Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.

The average comment isn't too great on LW either.

There's a large difference between "mostly awful" and "not too great".

Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.

The average comment isn't too great on LW either.

This is the iron law of blogs and web forums: the quality of the average comment is always well below that of the average post.

I've told you on IRC how I think the tribalism post is bullshit, but I have zero interest in writing up an email and sending it off and the email either never being seen or at best quoted.

Could you give a quick summary here? I'd be interested in seeing it, since at a glance the post seemed reasonable to me.

And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia - wait, is that example so excellent that you don't even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this 'trivial inconvenience' was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.

Apparently these editors have decided that rather than getting as much activity as possible, they're willing to settle for smaller amounts of activity if it means they don't have to deal with all the shit you get by moderating after the fact. I can't fucking blame them the tiniest bit.

And you've based this on careful experimentation, of course.

I so love your sarcasm when it is directed at someone else.

Trivial inconvenience is a feature not a bug. I mentioned it explicitly when arguing for this system to be adopted for the early days of the blog. I may be wrong, but I think it acts as a filter for those who can't be bothered to expend the small amount of effort in reply. This correlates with a less useful reply.

This is not an encyclopedia gwern.

OB published everything sent to it

The one post I sent to OB was rejected. (Which it deserved to be, since in retrospect it was pretty poor.)

Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx.

Never mind Marx, that's pretty obvious if you know anything about the non-straw version of Ayn Rand's ideas. For all that she liked to frame her arguments in individualist terms, Rand's deal was basically all about a conflict between creative and exploitative classes as mediated by social and technological changes; her idea of the creative class just included people like entrepreneurs and financiers (though it's worth noting that her heroes were usually artists or engineers), and didn't include most ordinary laborers. Once you pick this up, Atlas Shrugged basically -- and not without some irony -- becomes Class Warfare: The Novel.

She and Marx also had similar ideas about the role of religion in the public sphere, and both liked to express their ideas as deriving from a small set of abstract principles (though Marx's take on it is basically Hegelian, and Rand's got some kind of strange quasi-Aristotelian thing going on). I haven't read as much Chesterton, but from what I gather he's more of a status-quo paleocon, and of course became famously Catholic.

Shit, I've got a .txt file open right now with a Frankenstein's monster of a long comment intended to attack the neo-reactionary ideology with regards to issues of structural power and social dominance... epistemology and the biases/rationalizations caused by privilege (building on a "cheap shot" about your pals all being straight white tech-minded guys, having at least modest economic security, living in modern liberal democracies and communicating freely in a de facto libertarian-socialist network)... the way historical narratives are formed and how they relate to social psychology/self-image/intergroup relations (re: all conservative talk of a Relatively-Golden-Age)...

I would be highly interested in reading such a post, either here at LW or somewhere else. You shouldn't worry too much about it becoming too long or its style being unsatisfactory; these are complicated issues, and getting some editorial commentary from other users would also help.

I do agree that More Right itself won't help much wrt. non-right-wing political commentary. Really, we need to start embracing friendly, benign factionalization and create a network, 'planet' or blogroll of political/rationalist venues inspired by other political ideologies. As you say, even just the inferential distances among differing worldviews and ideologies make a centralized treatment quite hopeless. And that's before taking all kinds of legitimate controversies into account, which mean that the 'network' approach will probably be trusted to a greater extent by potential users.

I am just asking people to use their email client rather than their browser to write comments. And in a regular open thread they can write comments in the way they are used to when they primarily seek interaction with other readers or off topic discussion.

You underestimate how much nonrightwing people would be scared off by an actual right wing comment section. We are not therefore discussing expectations of quality or moderation here but only the trivial inconvenience of emailing them in.

I suspect your and gwerns comments are getting a lot of upvotes because of Far mode considerations and vague feelings of goodness around open discussion. Let me push that into Near mode and explain why unmoderated comments where never an option on the table. I very much expect that sooner or later we would end up at best with Unqualified Reservation's comment section or at worst with that of Alternative Right's. First I encourage the reader who is unfamiliar with them to google up both. Now tell me how many non right wing rationalists would comment there no matter how reasonable or interesting a hypotheticl article by an author?

The filter of moderation may keep interesting some comments at bay but eliminates far more of mindless politicking than pf the former. Ultimately that ratio is what I think matters.

I think these long rants are exactly what they want to avoid.