Comment on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)

Thu, 10 May 2012 20:52:36 GMT

On April 7th, Richard posted to Facebook:

LessWrong has now shown its true mettle. After someone here on FB mentioned a LW discussion of consciousness, I went over there and explained that Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his essay, had completely misunderstood the Zombie Argument given by David Chalmers. I received a mix of critical, thoughtful and sometimes rude replies. But then, all of a sudden, Eliezer took an interest in this old thread again, and in less than 24 hours all of my contributions were relegated to the trash. Funnily enough, David Chalmers himself then appeared and explained that Eliezer had, in fact, completely misunderstood his argument. Chalmers' comments, strangely enough, have NOT been censored. :-)

I replied:

I haven't read the whole discussion, but just so everyone is clear...

Richard's claim that "in less than 24 hours all of my contributions were relegated to the trash" is false.

What happened is that LWers disvalued Richard's comments and downvoted them. Because most users have their preferences set to hide comments with a score of less than -3, these users saw Richard's most-downvoted comments as collapsed by default, with a note reading "comment score below threshold", and a plus symbol you can click to expand the comment and the ensuing thread. This happens regularly even for many LW regulars like Will Newsome.

What happened was not censorship. Richard's comments were not "relegated to the trash." They were downvoted by the community, and not merely because Eliezer "took an interest" in the thread again. I have strongly disagreed with Eliezer on LW before and had my comments massively UP-voted by the community. LessWrong is not community of mindless Eliezer-drones. It's a community of people who have learned the skills of thinking quantitatively for themselves, which is one reason it can be hard for the community to cooperate to get things done in general.

Chalmers' comments weren't "censored" because (1) nobody's comments on that thread were actually censored, to my knowledge, and (2) the community thought Chalmers' comments were valuable even when they disagreed with them.

Richard, I find your comment to be misleading to the point of being dishonest, similar to the level of dishonesty in the messages that got you banned from the SL4 mailing list: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0608/15895.html

I've appreciated several of the articles you've written for IEET and H+, and I wish you would be more careful with your communications.

As you can see, the point of my comment wasn't to "abuse" Richard, but to explain what actually happened so that readers could compare it to what Richard said had happened.

At that point, Abram Demski commented:

I humbly suggest that the debate end here. (I do not predict anything useful coming out of a continued debate, and I'd prefer if we kept on the interesting track which the conversation turned to.)

...and Richard and I agreed.

Thus, I will say no more here. Indeed, given Richard's reaction (which I might have predicted with a bit more research), I regret having raised the issue with him at all.

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