cousin_it comments on Help! Name suggestions needed for Rationality-Inst! - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 January 2012 02:24AM

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Comment author: hankx7787 29 January 2012 11:54:10PM *  1 point [-]

Why is Less Wrong against humor? I am all for being professional - if all you are looking for his humor then you can go to reddit or something - but why should we be actively discouraging people from being funny at all? I've seen this in other communities, too. As much respect as I have for Eliezer (which is a lot), people tend to get all emotionally attached to the "hero" of their community/movement, and suddenly it becomes not ok to joke about the authorities or otherwise hint anything negative about them at all. Doesn't go well with your whole "we're not a cult" thing. Just saying.

Comment author: cousin_it 31 January 2012 09:49:37PM *  11 points [-]

Not sure about LW in general, but I don't want to see humor on LW unless maybe if it's exceptionally good. Humor seems to be toxic to thoughtful discussion. It's not about Eliezer as a high value target, I feel the same way about humor aimed at anyone or anything else. A quote from Paul Graham discussing the deterioration of Reddit, among other things:

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Comment author: Grognor 03 February 2012 11:05:33PM 0 points [-]

You have no idea how much I agree with this. I suspect a similar but smaller thing happens when people use emoticons.

I love a good laugh (it is, in fact, the only joy in my life right now), but LW is not the place for it. The instant someone makes a dumb joke here, which happens far more than it should, the entire thread and all surrounding threads plummet in signal to noise ratio.

And people always upvote comments that make them laugh, reinforcing the behavior. Unfunny joke comments usually do not settle into negative karma, usually garnering, like, 1-4. That's no good, in my mind. It still positively reinforces unwanted behavior.