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Konkvistador comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well... disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
I support this proposal and would like to join the mailing list if one becomes available. But why do you think a mailing list would fare better than a website? Because of restricted access?
I guess it has more of a "secret society" vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
Is 1100 enough karma? I've tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don't know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
Yes, that's another way in which it just doesn't look like a good idea. When you're organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you're doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don't make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn't perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn't be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don't seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn't made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster -- and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual -- who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic ("openly," at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I'm glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I'm not sure how you're supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
Coming out and saying what exactly?
Is this a joke? I don't know what exactly. That's the point.
OK, then to phrase it in purely grammatical terms, what exactly is the antecedent of the pronoun "it" in your question above?
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I'd like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I'm afraid to do so. There's nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. ("Offends" in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it's smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It's this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that's offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful "Soylent Green is people" bombshells.
That would be cool. I'd prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
I have over 1500 karma as of today; I think 1100 ought to be enough.
I think the mailing list should be set up as invitation only, with some place where one can request an invitation. Then current members could look at their posts, and if the person has a lot of contributions and looks open-minded enough, they can be allowed on. There wouldn't have to be a hard-and-fast karma cutoff if every new member was "previewed" and disruptive members could be banned easily.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members. The LW moderators and/or Lukeprog* is an obvious Schelling point, but they may not have the time or inclination. Conversely, I could probably figure out how to create a mailing list and would be willing to do so, but I don't have the reputation here to be seen as a valid judge of who's non-ideological enough to join.
*Lukeprog would presumably have a significant amount to post to such a list, and is widely respected by the community despite not having moderator powers.
Those are more literally correct, but the acronyms don't work out as ironically.
Well, given that the idea is to create a place where certain norm-violating ideas can be discussed, it seems like the ones with veto power ought to be the ones who have come up with the idea but are reluctant to discuss it in public (I admit I've rather lost track of who this is, in this instance). If nothing else, the veto would be exercised by simply not discussing the topic.
"Contrarian Conspiracy for Correcting Politics"
"New Association for Apolitically Criticizing Politics"
"New Society for Discussing, Apolitically, Politics"
The problem with setting up such a society is that it's about as secure as a house of cards. If I was a potential attacker, all I'd need to do would be,
In fact, the first three steps aren't even necessary, if you assume that instead of being an outside attacker, I'm an internal member who'd gone rogue. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping a person like that.
Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.
One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.
I don't see why hypothetical conspiratorial mailing list (HCML) identities and LW identities have to be linked at all, really.
This is a good idea, but it does not guarantee security; and I'm not sure how effective it would be against a determined attacker. It would be relatively easy to collect a large enough corpus of text and then use it to match up "46233782482@gmail.com" with "Bugmaster of LessWrong". And, of course, this assumes that Google won't roll over and surrender all of Mr. 46233782482's contact information to the authorities when said authorities come knocking.
How determined an attacker are we planning for, here? The original goal was to just meliorate the damage that a theoretical rogue member could cause (as it seems hopeless to try to prevent that). Are you really anticipating "the authorities" getting involved?
Trivial inconvenience to protect against a trivial danger.
I find the scenario very low probability if high impact.
This might be useful.
I like this idea, but since I have very little karma, I would be a bit sad to see it happen. Could an email list be contrived in such a way that users with lower karma could read the correspondences of the group without having the ability to post messages? If possible, it seems like that would maintain the integrity of discussion while also allowing interested parties to learn new things.
If you don't have a lot of karma, and the requisite posting history of being nonpartisan, how could the Conspirators trust you not to spread around the Deep Dark Secrets that would give the site a bad reputation?
(If I seem to be giving off mixed signals, it's because I'm not sure how I feel about this idea myself yet. I'm having a really hard time imagining what could be somehow so beyond the pale as to be impossible to allude to in public.)
To take an attested example, discussion of the beliefs and tactics of the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community was either heavily discouraged or banned, I forget which, because of the unpleasant air it seemed to give to this site.
I'm lost. Isn't that exactly what started this discussion upthread?
That is not really discussion about PUA, but rather about what is problematic about discussing PUA.
Good question. I don't have an answer, but I guess there could be tiers? Like, if a person* has a couple hundred karma, has been active on the site for a while, and has conducted him/herself well then that person could receive low level access. With the concern you brought up it's hard to choose criteria that would make a user trustworthy but that wouldn't warrant just letting them in completely. I guess I would advocate less stringent requirements. Like, nobody with negative karma and to be accepted you need to have been on the site for x amount of time and have been polite/non-inflammatory/thoughtful in all previous discussions. If a person has low karma because they rarely comment, they likely won't post much in the email list anyway.
If we need a way to find out if someone's trustworthy, can't we just ask them to raise their right hand?
*This hypothetical person happens to be me.
You'd have to ask the people who know what's going on and why it should be kept secret.
(I am not one of them.)
Apolitical Conspiracy could be abbreviated as APC, a vehicle useful to well-resourced partisans who want to decide when and where to engage without resorting to sneaking about dressed as civilians.
I'd like to request an invite, if this is still a thing.
The comment sections on iSteve and Roissy are not great places either.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy's blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don't count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can't think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I'm inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there's freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person-- a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
There's a hypothesis I've seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven't seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can't find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I've looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the "No Hostility" threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
From I Don't Know:
If I'm dealing with someone who doesn't think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn't understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn't strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he's wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one's self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one's best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik's that focus more on appealing to people who aren't yet rational.
I didn't see myself as responding to his point, just to yours.
Indeed, that's my point.
A non-archived mailing list, I think, to greatly reduce the potential cost of adding new members.
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I've been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.
Everything? I don't believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.
Yes, of course, it's not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.
I agree with you completely regarding privacy. If you feel that you must absolutely prevent some piece of information from leaking out into the world for all to see, you must treat every communication medium -- and the Internet specifically -- as insecure. The world is littered with dead political careers of people who did not heed this warning.
That said though (to paraphrase the old adage), are we rationalists or are we mice ? If you hold some beliefs that can get you burned at the stake (figuratively speaking... hopefully...), then isn't it all the more important to determine if these beliefs are true ? And how are you going to do that all by yourself, with no one to critique your ideas and to expose your biases ?
This is just a quibble because I don't disagree with your conclusion, but the traffic could conceivably be archived in its encrypted state for decryption later.
Yes, I theoretically have to consider how good people from the distant future who particularly want to know what I said now are at playing with large primes. Because there is always the possibility that a man in the middle is saving the encrypted data stream just in case it becomes possible to decipher in the future.
Do you mean in users' inboxes, or something else?
Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don't think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.
The Wayback Machine?
Edit: Or not.
Not relevant to email, or even an access-controlled site.
Oh. Oops. (I don't know much about that sort of thing, obviously.)
Honest question: why was this downvoted?
(I downvoted because I saw the comment as decreasing the thread's signal-to-noise ratio: as Nick noted, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine doesn't archive private pages or emails, and is therefore not relevant.)
Observe, however the comment section of certain horribly non PC blogs. By and large. they are very smart, and remarkably well informed. Censorship is never necessary, whereas in more politically correct environments, censorship is essential, because when non PC views are spoken, commenters take it upon themselves to silence the heretic by any means necessary, disrupting communication.
If the blog owner posts fairly heretical views, and himself refrains from censoring or intemperately and rudely attacking views in the comments that are even more heretical than his own, then no one in the comments intemperately or rudely attacks any views that anyone expresses in the comments or on the blog.
The blog owner can say that left wing views are held by fools and scoundrels, but because left wing views are high prestige, a left commenter will not be called a fool and a scoundrel. If the blog owner refrains from saying that views more right wing than his own are held by fools and scoundrels, then commenters with views more right wing than his own will not be called fools and scoundrels in the comments.
Because right wing views are low prestige, it requires only the slightest encouragement from the blog owner to produce a dog fight in the comments, should someone further right than the blog owner comment, but not so easy to produce a dog fight when someone lefter than the blog owner comments.