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fezziwig comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Comments (1742)
I think Eridu's downvotes were mostly well-deserved.
I don't think this is a good idea.
I wonder if we could solve this problem from another direction. The issue from your perspective, as I understand it, is that you want to be able to follow every interesting discussion on this site, in semi-real time, but can't. You can't because your only view into "all comments everywhere" is only 5 items long, so fast-moving pointless discussions drown out the stuff you're interested in. An RSS feed presumably isn't sufficient either, since it pushes comments as they occur and doesn't give the community a chance to filter them.
So if I've reasoned all this out correctly, you'd prefer a view of all comments, sorted descending by post time and configurably tree-filtered by karma and maybe username. But we haven't the dev resources to build that, and measures like the ones you describe are a cheap, good-enough approximation.
Do I have that right?
I think it's more than that - he also doesn't want other people to notice the pointless discussions, so that
1) people stop fanning the flames and feeding the trolls
2) people post in the worthwhile threads, resulting in more quality there
(and I agree with this point of view)
Above all:
3) Newcomers who arrive at the site see productive discussion of new ideas, not a flamewar, in the Recent Comments section.
4) Trolls are not encouraged to stay; people who troll do not receive attention-reward for it and do not have their brain reinforced to troll some more. Productive discussion is rewarded by attention.
The discussion with eridu was probably worth ending, but I saw someone say it was the best discussion of those issues they'd ever seen, and I'd said so myself independently in a location that I've promised not to link to.
I am very impressed with LW that we managed to make that happen.
Did you learn something useful or interesting, or were you just impressed that the discussion remained relatively civil? If the former, can you summarize what you learned?
I learned something that might turn out to be useful.
I got a bit of perspective on the extent to which I amplify my rage and distrust at SJ-related material (I had a very rough time just reading a lot of racefail)-- I'm not sure what I want to do with this, but it's something new at my end.
The civility of the discussion is very likely to have made this possible.
I'm having trouble understanding this sentence. First, I guess SJ = "social justice" and racefail = "a famously controversial online discussion that was initially about writing fictional characters who are people of color"? But what does it mean to amplify your rage and distrust at some material? Do you mean some parts of the SJ-related materials made you angry and distrustful? Distrustful of who? Which parts made you feel that way? Why? And how did the eridu discussion help you realize the extent?
I'm curious myself. I honestly didn't see anything useful said. (Perhaps I just took all the valid points for granted as obvious?)
That discussion sucked. I was appalled at LW when I came back after a few hours and still "patriarchy" "abuse" etc hadn't been tabooed.
You could have asked for them to be tabooed.
I did. Multiple times.
Thanks.
That's interesting-- as I recall, requests for words to be tabooed are usually at least somewhat honored.
Not in my experience.
You ask for "exist" "true" etc to be tabooed, which is hard. Assuming they even try, it would take a while to wade thru all the philosophical muck and actually get to something, by which point the moment has passed.
I dislike this solution, for several reasons.
If the problem is differentiating between trolls and simply weak, airy, or badly formed comments/arguments, I think the obvious simple solution would be to do what has worked elsewhere and add a "Report" or "Troll-Alert" option to bring the comment/post to the attention of moderators or send it to a community-review queue.
It certainly seems easier to control for abuse of a Report feature than to control for trolling and troll-feeding using a single linear score that doesn't even tell you whether that -2 is just 2 * (-1) (two people think the poster is evil) or whether it's +5 -7 (five cultists approve, seven rationalists think it's a troll) (unless moderators can see a breakdown of this?).
Do you not see a Report button? There at least used to be one; I can't see because I only see a Ban button.
There is a Report button when I view comments that are replies to my comments, or when I view private messages.
There is no Report button when I view comments normally.
Oh, you're right! Didn't remember that, but the inbox does have "Context" and "Report" links instead of the standard buttons.
Edit: I suppose a clever bit of scripting could probably fix it browser-side, then, but that's a very hacky solution and there's still value in having a built-in report button for, say, people who don't have the script or often access lesswrong from different browsers/computers.
I do not see a Report button.
See Issue 272. The report button was removed during a past redesign, as (I gather) redesigners didn't feel it was motivated sufficiently to bother preserving it. The issue's been in accepted/contributions-welcome mode since Sep 2011.
Okay, if there's no longer a Report button, I at least am willing to field PMs from people who think I should consider banning specific comments.
Nope, no report button here. Upvote/downvote on the left, Parent/Reply/Permalink on the right (+Edit/Retract when own posts).
I see no such button, FWIW.
There are several moderators, I don't think Eliezer is the most active.
It doesn't, "ban" just means the comment is hidden.
I agree that there are downsides, they just don't seem that terrible..
I am aware of this, but Eliezer came off as being particularly invested in personally combating people whom he perceives as trolls.
Ah, I stand corrected then, thanks for the info.
What about the never-ending meta discussions, or are you counting on those dying down soon? Because I wouldn't, unless the new policy is either dropped, or an extensive purge of the commentariat is carried out.
If you click on the recent comments link you get a longer view.