All right. I think I did overreact. And it's not right to try to defensively turn it into a point about something bigger, even if that bigger thing is much more important.

However, since no-one has talked very much about why an intervention like this looks so bad, let me try to do so. But first, let's bear in mind the sort of intervention which normally leads to criticism of editors and moderators: negative interventions, like deletions and blocks. This was actually a promotion, so it's a different sort of faux pas (as wedrifid aptly termed it).

Basically, Eliezer took someone's essay, give it a new title that is a psychological self-assessment written in the first person (that is, written as if it was produced by the article's author, rather than by the editor), and then promoted the essay on the front page. The new title went immediately into Google, into the RSS feed (from where it also ended up on Twitter), and who knows how many other places. Then he asked the author if she liked her new look.

The old title was somewhat forward-looking: "Why Less Wrong hasn't changed my life (yet)". The new title is not: it's just "How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious". The new title corresponds more directly to the content of the essay, but presumably the old title reflected authorial intent as well. Maybe there is a push and pull going on inside Swimmer963 between a will to realism, some LW social pressure to attempt great things, authentic personal ambition versus a desire for a comfortable life and a desire to avoid fiascos, who knows what else.

The reason this situation even arises is because of LW's ambiguous status halfway between "group blog" and "rationality broadsheet". If LW was a magazine with columnists, we wouldn't be so surprised at such editorial interventions. But if someone hacked into your personal blog and changed the titles of all the posts according to their private understanding of what the posts were really about, that would feel very invasive.

In practice, people do try to shape their posts so that they meet an imagined LW standard - I don't just mean quality of reasoning or clarity of expression; I also mean a tone whereby the author says "There is this issue that you run across in life, how can we deal with it? Here's how." There's a competition to exhibit methods of self-improvement that one has personally discovered and employed; who is the best at helping others to help themselves? Now that there's a Discussion section, there's less need to shape every post into that form; that's now reserved for the featured articles. But I've certainly shaped one or two of my posts, somewhat artificially, to conform to an imagined LW style of communication.

So we're all aware that there are standards and conventions which apply to ambitious :-) LW posts, and we can expect that they'll be moved into Discussion if they're judged not good enough, that people may ask us to rewrite them, and so on. But this is the first time I can remember when a direct modification like this was made by a moderator. He gave an opportunity for dissent a short time later, but, it still seems like bad practice, and this seems to have been recognized.

As long as you are in charge, I am never posting here again. That is too much editorial power being exercised without consent.

It was a faux pas, not an overt infraction! I would be concerned if Eliezer was unwilling to reverse the change upon objection (and didn't allow the author to reverse the change herself). I would also be concerned if Eliezer didn't admit he made a mistake!

Willingness to admit errors and change behavior is a good thing!

Downvote: save the nuclear option for a larger infraction, preferably one protested by the author and committed without remorse.

I really don't want to use the downvote-to-disagree mechanic here, so just chiming in with a datapoint that I'm fine with wiki-style proactive back-and-forth editing as a general style on this site and on anything I end up writing in favor of always running everything by the original author before doing anything.

Ya know, it's people like you what cause people to spend their lives silent and paralyzed by indecision for fear of making a single social error that they will never be allowed to correct.

You'll be missed. Wouldn't be so bad if you blogged regularly at one location.