= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wei_Dai comments on META: Deletion policy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (91)
I own the "everything-list" Google Group, which has no explicit moderation policy, although I do block spam and the occasional completely off-topic post from newbies who seemingly misunderstood the subject matter of the forum. It worked fine without controversy or anything particularly bad happening, at least in the first decade or so of its existence, when I still paid attention to it. I would prefer if Eliezer also adopted an informal but largely "hands off" policy here. But looking at Eliezer's responses to recent arguments as well as past history, the disagreement seems to be due to some sort of unresolvable differences in priors/values/personality and not amenable to discussion. So I disagree but feel powerless to do anything about it.
Interesting. A couple hypotheses:
1) Admins overestimate the effect that certain policies have on behavior (they may underestimate random effects, or assign effects to the wrong policy); just like parents might overestimate the effect of parenting choices, or managers overestimate the impact of their decisions ("we did daily stand-up meetings, and the project was completed on time - the daily stand-up meetings must be the cause!").
2) Eliezer is more concerned about the public image of LessWrong (both because of how it reflects on CFAR and SIAI, and on the kind of people it may attract) than you are (were?) about the everything-list.
For what it's worth I'm fine with moderation of stupid things like discussing assassinations, and of banning obnoxious trolls and cranks and idiots, and the main reason to refrain from those kind of mod actions would be to avoid scaring naive young newcomers who might see it as an affront against Sacred Free Speech.
Your testimony of a case where you still have quality discussion with very light moderation makes me slightly less in favor of heavy-handed moderation.
(I'm not sure that the moderation here is becoming "stronger" recently, as opposed to merely a bit more explicit)
It seems to me the occasional crazy idea posted here wouldn't reflect that badly on CFAR and SIAI, if they had a policy of "LW is an open forum and we're not responsible for other people's posts", especially if the bad ideas are heavily voted down and argued against, with the authors often apologizing and withdrawing their own posts.
A crazy idea reflects badly on the ideology that spawned the crazy idea.
If that were true, LessWrong would have such an INCREDIBLY HUGE advantage over most every major religion. LessWrong hasn't managed to raise armies and invade sovereign nations yet, after all.
Thinking in those terms, it makes me strongly suspect anyone turned away by a single bad post is engaging in some VERY motivated cognition, and probably would not have stayed long. (A high noise:signal ratio, on the other hand, would be genuinely damaging)
No one here felt distraught with religion? Not even a little? :)