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Wei_Dai comments on Should I believe what the SIAI claims? - Less Wrong
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"Eliezer Yudkowsky facts" is meant to be fun and entertainment. Do you agree that there is a large subjective component to what a person will think is fun, and that different people will be amused by different types of jokes? Obviously many people did find the post amusing (judging from its 47 votes), even if you didn't. If those jokes were not posted, then something of real value would have been lost.
The situation with XiXiDu's post's is different because almost everyone seems to agree that it's bad, and those who voted it up did so only to "stimulate discussion". But if they didn't vote up XiXiDu's post, it's quite likely that someone would eventually write up a better post asking similar questions and generating a higher quality discussion, so the outcome would likely be a net improvement. Or alternatively, those who wanted to "stimulate discussion" could have just looked in the LW archives and found all the discussion they could ever hope for.
If almost everyone thought it's bad I would expect it to have much more downvotes than upvotes, even given the few people who voted it up to "stimulate discussion". But you probably know more about statistics than I do, so never mind.
Before or after the SIAI build a FAI? I waited half a decade for any of those questions to be asked in the first place.
Right, haven't thought about that! I'll be right back reading a few thousand comments to find some transparency.
This is true. You might also be able to think of jokes that aren't worth making even though a group of people would find then genuinely funny.
I agree with Aleksei about the Facts article.
Can you please explain why you think those jokes shouldn't have been made? I thought that making fun of authority figures is socially accepted in general, and in this case shows that we don't take Eliezer too seriously. Do you disagree?
Making him the subject of a list like that looks plenty serious to me.
Beyond that, I don't think there's much that I can say. There's a certain tone-deafness that's rubbing me wrong in both the post and in this discussion, but exactly how that works is not something that I know how to convey with a couple of paragraphs of text.
I have a theory: all the jokes parse out to "Eliezer is brilliant, and we have a bunch of esoteric in-jokes to show how smart we are". This isn't making fun of an authority figure.
This doesn't mean the article was a bad idea, or that I didn't think it was funny. I also don't think it's strong evidence that LW and SIAI aren't cults.
ETA: XiXiDu's comment that this is the community making fun of itself seems correct.
Ok, I think I have an explanation for what's going on here. Those of us "old hands" who went through the period where LW was OB, and Eliezer and Robin were the only main posters, saw Eliezer as initially having very high status, and considered the "facts" post as a fun way of taking him down a notch or two. Newcomers who arrived after LW became a community blog, on the other hand, don't have the initial high status in mind, and instead see that post as itself assigning Eliezer a very high status, which they see as unjustified/weird/embarrassing. Makes sense, right?
(Voted parent up from -1, btw. That kind of report seems useful, even if the commenter couldn't explain why he felt that way.)
You seemed to seriously imply that Eliezer didn't understand that the "facts" thread was a joke, while actually he was sarcastically joking by hinting at not getting the joke in the comment you replied to. I downvoted the comment to punish stupidity on LW (nothing personal, believe it or not, in other words it's a one-step decision based on the comment alone and not on impression made by your other comments). Wei didn't talk about that.
I guess after so many comments implying things I never meant to say I was a bit aggrieved. Never mind.