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Wei_Dai comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
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I have privately discussed the arguments and found them convincing enough to move my position over the past year much more in his direction.
The best course of action is perhaps a correspondence with assured privacy? The problem is that one to one correspondences are time consuming and have their own weaknesses as a means to approaching truth seeking. I tried to get more open discussion of such arguments on a mailing list but as your probably know most didn't participate or write enough material to make reasoning explicit in ways they do in regular correspondence.
Also I felt this important enough to say to break my one month streak of staying off LW, I will now (hopefully) resume it.
Thank you for this data point, but it doesn't move me as much as you may have expected. I think many flawed arguments are flawed in subtle enough ways that it takes "many eyes" to detect the flaws (or can even survive such scrutiny for many years, see some of the flawed security proofs in cryptography for important commonly used algorithms and protocols as evidence). I personally would not update very much even if I saw the arguments for myself and found them convincing, unless I knew that many others with a diversity of expertise and cognitive styles have reviewed and had a chance to discuss the arguments and I've looked over those discussions as well.
Typically the first thing I do after finding a new idea is to look for other people's discussions of it. I'm concerned that many are like me in this regard, but when they come to Vladimir_M's "vague and general" arguments, they see them highly upvoted without much criticism, and wrongly conclude that many people have reviewed these "vague and general" arguments and found nothing wrong with them when it's more of a problem with potential critics lacking sufficient incentive to attack them. Even worse, if Vladimir_M's conclusions become commonly accepted (or appear to be commonly accepted) on LW due to such dynamics, it sets up a potentially bad precedent. Others may be tempted (not necessarily consciously) to overestimate how inflammatory some of their arguments are in order to gain an edge in getting their ideas accepted.
(As I mentioned, Vladimir_M may well have already thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have, but I wanted to bring up some possible downsides that he may have overlooked.)
Oh I didn't expect it to, its not like I'm a particularly trustworthy authority or anything and your many eyes argument is a good one, I just wanted to share an anecdote.
I was actually hoping readers would take more notice of the other anecdote, the one about the attempt to create an alternative for rationalists to discuss and update on such topics (a mailing list) that was tried and failed. To describe the failure in more detail I think inactivity despite some interesting discussion in the first month or so captures it best.
I was confused by your description of the mailing list so I put it aside and then forgot to ask you to clarify it. Can you tell us a bit more? How many people were on the list? Was it open or by invitation only? Was it an existing mailing list or created just for this purpose? How did you recruit members? Why do you think it failed to be active after the first month? Why did you say "as you probably know"?
I have been on several highly active mailing lists, both open and closed, so my guess is that you failed to recruit enough members. (Another possibility is that people didn't find the topic interesting but that seems less likely.) Why not try to recruit more members?
Before I saw this reply I already talked about it more here since I saw it needed to be clarified. Now to answer all your questions.
I'll do better I will share the introductory description sent via PM. To give context, a little before this there was an extensive discussion on the pros and cons of various approaches to discovering truth and gaining sanity on mind-killing issues. I think it was in one of the many sub-threads to lukeprogs rational romance article.
Also to again emphasise a key point I fear might be misunderstood I'll quote from the temporary guidelines:
Now to answer your specific questions.
About 20 to 30.
Invitation only. With people having to agree to new members being added. No proposals where shot down, however people didn't suggest many names.
Newly created.
PMs to people on LessWrong with contact info.
I'm not sure, my best guess was not enough people. Perhaps people where also reluctant to open new topics since privacy protection was pretty much paper thin. My cynical side said it was because the list had too many contrarians who weren't motivated to write because they lacked a non-contrarian audience, and going metacontrarian one more step would require too muhc legwork. :)
I thought you where a member of the list. I've now checked, you where invited but you never replied.
Most likely explanation.
It has been inactive for some time. Still some discussion did take place, so potentially harmful material may be in the archives, I wouldn't be ok sending new invitations unless the old members agreed.
It's possible that the mailing list would be in better shape if you posted more. I used to be in amateur press associations-- what people did before they had the internet-- and I'm pretty sure that the successful ones had substantial contributions by the people running them.
That sounds like good advice. But I honestly wasn't sure people where interested in my contributions at all, there where lots of excellent rationalist there, that's a pretty intimidating audience!
That's why someone has to go first. I nominate you.
I must have been busy with something at the time and then later forgot about the invitation. Can you PM me the details of how to join so I can take a look at the archives?
Lack of a big audience would definitely also contribute to inactivity, especially if there's not even a feeling that one's contributions might eventually be synthesized into something that will be seen or used by many others. Maybe you can try a different format? Make the forum public but encourage people to use fresh pseudonyms for privacy, and be ready to ban people who are disruptive?
Yes you where on the original list people agreed to so there is I think no problem with you taking a look at the archives. I'll send you a PM.
Perhaps this would be a better approach. I don't think I have the time for this right now and not for at least a month or two, so if anyone else is feeling motivated...