LESSWRONG
LW

A place for casual, non-karmic discussion for lesswrongers?

by [anonymous]

1 min read4th Nov 201288 comments

24

I have never been on a Lesswrong meetup because they tend to take place too far away from my range in terms of distance and budget. Because of that, I don't know if those perform this function to everyone's satisfaction in such a way that what I'm suggesting here doesn't seem worth the effort. I hear that they're a lot of fun, and involve quite a bit of silliness, though; I find those cruelly lacking on Lesswrong proper, whether it be in main posts or discussion posts, and their relevant threads.

That's why I think it would be nice to have a forum, a place to have normal discussions, where you don't have to watch that you don't say anything stupid or out-of-line lest you unexpectedly lose karma. A place to exchange jokes, frivolities, and entertainment. A place to talk about stuff that isn't rationality or singularity-related. A place to relax and enjoy the company of like-minded folks. A place to take a more personal approach to communication, with sequential rather than branching conversations. A place to make and be friends.

Don't you think having that would be nice?

EDIT: Also, if this place does already exist and I'm not aware of it, I humbly request that you provide me a link, for which I would be most grateful.

New to LessWrong?

Getting Started

A place for casual, non-karmic discussion for lesswrongers?

0Richard_Kennaway

4Richard_Kennaway

0William_Quixote

2Vladimir_Nesov

0William_Quixote

New Comment

88 comments, sorted by

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:46 PM

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

[-]shminux11y220

#lesswrong freenode irc channel works for a number of forum regulars.

[-][anonymous]11y130

I never got the hang of irc myself. I find the transience and reliance on simultaneous presence to be a bit of a burden. I prefer the slower pace of forum threads, and its higher word-per-post ratio. However, it's not like I'm going to push for alternative options if what already exists is deemed satisfactory by everyone.

[-]CronoDAS11y190

/me shrugs

The open threads are less formal than the rest of the site's discussions.

As for karma, the trick is just not caring very much.

[-][anonymous]11y120

As for karma, the trick is just not caring very much.

I find that when opening the website, my first (and very quick) glance is invariably directed at my karma score, even when I have not posted recently.

I wish there was a userstyle or some other way to hide karma. The LW anti-kibitzer is inaccessible at this time and I'm not even sure it hides self karma. I promise to upvote any solution to this.

8vi21maobk9vp11y

Maybe "span.monthly-score {display:none;} span.score {display:none;}" in userstyle would help?

4fortyeridania11y

Unfortunately, everyone who has a solution is already using it, and thus cannot see their own karma--and is therefore not motivated by the reward you've offered! :)

0vi21maobk9vp11y

Well, if at least one of my upvotes is from a person who tested my solution, I would be a partial counterexample - I do look at my karma for latest posts, and although it is not a good motivation per se, using upvote count as a data point for what and when is valued by LW is a minor amusement for me.

4vi21maobk9vp11y

For the record: anti-kibitzer (I force-start it via a domain-specific user script) hides your cumulative score, but not last-month score.

4drethelin11y

As long as your posts don't all suck then making a lot of comments means you'll gain more karma than you lose. Not caring is the solution I use. I take things that get downvoted when I don't expect it as datapoints but I don't not post things just because I think they might get downvoted

2[anonymous]11y

Don't forget to munch on some cake, too! ;)

0CronoDAS11y

Mmmm, cake!

[-]RomeoStevens11y140

Perhaps google hangouts for virtual LW meets should be scheduled?

7Curiouskid11y

I'd be down for it.

6[anonymous]11y

So would I.

[-]Eugine_Nier11y120

There was an attempt to create one about a year ago. The forum still exists although no one uses it.

[-]AlanCrowe11y100

Idea: have an option to tag a comment as fluff.

Fluffy comments wouldn't have upvote and downvote arrows/thumbs.

The hide fluff button changes to a view of the comment database that omits them.

Once the reader gets bored of being all serious, all the time a simple click on the show fluff button brings them all back, until the reader gets their fill of candy-floss comments.

3Kawoomba11y

There may be many unforeseen consequences with such a change: Do you allow normal comments in response to fluff comments? 1) Yes - you'll need to reenable fluff to follow what the "serious" replies are referring to. 2) No - the responding comments would by necessity also be labelled fluff, even if intended seriously (just to enable being able to follow up on some throw-away remark), which would lead to a continuing incentive for fluff comments - actual fluff and otherwise - to supplant actual comments. 3) No replies allowed to fluff comments - weird circumvention effects e.g. by replying to the grandparent while referring to the fluff comment Don't you want to read all the content some specific authors provide on LW, regardless of whether they consider it serious or just "candy-floss"? Do you then have an option for "hide fluff - except for fluff from users 1..n"? Yes - keeping such a list up to date could quickly become tedious. No - have to reenable all fluff unless you want to miss e.g. Nesov's fluff-labelled comments, which will probably still be more valuable than most people's serious comments. The list goes on. (Eventually some may even wish for a way of rating fluff comments, leading to a secondary karma system, which may lead to a regress until someone pulls the plug and goes back to the current system.)

1AlanCrowe11y

I ventured a short way down that rabbit hole 3 years ago. If my wretched health were to improve, that the project I would most like to work on.

3Dorikka11y

I like, but do not know how hard this would be to implement.

1NancyLebovitz11y

Slrn would get into the neighborhood-- it's a system for scoring comments by author, strings in the text and subject line, etc.

1Viliam_Bur11y

Depends on how it would be used. It's not just the features, but also the social conventions that develop around them. I imagine using "fluff" comments specifically for abusing other people. Or just trolling. Or spamming. Like this:

0Richard_Kennaway11y

How does this proposal differ from those that would result from replacing the word "fluff" throughout by "boring", "genius", "Sanskrit", or "Islamic theology"? Reminds me of the "evil bit" RFC.

2AlanCrowe11y

The poster is in control of a trade. The poster can choose to avoid negative karma, but only by taking the risk of the comment being hidden from many readers. (Perhaps hide fluff = fewer comments and show fluff = more comments). It is only a little like an "evil bit". It allows the poster to escape the consequences of evil (ie no down votes) by setting the evil bit. But that makes their attempts at evil easy to filter out.

4Richard_Kennaway11y

What I was getting at, though, is that labelling it a fluff tag doesn't make it one. People could use it for anything they like, and I predict it would end up being the resort of people resentful at getting heavily downvoted for their hobbyhorses.

2AlanCrowe11y

That is an interesting prediction. If true, then the fluff tag will not work as I expected. If true, what else follows? Perhaps those with hobbyhorses to ride will tag them fluff and not end up bitter at getting heavily downvoted. Meanwhile, most LessWrong'uns hide fluff and are unaware of the various strange obsessions. Perhaps that is a small improvement to the site?

2Nornagest11y

Well, is soft exclusion of people with hobbyhorses a feature, or a bug? I'm leaning towards "feature" for identity maintenance reasons, but this seems like an issue on which reasonable people could reasonably disagree.

0AlanCrowe11y

If I make a fine distinction between "soft exclusion of people with hobbyhorses" and "soft exclusion of hobbyhorses" am I reading your comment too closely? The current system offers individuals a choice: talk about your hobbyhorse and get down voted, or just shut up already! That strikes me as the "soft exclusion of people with hobbyhorses". Having the option to talk about it, under the protection of the fluff tag is more friendly. It is soft inclusion of people. But if most people read the site with the fluff hidden, the hobbyhorses are mostly invisible. I call that "soft exclusion of hobbyhorses". Is it a feature or a bug? I don't know.

0vi21maobk9vp11y

You really think noone would mark own posts as fluff? I would mark some of my posts which are more conversations than public comments but relevant for some people enough not to make them PM. Actually, maybe 3 fluff votes to mark as fuff would be a better alternative to current three-downvotes rule.

You might want to try the the subreddit, but I think most people are satisfied with the open threads and IRC.

[-]theduffman11y50

The Felicifia forum for utilitarians has an overlapping userbase and is nearby to your suggestion in concept-space: http://felicifia.org/

1[anonymous]11y

What did they make of the dust speck dilemma?

0theduffman11y

The 3^^^3 dust specks vs torture dillema is an axis that utilitarians can vary on. Most utilitarians on Felicifia understand scope insensitivity and will prefer a small amount of torture. Of the rest, some believe in fundamentally different grades of suffering.

0[anonymous]11y

Or, you know, they could weight suffering in a continuous, derivable way that doesn't make a fundamental distinction in theory, but achieves that result in practice; amputating a finger is worth more than a billion blood-pricks, one broken arm is worth more than a billion billion nudges, and so on. Or maybe we're going at it completely wrong and the models for quantifying overall suffering are completely inadequate to the subject matter. If pain functioned like a sound, and that an order of magnitude increase would register as a linear increase, you could stack billions of the lower pains without the resulting pain registering very high. And so on. Or maybe it's completely different than that. My point is, the dust speck question is more of a question on how human psychology of pain and reciprocity works than on the merits of some forms of utilitarianism and deontologism, which I feel are only approximations towards modelling said psychology.

3FAWS11y

That's not (at all realistically) possible with a number as large as 3^^^3. If there is a number large enough to make a difference 3^^^3 is larger than that number. You say "and so on", but you could list a billion things each second, each a billion times worse than the preceding, continue doing so until the heat death of the universe and you still wouldn't get anywhere close to a difference even worth mentioning when there's a factor of 3^^^3 involved.

0[anonymous]11y

Then how about we take the human brain's inability to multiply into account? Above a certain number of people, the brain goes numb to any increments, in suffering or otherwise. Then it wouldn't matter if you're 3^^^3, 3 million, or even 3 thousand; anything past a certain limit is just background noise, statistics. Which I suppose would have an interesting effect on the value of genocides and other mass-scales inflictions of suffering, and donation management and other mass-scales alleviations of such. I guess what really matters is the tangible result to you, those close to you whom you care about, and the more immediate social environment you move in. You'd care about the state of a neighborhood, not because you care about any of them individually; you don't even know them. No, you just want to walk around happy people so you can feel happy yourself. Depressed people are depressing. A utilitarian, linear calculation of wealth increase (or even one that'd include a law of diminishing returns) is simply a very rough approximation towards this goal of seeing smiling faces. And then there's of course the matter of satisfying your values, which has much more to do with the state of your mind than with that of others'. And this is the limit of my working memory for today. I'll go mull this over... Of course, I suppose I'm hardly being original here; could you point me to sources that have already thought over all this? I'd hate to find out I'm wasting brain-time reinventing the wheel.

[-][anonymous]11y50

.

0[anonymous]11y

I don't twit. That thing is in(s)ane. It must be the most frustrating, unfulfilling, obsession-inducing social medium I've ever attempted to use.

6[anonymous]11y

.

6fortyeridania11y

Upvoted for patience and directness.

2[anonymous]11y

.

-3[anonymous]11y

Upvoted for both, downvoted for condescension. Result; neutral.

5[anonymous]11y

It's not the posters that bother me, it's the format. I'm a wordy person who likes to take it slow and read things leisurely. Hence why the very concept of Twitter is anathema to me. Beyond its usefulness for instigating revolutions, I don't appreciate it much.

2John_Maxwell11y

The writers at Cracked.com don't seem to think Twitter is all that useful for instigating revolutions, FWIW.

3[anonymous]11y

Well, besides the fact that the article is addled with subjectiveness and exaggeration in pure Cracked fashion, they did manage to make me feel rather stupid about myself. For a rationalist, news sources that achieve that are extremely valuable, and should be consulted often.

-2[anonymous]11y

.

3vi21maobk9vp11y

How will it help? 140 characters is simply too short form for some kinds of posts.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0vi21maobk9vp11y

Well, maybe Rational_Brony wants to find posts with detailed explanation of some position/fact with a summary of corroborating evidence. I treat that as preference for 1k-ish posts over ≤140-character posts. On many forums posting a medium-length essay without too much polishing would be just "business as usual", on some other it would be "weird but OK". On Twitter it is declared impossible if you use it as supposed. You could use Twitter as an RSS-like stream for your blog, but leading conversation by linking blog posts with points and couterpoints doesn't seem to be widespread practice on Twitter. EDIT: I answered before readng the entire thread; looks like I mostly guessed.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

That is indeed a terrible vice of mine. But see vi21maobk9vp (what kind of handle is that anyway?) for the other reason I find twitter unsatisfactory.

0[anonymous]11y

.

1[anonymous]11y

Help with the fact that, given how short twitter posts are, it is very difficult to talk about stuff at comfortable length. There isn't even the comfort of a linear or tree structure like in fora or reddits, and while you can stack them by topic you need to sacrifice characters to do so. You can link to longer posts in blogs and fora, but then why not talk there? Also, every time you post a link, it has to be tinyfied, which is a pain in the neck. And the briefness of the format forces to rely on tacit understanding and common priors, which oftentimes aren't there, so the risk of illusion of double transparency is very high. .

0[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

You've lost me from "if" onwards. What's root density? Erosion?

0[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

Got any recommendations? Also, how to avoid an echo chamber effect (which is already enough of a problem here on LW, I'm afraid)?

0[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

... I still find it kind of baffling. And I didn't mean "echo chamber" in terms of ideas so much as in terms of habits, norms, etc. We're a rather different subculture, and it's really easy to lose track of how others thinks, a bias which may bite us in the ass later on. Not that I understand normal people all that well, either, but huddling with my peers isn't going to help.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

... The ideal would be to find people that I disagree with, who don't express their disagreeable opinions in a way that makes me reject them. Example; mormons, the nicer variety of zionists, anarchists, the nicer variety of randians... But if I'm only willing to listen to people who express themselves nicely and politely and are civil about stuff, that's already a bias in itself, huh?

2[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

Tribal banners are usually tighly associated with ways of knowing and doing. Nevertheless, I think we're heading away from the topic. What worries me is not understanding special tribes, but normal people. And it isn't so much that I disagree with them, more like I can`t understand them in the first place. Their opinions tend to be few and unworded, so there's little to disagree upon, let alone argue. Not to mention, they don't like to argue, they don't like philosophical or political discussions besides reconfirming whatever they already happen to believe at the moment. It's these people that I need to fully grasp if I want to make them leave a conversation in the state of mind I want them to be in, and do the things that I want them to do. Or, barring that, at least being able to predict their behaviour would be nice.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0[anonymous]11y

You're kinda right, but it's still related. It's like we're this very specialized group who drifts away from the concerns of the mainstream more and more, developing our slang and lingo and environment... which wouldn't be different from any other group such as rock geeks or art fandoms or the like... except our focus of geekery is the improvement of the human mind. This makes communicating with defenctive people complicated, because they don't know they're thinking wrong, they'll confuse your cleverness for insanity, and your attempts to help them for arrogance. It's like when you know yoga and talk about it to people and they go "Are you going to teach me how to breathe?" I've had places were I've delcared myself a lesswronger, and where I was told my company was welcome as long as I didn't try to teach them how to think. And that's just people in general. But there's that subset of people, the normal-normal people, people without dreams, without ambition, without curiosity, without any motivation besides making it to the next month. Talking with those people frustrates me enough as it is, and I fear the company of intelligent, ambitious, witty people such as the ones found here is not going to help assuage that.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0Sabiola11y

A while ago, someone posted a list with twittering LWers, and I started following them all, but now I've mostly unfollowed them again. Not because I don't like them, but because I don't like them on Twitter. I would have to follow not just them, but all the people they follow as well, to understand what they're saying, and then I wouldn't have time to do anything else with my day. I don't think Twitter is a good medium for ongoing discussions.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0Sabiola11y

Well, of course I'm exaggerating. But following not only those LWers, but the people they follow, would cost more time than I am willing to spend.

0John_Maxwell11y

It'd be interesting to see a site like Twitter that hid all follower/following relationships.

1[anonymous]11y

.

1John_Maxwell11y

Less of an implied popularity contest.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0John_Maxwell11y

I can't think of a way, but LW feels like much less of a popularity contest, and it has that problem.

0[anonymous]11y

.

1John_Maxwell11y

I don't think verbosity is a big problem on LW. People not making posts for fear of being downvoted, or just not investing the time necessary to create good discussion/top-level posts, seems much bigger.

0[anonymous]11y

.

0vi21maobk9vp11y

It is much more segmented popularity contest because who are the "right" people vaires. Follower count is a global instantly updated popularity contest, which may be considered worse.

0[anonymous]11y

.

[-]mwengler11y30

I'd propose that THIS is the place, the "discussion" section of the site. The people who don't like a particular post or discussion topic can just go on to the next.

I'd like to see a karma voting system that kept the positive and negative totals. For simplicity (?) the net could still be what is shown in cases where compactness and simplicity of presentation means it. But the user page and any page that shows the text of comments/posts would show the plus and minus points rather than just the net.

My idea here is, I am generally interested ... (read more)

[-]Armok_GoB11y30

SO VERY MUCH THIS! I wish I could upvote this I million times. I've been trying to get this discussion started or just directly making a place like this and inviting people, many times, but it has never managed to catch on (and they are all gone now).

2[anonymous]11y

Well that's depressing... Hopefully this discussion will allow us to see the general panorama on this topic.

[-]William_Quixote11y00

I’m not sure if its something I would use that much, but since this thread seems to show that there is some interest in a casual non karmic discussion corner, here’s a proposal for how to create one that could be implemented immediately and requires no coding 1) In discussion, create a new thread called “Non Karmic Casual Discussion Thread” or something similar

2) in the first post establish the groundrules:

“Hi, Welcome to the Non-Karmic-Casual-Discussion-Thread.

This is a place for [purpose of thread goes here].

In order to create a causal non karmic enviro... (read more)

3wedrifid11y

Those who like the karma system and do not want to see low quality conversations immune to being hidden should of course feel free (or, if they wish, obliged) to downvote all comments in such a thread without exception.

0Armok_GoB11y

I strongly support making this thread as soon as possible! Might even do it myself if I remember to when it's less late.

2Vladimir_Nesov11y

Do look at how the first thread of this type turned out, and if you decide to go ahead I expect the post will fare better if you explicitly state that voting on the post itself is encouraged rather than prohibited and distinguish the post from comments in the statement of the other rules.

0Armok_GoB11y

Oh, somehow missed that thread. Guess this is not happening then. :(

0dbaupp11y

I agree with wedrifid, and would prefer that this doesn't happen. One problem is comments are "non-local", as long as they are above the bad-comment threshold, they appear in the recent comments. Allowing people to have stupid discussions freely will pollute the recent comments section (and this was actually one of the reasons for the recent implementation of the karma threshold). If LW supported marking some threads as "comments don't appear in recent comments", then it wouldn't be such a problem, although there is also the risk that the low-quality will start overflowing into the rest of LW (maybe?).

0William_Quixote11y

Hmm. The non local nature of comments is a good point and one I had not considered. I had initially been thinking that this might be helpful to some, and that most folks (myself included) would opt out. Since everyone sees the recent comments I am now desuggesting my suggestion.