectivist) or yours (relativist subjectivist).
But maybe I've got it wrong, because this view seems so reasonable, whereas you've indicated that it's rare.
The key phrase for subjectivism is "mind dependent" so if you think other people's morality comes from their minds then you are a relativist subjectivist.
I just realized I don't think people should conform to their own morality, I think people should conform to my morality which I guess would make me a subjective non-relativist.
So you believe that the word morality is a two-place word and means what an agent would want to do under certain circumstances? What word do you use to means what actually ought to be done? The particular thing that you and, to a large degree all humans would want to do under specified circumstances? Or do you believe there isn't anything that should be done other than what whatever agents exist want? Please note that that position is also a statement about what the universe ought to look like.
Yes, morality is a two-place word -- the evaluation function of whether an action is moral has two inputs: agent, action. "Agent" can be replaced by anything that conceivably has agency, so morality can be considered system-dependent, where systems include social groups and all humanity, etc.
I wouldn't say morality is what the agent wants to do, but is what the agent ought to do, given its preferences. So I think I am still using it in the usual sense.
I can talk about what I ought to do, but it seems to me I can't talk about what another agent ought to do outside their system of preferences. If I had their preferences, I ought to do what they ought to do. If they had my preferences, they ought to do what I ought to do. But to consider what they ought to do, with some mixture of preferences, isn't incoherent.
I can have a preference for what another agent does, of course, but this is different than asserting a morality. For example, if they don't do what I think is moral, I'm not morally culpable. I don't have their agency.
You're thinking of the wrong sense of objective. An objective morality, according to this article, is a morality that doesn't depend on the subject's mind. It depends on something else. I.e., if we were trying to determine what should_byrnema is, we wouldn't look at you're preferences, instead we would look somewhere else. So for example:
A nonrelativist objectivist would say that we would look at the one true universially compelling morality that's written into the fabric of reality (or something like that). So should_byrnema is just should, period.
A relativist objectivist might say (this is just one example - cultural relativism), that we would look for should_byrnema in the culture that you are currently embedded in. So should_byrnema is should_culture.
I'm not sure that subjective nonrelativism is a possibility though.
I think "subjective" means based on opinion (a mind's assessment).
If Megan-is-moral if she thinks she's moral, then the morality of Megan is subjective and depends on her mind. If Megan is moral if I think she's moral, then it's subjective and depends on my mind.
I think that whether an agent is moral or not is a fact, and doesn't depend upon the opinion/assessment of any mind. But we would still look at the agent's preferences to determine the fact. I thought this was already described by the word 'relative'.
Surely it's a logical possibility. Stipulate: "What's right is either X or Y, where we ask each person in the universe to think of a random integer, sum them, and pull off the last bit, 0 meaning X is right and 1 meaning Y is right."
ETA: CEV, perhaps?
I'm fairly certain you could find people implicitly arguing for some varieties of non-subjective relativism. For example, cultural relativism advances the view that one's culture determines the facts about ethics for oneself, but it's not necessarily mental acts on the part of persons in the culture that determine the facts about ethics. Similarly, Divine Command Theory will give you different answers for different gods, but it's not the mental acts of the persons involved that determine the facts about ethics.
It's an interesting question. The SEP link in Jack's comment actually gives Divine Command Theory as an example of non-relativistic subjectivism. It's subjectivist because what is moral depends on a mental fact about that god — namely, whether that god approves.
It's less clear whether cultural relativism is subjectivist. I'm inclined to think of culture as depending to a large extent on the minds of the people in that culture. (Different peoples whose mental content differed in the right way would have different cultures, even if their material conditions were otherwise identical.) This would make cultural relativism subjectivist as well.
Indeed, I was glossing over that distinction; if you think cultures or God have mental states, then that's a different story. There's also a question of how much "subjectivism" really depends on the relevant minds, and in what way.
I could construct further examples, but we already understand it's logically possible, so that would not be of any help if nobody is advocating them. I think the well has run dry on my end w.r.t examples of relativism in the wild.
Ah, i see. I had always understood relativism to mean what the article calls subjective relativism.
If we're talking about the meanings of terms, how is semantics not a relevant question?
You asked what Eliezer claims, not for the words that he uses to claim it.
Objective in the sense that you can point to it, but can't make it up according to your whims. But not objective in the sense of "being written into the fabric of the universe" or that every single agent, with enough reflection, would realize that its the "correct" morality.
I still haven't gotten through the metaethics sequence yet, so I can't answer that exactly, but if he believed in an "objective" morality (i.e. some definition of "should" that is meaningful from the perspective of fundamental reality, not based on any facts about minds, or an internally-consistent set of universally compelling moral arguments), then he would probably expect a superintelligence to be smart enough (many times over) to discover it and follow it, and that is quite the opposite of his current position. If I recall correctly, that was his pre-2002 position, and he now considers it a huge mistake.
"Fundamental reality" doesn't have a perspective, so it seems weird to draw the lines there. Rather, there's a fact about what's prime, and the pebblesorters care about that, and there's a fact about what's right, and humans care about that. We can be mistaken about what's right, and we can have disagreements about what's right, and we can change our minds. And given time and progress, we will hopefully get closer to understanding what's right. And if the pebblesorters claim that they care about what's right rather than what's prime, they're factually incorrect.
Of course — I was just doing my best to imagine the mindset of a non-religious person who believes in an objectively objective morality (i.e. that even in the absence of a deity, the universe still somehow imposes moral laws). Admittedly, I don't encounter too many of those (people who think they've devised universally compelling moral arguments are more common; even big-O Objectivists seem to just be an overconfident version of that), but I do still meet them from time to time, e.g. people who manage to believe in things like "natural law" or "natural rights" (as facts about the universe rather than facts about human minds) without theistic belief.
All I was saying was that things like that are what the phrase "objective morality" make me think of, and that Eliezer's conclusions are different enough that I'm not sure they quite fit in the same category. His may be an "objective morality" by our best definitions of "objective" and "morality", but it could make people (especially new people) imagine all the wrong things.
For example, here. Read the whole thing, not just this illustrative quote:
That's a part of the metaethics sequence, to which this posting might be a suitable entry point, which says where he's going, and tells you what to read before going there.
"Objective morality" usually implies some outside force imposing morality, and the debate over metaethics (at least in the wider world of philosophy, if not on LW) is usually presented as a choice between that and relativism. If I'm understanding Eliezer's current position correctly, it's that morality is an objective fact about subjective minds. This quote sums it up quite well:
Unfortunately, when people talk about "objective morality", they're usually talking about the commandments the Lord hath given unto us, or they're talking about coming up with a magical definition of "should" that automatically is the correct one for every being in the universe and doesn't depend on any facts about human minds, or they're talking about their great new fake utility function that correctly compresses all human values (at least all good human values, recursion be damned). I don't know how Eliezer feels about the terminology, but if it were up to me, I'd agree with advising against "claim[ing] an objective morality", if only so that people have to think about what parts of their arguments are more about words than reality.
If I recall correctly it seemed that you mostly argued for an objective morality instead of using it as the (explicit or implicit) linchpin of a larger argument. The former is well and good but the latter is irritating (e.g. "Deity X must exist because there is an objective morality").
If that's what was meant, then it shouldn't appear as a separate item in a list that also contains the unrelated injunction against easy solutions to FAI.
Great idea, Kevin. I would also suggest adding the FAQ to the About page here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1/about_less_wrong/, to allow new users to find it more easily.
Less Wrong needs a general forum, not just an FAQ
I think tommccabe was discussing this in Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - it would be better to keep the threads separate.
What tone do people think the FAQ should take? Right now it is pretty serious and straight forward, jokes would make us less intimidating. But maybe that is a bad idea.
It's a reference - a serious tone is appropriate for people jumping in to quickly find small amounts of data.
In a "Quick-Start Guide" or the like*, a bit of levity would be appropriate.
* I have a file on my hard disk which was supposed to become this, but hasn't been touched since March.
"We need a FAQ" is solution language.
Why do we think we need one? What appears to be the problem?
What is the desired outcome?
So the hold of on solutions thing isn't wrong but in this case we've talked about how LW is difficult for newcomers many, many times before. An FAQ has long been something we agreed on, it hasn't gotten done for reasons of akrasia. In this case, postponing work on the FAQ because we need to keep talking about the problem is just going to make it less likely that the work gets done.
I remember the last time we had this discussion, my conclusion was that we needed "better newcomer orientation".
An FAQ is a (possibly) necessary, and (probably) not sufficient, component of a set of solutions leading to the outcome "better newcomer orientation".
What we are planning is, by the way, not literally an FAQ. The Lurkers thread didn't reveal frequent questions people had that we're not answering, or that they have trouble finding the answers to.
It did reveal a frequent observation, namely that people find the site intimidating.
I suspect that no amount of answering frequently-not-asked questions (in an out of the way page) is going to fix that.
I do believe that more discussion of which kinds of top-level posts and which attitudes in the comment stream encourage or discourage participation could fix that.
We should talk about this. We should also just write an FAQ. We don't need to postpone the latter for the former.
The Lurkers aren't who the FAQ is for- if they've been lurking a while they've probably figured a lot out. But when new users show up who haven't been lurking the same topics have come up repeatedly.
Lots of lurkers who claim to be intimidated by our site, and lots of non-lurkers seemingly unfamiliar with our standards.
We can now do better than "lots", thanks to Kevin.
Someone with some time on their hands could, for instance, tabulate the top-level comments among the 422 posted to "Attention Lurkers".
I've trialed that on a small sample. Out of the 22 first comments, 11 say something that I interpret as "intimidated", 3 say something to the effect that they're no longer interested by the topics on LW, 8 say that they're lurkers but OK with it (or say nothing beyond "hi"). So that's roughly half of them explicitly saying they're intimidated.
The more salient fact to me is that all 22 did write a comment when encouraged to do so and the barrier to participation was suitably lowered.
Another salient comment: "Anytime anyone wants to discuss prenatal diagnosis and the ethical implications, let me know", that being the commenter's area of expertise. We may be missing out on many opportunities to engage, by failing to deliberately open up discussions on topics where the community has hidden expertise.
I'm thinking I will write up a poll-type post asking people what their area of professional expertise is, and which issue in their domain they think would most benefit from application of the techniques discussed on LW.
...and which techniques of their domain could benefit LW by being discussed, I would add.
Are you definitely going to do that "Ask Less Wrong"? I want to post it now but don't want to take your karma/status for having that idea... so if you don't plan on making it in the next 24 hours, can I make it? It can really just be a question, the post itself should be very short.
I'd prefer to sleep on it. This isn't quite a spur-of-the-moment idea, I've had this idea for a post setting forth a "marketplace" metaphor for such discussions for a while.
But possibly the post asking for expertise info should be separate from that anyway, for housekeeping reasons.
Should probably happen within 24h anyway, but we've had a fair number of posts just today, so it's best to let things calm down a bit.
ETA: it's not quite "Ask LW", more like "Tell LW". ;)
The desired outcome was that I made this top-level post right before going to sleep, then other people expanded and improved the FAQ as a result of me calling attention to it, which seems to have happened.
Normally a good question, but it's been answered already: the community is intimidating to new contributors. There are lots of frequently asked questions, and they deserve answering.
Maybe reverse the subheadings, so that the questions about what we think come before the details of how to use the site?
How do I format my comments?
Instructions are provided from the "Help" link under each comment box. The usual things are as follows:
More information about the Markdown syntax can be found at daringfireball.net.
I suggest adding that link to the help sheet or the about page-- I had no idea there were formatting options beyond what was on the help sheet.
Just add it to the wiki.
Where? Under "Feedback", before "What's all this about upvotes and downvotes"?
Put it after 5.1
After "How do I submit an article"? When people will be mathematically certain to submit comments before they ever submit an article?
I have to say that I don't like the FAQ as it stands - the entire thing strikes me as patronizing and hostile. I'll contribute, but I'm not going to be happy about it.
I mean, do whatever makes sense. It's our FAQ we can do what we want to. If something doesn't work we can change it.
I don't like the recent edit either. If you can make it less patronizing and hostile, do!
I'll see when I can scrape together enough motivation to tackle it - looking at it is leaving me rather frustrated, as I implied.
I've edited one of the subsections to make it less patronizing.
Very nice!
I agree - a definite improvement.
In retrospect: yeah, that's the right place. Added.