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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Ritual Report: Schelling Day - Less Wrong
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Comments (113)
I've previously marked V_V as a probable troll. It seems a lot of feeding is going on. This post in particular is not an appropriate place for it. I'm thinking of adding a term to the Deletion Policy for, well, this sort of thing on any post that reports a positive community effort - see Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate for the rationale.
When I was doing OB and the Sequences, I realized at one point that Caledonian was making it un-fun for me since each post was followed by antihedons from him, and that if I didn't start deleting his comments, I would probably stop continuing (though I certainly didn't know as much then about reinforcement psychology, I still appreciated this on some instinctive level). I'm not going to tolerate that kind of negative stimulus being applied to community organizers.
I think it might actually be a good idea to give any poster the power to delete replies in their post's comments thread - Facebook does this automatically and I don't think it's a problem in real life, except of course for the trolls themselves - but that would require development resources, and as ever, we have none.
Yes.
No.
A Facebook page is a personal fiefdom within which one has absolute power (within the limits of what one's feudal superiors, i.e. the owners of Facebook, and beyond them the state, allow). The same applies to personal blogs. Making a post or a comment here puts it up for grabs by anyone. That is what a discussion forum (which this is) is for. I specifically do not want that power over replies to my posts here.
This is a terrible idea. People already try to bully people out of disagreement with their point. Giving everyone the power to delete dissenters in their threads introduces drastically undesirable incentives. It means that people would, and, indeed should systematically downvote every comment in a thread if they believe the local PostDictator has or will abuse their local dictatorial powers. That is the only way to eliminate the bias in the conversation.
I agree that it's possible that V_V is trolling. I think it's more likely that they're just educated enough to cut themselves, thinking in terms of fallacies and warning signals, rather than causal models.
But I responded to V_V because you have the critics you have, not the critics you want, and because they do sometimes raise concerns that are worth considering. It is a questionable idea to share secrets in a public setting, but I suspect that V_V and other observers overestimate the social distance between the attendees; I know I would be comfortable telling the regulars at my LW meetup quite a bit about myself, because I've been friends with them for quite some time now. When you cast it as "we're friends that would like to deliberately be friendlier, and that includes targeted attempts to get to know each other better," it loses much of its danger.
(It still has the awkwardness of "how dare you be deliberate in your dealings with other humans!", but I don't think it's possible for that awkwardness to go away, and that's something that most posts on social issues seem to be open about.)
Responding positively demonstrates open-mindedness, encourages superior criticism, and gives me an opportunity to improve the thing criticized.
Deleting people's comments because of your negative emotional reaction is a strategy I strongly recommend against, and admitting to that in response to deleting someone's accusation of cultishness is a mistake. Your refrigerator is unplugged, and you should plug it back in before the ice melts and the food starts to spoil.
I suppose I should've used my free will to ignore the negative conditioning being applied to me? I'll go do that as soon as I acquire free will.
This isn't a goal you automatically succeed at; responding appropriately to criticism is a skill that takes development. I've put quite a bit of effort into training my skill at this, and am pleased with how far I have gotten, but recognize I still have a ways to go. In particular, I'm afraid I haven't put much effort into developing my ability to train others; I'd recommend talking to Val about it; he should be able to teach you much more effectively than I can.
The primary technique that I use that's communicable is to try and use defensiveness as a trigger for curiosity. That association is very useful, but I'm not sure what sort of practice would help teach it. Perhaps a helpful visualization is to try and 'slide' down from combativeness into curiosity.
Perspective alteration is also useful. People aren't responding to you, but to what you created; Julia has a neat visualization trick of seeing people's positions (including her own) as somewhat displaced from them during arguments. If Caledonian has something mean to say about one of your posts, well, it's attacking your post, not you. (And even if he says something along the lines of "Eliezer is a big meanie head," well, it could easily be the case that the Eliezer model in Caledonian's mind is a big meanie head, but you don't have to interpret that as an attack.)
And once you have distance from it, you can remove the tone and focus on the substance, and see whether or not you can use the substance to make yourself stronger.
Were you around back then? Caledonian was attacking posts because it knew it was getting under people's skin.
Nope; I only saw his comments when reading through the sequences, and thought they were often sharp (in both senses of the word). There are no doubt selection effects at play in which ones still existed for me to read them.
To which the obvious response is to not let it get under your skin, and if you lack that level of control over your skin, to deliberately develop it.
To quote ShannonFriedman from another post:
(Replacing 'write bylaws', of course, with 'respond positively to criticism.')
Willpower isn't an infinite resource.
But being able to handle criticism properly is a very important rational skill. Those who feel they cannot do it need to adjust their levels of self-advertisement as rationalists accordingly.
You are absolutely right. Some parts of this very important rational skill are: properly discerning genuine criticism from trolling; properly discerning whether the person posting it is a useful or a harmful presence in the forum; properly deciding a useful course of action.
I think that Eliezer has indeed demonstrated possession of this very important rational skill in his handling of V_V's criticism.
Been there. Done that. Got tired. Try being a D-level Internet celebrity sometime. It will rapidly exceed reserves of patience you didn't know you had.
I continue to support your decisions on heavier moderation, and once again thank you for your efforts to keep Less Wrong a well-tended garden.
I empathize. Looking back, I also realize I was unclear; in the grandparent I talked mostly about how to respond positively to criticism, when my original comment of responding appropriately to criticism was closer to the mark.
I don't expect you to respond positively to all criticism; one of the benefits of being a celebrity is that there are other people who will do that for you. But if it takes patience for you to be indifferent to criticism, then I think you would see significant gains from further skill development. Deleting critical comments reduces your public effectiveness, and putting emotional satisfaction above that is not something I recommend. This is especially important for you, because you have pinned your public image so closely to rationality.
I don't think you understand the concept here. I'm not deleting comments because it gives me a satisfying feeling. I deleted Caledonian's comments because he was successfully shifting OB to troll comments and discussion of troll comments, and this was giving me an 'ouch' feeling each time I posted. I tried talking myself out of the ouch feeling but it didn't actually work. I asked people to stop feeding the troll and that also didn't work. So I started deleting comments because I don't live in a world of things that ought to work.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea - in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
/r/science occasionally vaporizes half the comments in their threads now and it hasn't seemed to hurt them any. I don't think censorship actually hurts reputation very much, certainly not enough to make up for the degree to which meta blather hurts community.
Censorship of offtopic and idiots is very much appreciated and not usually regarded as the squicky kind of censorship, except on places like r/anarchism, which I wouldn't worry about.
As always, I encourage you to do more public executions. (keyword "public". The masses must know that there is a benevolent moderator delivering them from evil trolls).
+1. Even those of us who participate in meta discussions don't necessarily appreciate their existence. Start with this thread.
Just voicing support for this, together with an outlet in terms of a periodic meta thread or that LW subreddit.
What would it look like if you were?
It's not clear to me how to interpret this "and." If he were successfully shifting OB to troll comments, and this was giving you a pleasant feeling every time you posted, you wouldn't have deleted his comments? If lowering the discourse was reason enough to delete his comments, why not just list that as your primary reason, rather than your internal emotional response to him lowering the discourse?
It seems to me that there are several kinds of healthy meta discussions. I am worried that a ban on meta discussion will accelerate the departure of dissatisfied members of the community, because they have no outlet to process their dissatisfactions, and that this will decrease the quality and intellectual breadth of the community.
SMITE!
Have you considered having a separate "place" for it?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gkv/officiallwuncensoredthreadon_reddit/
I haven't seen anything to say that is for meta discussion, it mostly isn't de facto, and I haven't seen a "take it elsewhere" notice anywhere as an aternative to downvote and delete.
It's not just yours; it's also negative for the people trying to put together these events. Vaniver was wrong to single your reaction out in this instance.
For what it's worth, I agree with your moderation decision in this circumstance.
I am also opposed to deleting comments because they cause antihedons for community organizers. In general, I am opposed to the exercise of institutional power to achieve hedons or avoid antihedons instead of to achieve institutional goals, and am particularly opposed in the case that doing so damages institutional goals.
It seems to me that the deletion of criticism, even ill-intended criticism, damages several key goals of the LW community.
Seems to me you misunderstand this aspect of trolling: someone systematically working to create an ugh field about some topic, person, or a blog. Pavlovian conditioning through online communication.
Imagine a situation where every time you speak about a topic X, someone kicks you in a foot. Not too painfully, but unpleasantly enough. Imagine that there is no way for you to avoid this feeling (except for not speaking about X ever again). Do you expect that in a long term it would influence your emotions about X, and your ability to think about X clearly? If yes, why would you want to give anyone this kind of power over you?
This is an art some people are very successful at. I don't know why exactly they do that; maybe it is deliberate on their part, or maybe they have some bad emotions related with the topic or person, and they can't resist sharing the emotions with a larger audience.
In the past I have left one website I participated on for a few years, just because one crazy person got angry at me for some specific disagreement (I criticized their favorite politician once), and then for the following months, wherever I posted a comment about whatever topic, that person made sure to reply to me, negatively. Each specific instance, viewed individually, could be interpreted as a honest disagreement. The problem was the pattern. After a few months, I was perfectly conditioned... I merely thought about writing a comment, and immediately I saw myself reading another negative response by the given person, other people reacting to that negative response, and... I stopped writing comments, because it felt bad.
I am not the only person who left that specific website because of this specific person. I tried to have a meta conversation about this kind of behavior, but the administrators made their values obvious: censorship is evil and completely unacceptable (unless swear words or personal threats are used). Recently they have acquired another website, whose previous owner agreed to work as a moderator for them. I happen to know the moderator personally, and a few days ago he said to me he is considering quitting the job he used to love, because in a similar way most of his valuable contributors were driven away by a single dedicated person, whom the site owners refuse to censor.
If you have a sufficiently persistent person and inflexible moderation policy, one person really is enough to destroy a website.
Retaliatory sniping like the one you described is common, both online and IRL, and is not easy to moderate against. It is present on this forum, as well, to some degree, and occasionally complained about. The problem is that it is hard to prevent, since each specific instance usually does not break the usual ground rules. A couple of places I know have an informal "no sniping" rule, but it is quite subjective and the violations are hard to prove, except in extreme cases. An enforcement attempt by the mods is often costly, as it often evokes the ire of the egalitarian rank and file, who only see the tip of the iceberg.
Interestingly, on karma-supporting forums it often takes the form of downvoting with impunity everything (or almost everything) written by a poster you don't like. Because of its zero cost it is hard to resist, and because of its anonymity it is hard to guard against. Fortunately, it is not as destructive as explicit sniping, since the hate-on downvotes tend to get overwhelmed by the relevant feedback, whether positive or negative.
I agree that destructive people can do a lot of damage, and that removing them is a good idea. I also agree that destructiveness doesn't even require maliciousness.
The strategy I'd like to see is "cultivate dissent." If someone is being critical in an unproductive way, then show them the productive way to be critical, and if they fail to shape up, then remove them from the community, through a ban or deletion/hiding of comments. Documenting the steps along the way, and linking to previous warnings, makes it clear to observers that dissent is carefully managed, not suppressed.
Tying the moderator reaction to whether or not the criticism is fun to receive, rather than if it is useful to receive, is a recipe for receiving fun but useless criticisms and not receiving unfun but useful criticisms.
Receiving and processing unfun but useful criticisms is a core part of rationality, to the point that there are litanies about it.
How specifically? I imagine it would be good to tell certain people: "you have already written twenty comments with almost the same content, so either write a full article about it, or shut up".
The idea is that writing an article requires more work, better thinking, and now you are a person who must defend an idea instead of just attacking people who have different ideas. Also an article focuses the discussion of one topic on one place.
Even if someone e.g. thinks that the whole LessWrong community is Eliezer's suicidal cult, I would prefer if the person collected all their best evidence at one place, so people can focus on one topic and discuss it thoroughly, instead of posting dozens of sarcastic remarks in various, often unrelated places.
I like this idea quite a bit, though I would word it more politely.
I also imagine that many posters would benefit from suggestions on how to alter their commenting style in general, as well as specific suggestions about how to apply those communication principles to this situation.
Very much agree with this.
The most unsuccessful thing about the message deletion is that now I am insatiable curious about what the message said and am thinking way more about that, and having to spend cognitive effort worrying about whether Eliezer overstepped his bounds or not, in a way that (I suspect) is at least as bad as whatever the original comment was. (This remains the case whether or not the message was truly awful)
Useless criticisms are no fun at all.
You're welcome!
At the very least, when you notice them you should do a formal outside view perspective, to compare to your inside view perspective. You can often learn a bit about how to present things this way.
I think that the discussion would have gone more productively if you had narrowed your original comment to the feature of the ritual that worried you, the effect it could have, and how that feature could reasonably lead to that effect. Then, people can focus on the individual components of the specific worry, rather the amorphous charge of cultishness. Even if you only noticed the danger because of it sounded your cult alarm, you don't need to use that as part of your explanation of why you think it's dangerous.
Indeed, if you can't come up with an independent reason for why it's dangerous, that's moderate evidence that it's not dangerous, but still suggests something like "I'm worried about group confessions as a component of this ritual; what could go wrong?", which will get the contrarians to do your imagining for you.
I think these concerns are worth informing attendees about- "hey, remember, there's no oath of secrecy here, but also please don't spread stories without permission"- but because attendees can choose to share whatever they like, there's no element of coercion to be worried about. (There might be a reciprocity concern, but that seems minimal and could be ameliorated with the addition of a targeted "X is verboten" rule.)
This intrigues me. You (and others) have said this multiple times, and I wonder what it means.
Presumably it would only take a few thousand dollars to round up a list of the highest value/cost ratio programming improvements on LW, and then pay someone to implement them. Do I underestimate the cost here?
So the fact that you (generalized you, in your role as LW sponsor) are not doing this implies that improvements to LW have low marginal value compared to other projects (presumably MIRI stuff). LW improvements look high value from out here.
It's interesting, then, that you take the time to delete things and write up these deletion reports. A few thousand dollars applied to some brave volunteer could save you a lot of time added up over the years. This needs calculation, of course. Also, you're probably doing this LW janitor stuff on your recharge time between actual work-ability time.
I can't say I disagree with the revealed preference; most of the value of LW seems to be the archives, meetups, and existence, which is secured for now. I'd rather you spent my money on saving the world (which I tentatively infer is much further along than external communications claim).
If we were bid $5K for the top dozen improvements by a credible source, we'd take it, but no such bid has ever occurred. I think you underestimate the cost.
Could I get a quick list of those top dozen improvements, so I can estimate the hourly rate for a $5k pay, and then forward that on to my extremely talented programmer fiance (who is also a LWer)?
Off the top of my head:
More ambitious projects:
You know, I've been here for years now, and I never noticed the green aura around new posts at all before.
EDIT: Also in the Ambitious column: Give the moderators the ability to move a whole comment thread between posts, preferably to another subreddit (so we can create /r/meta and dump a bunch of this old stuff there), preferably with a replacement comment that automatically links to the new location and has space for a moderator comment explaining the reason for moving. This would be better than deletion in a lot of cases.
Isn't that what the RSS feed for each comment is for? (I've never used RSS myself, so I dunno.)
Here are some of the LW issues sitting in the queue because the previous odesk programmer collaborating with Trike Apps on LW development went MIA a couple weeks ago: 373, 370, 367, 358, 323, 203.
BTW, that's one of the reasons development is so expensive. You can invest in training people, but they might disappear.
Look at the bugtracker and sort by priority? https://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/list?can=2&q=priority=High&colspec=ID%20Estimate%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Milestone%20Owner%20Summary%20Contributions
Even sorting by enhancements, I don't see a lot of things that people have been asking for.
It's a quick list. If it doesn't include what some people want, perhaps they should be filing requests instead of leaving their wishes languishing in threads no one will read again.
Agreed that improvements to LW will be more likely if people are incentivized to resolve issues in the tracker and post them in the tracker (and that the second could be accomplished just by advertising and visibility of site improvements).
Have you asked, or put together a list of those improvements? My current expectation is that unsolicited bids for unscoped projects are infrequent, but I don't have professional experience in that area.
See here.
Relevant: I did not actually read the thread before it was deleted.
Even if they're being fed, troll posts are probably going to be below -3, hidden by default. A solution that would not require changing the deletion policy might be for people to stop reading/rehide a post if they know that it's likely to emotionally affect them in a negative way and not serve a useful purpose. (Yes, this would inhibit feedback, but deleting the feedback entirely would do the same, but moreso.)
As a note, I likely won't respond to comments on this -- the topic isn't important enough to me for me to keep up with the discussion; I just wanted to drop in a potentially useful suggestion.
Is unpleasantness the only criterion? Nobody much likes criticism, but it is hardly rational to disregard it becuase you don't like it.
If you feel that going to those lengths are necessary, here is a more palatable censorship technique which might achieve the intended effect - instead of the current troll feeding penalty, simply automatically delete heavily down-voted comments. That way the community collectively decides what is inappropriate and what is simply discussion, rather than the OP.
I agree about the seriousness of the problem, but disagree about the solution. Giving anyone the power to delete any comments from their articles could be abused easily.
How about a compromise solution: a special "extra vote down" button, available only for the article author, giving -5 karma to a comment? That is enough to make a new comment collapsed, but can be reversed by enough votes from the readers. The probability of readers upvoting a trolling comment en masse is in my opinion not greater than the probability of an author to downvote a comment for wrong reasons. (Also, the number -5 can be adjusted later, if the value seems wrong.)