How can we get more and better LW contrarians?

Wei Dai

85 How can we get more and better LW contrarians?

18th Apr 2012

3 min read

85

I'm worried that LW doesn't have enough good contrarians and skeptics, people who disagree with us or like to find fault in every idea they see, but do so in a way that is often right and can change our minds when they are. I fear that when contrarians/skeptics join us but aren't "good enough", we tend to drive them away instead of improving them.

For example, I know a couple of people who occasionally had interesting ideas that were contrary to the local LW consensus, but were (or appeared to be) too confident in their ideas, both good and bad. Both people ended up being repeatedly downvoted and left our community a few months after they arrived. This must have happened more often than I have noticed (partly evidenced by the large number of comments/posts now marked as written by [deleted], sometimes with whole threads written entirely by deleted accounts). I feel that this is a waste that we should try to prevent (or at least think about how we might). So here are some ideas:

Try to "fix" them by telling them that they are overconfident and give them hints about how to get LW to take their ideas seriously. Unfortunately, from their perspective such advice must appear to come from someone who is themselves overconfident and wrong, so they're not likely to be very inclined to accept the advice.
Create a separate section with different social norms, where people are not expected to maintain the "proper" level of confidence and niceness (on pain of being downvoted), and direct overconfident newcomers to it. Perhaps through no-holds-barred debate we can convince them that we're not as crazy and wrong as they thought, and then give them the above-mentioned advice and move them to the main sections.
Give newcomers some sort of honeymoon period (marked by color-coding of their usernames or something like that), where we ignore their overconfidence and associated social transgressions (or just be extra nice and tolerant towards them), and take their ideas on their own merits. Maybe if they see us take their ideas seriously, that will cause them to reciprocate and take us more seriously when we point out that they may be wrong or overconfident.

I guess these ideas sounded better in my head than written down, but maybe they'll inspire other people to think of better ones. And it might help a bit just to keep this issue in the back of one's mind and occasionally think strategically about how to improve the person you're arguing against, instead of only trying to win the particular argument at hand or downvoting them into leaving.

P.S., after writing most of the above, I saw this post:

OTOH, I don’t think group think is a big problem. Criticism by folks like Will Newsome, Vladimir Slepnev and especially Wei Dai is often upvoted. (I upvote almost every comment of Dai or Newsome if I don’t forget it. Dai makes always very good points and Newsome is often wrong but also hilariously funny or just brilliant and right.) Of course, folks like this Dymytry guy are often downvoted, but IMO with good reason.

To be clear, I don't think "group think" is the problem. In other words, it's not that we're refusing to accept valid criticisms, but more like our group dynamics (and other factors) cause there to be fewer good contrarians in our community than is optimal. Of course what is optimal might be open to debate, but from my perspective, it can't be right that my own criticisms are valued so highly (especially since I've been moving closer to the SingInst "inner circle" and my critical tendencies have been decreasing). In the spirit of making oneself redundant, I'd feel much better if my occasional voice of dissent is just considered one amongst many.

Contrarianism

Frontpage

85

New Comment

Rendering 0/335 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:33 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

85 How can we get more and better LW contrarians?

by Wei Dai

18th Apr 2012

3 min read

335

85

Try to "fix" them by telling them that they are overconfident and give them hints about how to get LW to take their ideas seriously. Unfortunately, from their perspective such advice must appear to come from someone who is themselves overconfident and wrong, so they're not likely to be very inclined to accept the advice.
Create a separate section with different social norms, where people are not expected to maintain the "proper" level of confidence and niceness (on pain of being downvoted), and direct overconfident newcomers to it. Perhaps through no-holds-barred debate we can convince them that we're not as crazy and wrong as they thought, and then give them the above-mentioned advice and move them to the main sections.
Give newcomers some sort of honeymoon period (marked by color-coding of their usernames or something like that), where we ignore their overconfidence and associated social transgressions (or just be extra nice and tolerant towards them), and take their ideas on their own merits. Maybe if they see us take their ideas seriously, that will cause them to reciprocate and take us more seriously when we point out that they may be wrong or overconfident.

P.S., after writing most of the above, I saw this post:

OTOH, I don’t think group think is a big problem. Criticism by folks like Will Newsome, Vladimir Slepnev and especially Wei Dai is often upvoted. (I upvote almost every comment of Dai or Newsome if I don’t forget it. Dai makes always very good points and Newsome is often wrong but also hilariously funny or just brilliant and right.) Of course, folks like this Dymytry guy are often downvoted, but IMO with good reason.

Contrarianism

Frontpage

85

New Comment

Rendering 0/335 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:33 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

More from Wei Dai

Curated and popular this week

335Comments

335

Comment Permalink

twolier14y20

Same dude here, despite the name. Hypothetical: Should a prof at, say, Harvard working on the genetics of longevity post and spend time here?

Discussing his own work would be identifying and probably not very productive. Let's further say he's pre-tenure. Top places have a very different tenure success rate than even very good places, so it's an iffy point in his career.

Does Less Wrong have anything to offer him? And doesn't he serve Less Wrong best by staying away and working? (or even "playing" elsewhere)

My central criticism of this place may well be that some of you won't see there really is no question what the right answer is.

Incidentally, perfectly agree with your comment TimS, but the point is that I internalized those ideas independent of LessWrong. ViliamBur, you misunderstood my Karma point. I was merely acknowledging that my comment's being upvoted and Dmitry's downvoted means I can't use it to indict the community at large (and instead was offering is as illustration of my mindset). Luke: yup. But I did skim through the papers from the institute. Not very good. I suspect I can mostly infer the sequences from very basic background knowledge in game theory, philosophy, physics, neuroscience, psych, etc, and reading current comments threads. I don't see anything too fancy implied by the secondary sources (I enjoy reading the back-and-forth more).

Uh, what else. I enjoy HPMOR. What I like about it, however, is bad about me: Basically what Robin feared in his comment on OvercomingBias. I should (and will) go. It goes without saying that you wish me well. I just felt like saying hello because I like you. And if you can make it so I can talk to you profitably, I'd like that. Not your fault and I'm sorry to have said it, but I thought you should know.

orthonormal14y10

You should reply to different commenters individually, since then it will send them each notifications that you're replying. Few readers check all branches of the thread that they replied to.

0Viliam_Bur14y

He could discuss the less crtitical parts of his work. If there is a meetup near his home, he could go there and try to find someone to cooperate with. Or if he is expert at genetics but less expert on math, he could ask someone to help him with statistics. Also, he could just spend here his free time, if he prefers company of rational people and has problem finding it outside of his work. [...] That question is relevant for all of us, experts or not. Even for me there are many things I should be doing rather than procrastinating on LW. However, I know myself -- I spent a lot of time online, so given that, at least I can choose a site that gives me intelligent discussions. If you spend your time better, keep doing what works for you. Maybe visiting LW once a month and reading the articles in the "Main" part would be a reasonable compromise, if you want to participate. (I don't know if there is an RSS feed for "Main".)

See in context