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katydee comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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Comments (152)
This post, like the others in this series, seems much more appropriate for the Discussion section.
Moved.
Huh? These seem clearly like "Main" posts, going by the wiki's definition. These posts are extensively cited, and not just posting a link or offering an opportunity for brainstorming:
I worry the definition of what counts as suitable for "Main" has gotten ratcheted up over time so that now hardly anything counts as suitable for Main. Which is probably why hardly anyone posts there anymore. See this discussion, especially Yvain's comment and John Maxwell's comment about LW having gotten too focused on discouraging bad content at the expense of encouraging good content.
Whenever a non-meta post stays under 5, I always feel free to move it to Discussion, especially if an upvoted comment has also suggested it. I don't always, but often do.
Thanks for explaining this. I will start the next post in the series in Main, but if it stays under 5 I'll have no objection to moving it.
I don't think it's a good idea to do so on a per-post basis. I think it's confusing for different posts in the same sequence to be in different section of the site.
While certainly these posts are long and extensively-cited, that seems far from a sufficient condition for posting in LW Main. There are many Wikipedia articles that are long and extensively-cited, but almost none of them would be appropriate LW Main posts.
In general I think that Main posts should be directly related to rationality, and that posts not directly related to rationality shouldn't go in Main unless you have a really good reason to put them there, especially if you intend to write an extended series of posts. There are a lot of blogging platforms on the Internet, and while LW is an especially good one, not all content is appropriate for it.
This is applying a standard that would have gotten much of Eliezer's original sequences kicked over to discussion had the distinction existed at the time.
In fact, if you read the old comments on those posts, you can find examples of people questioning whether they fit the subject matter of Overcoming Bias.
Is this series any less fit for LessWrong than a series on quantum physics? Or scientific self-help (which Luke has done)?
There's also the fact that main motivation for this post series was to help address the question of how far we can trust mainstream scientific consensus. Indeed, in large part it's a response to a claim made by Eliezer in "The Correct Contrarian Cluster."
I'm not sure I agree with you. But as you point out, Discussion didn't exist back then-- it may well be that some of those posts would be more appropriate for Discussion than for Main! Discussion doesn't mean "bad quality" or "LW-lite," it's just a different board for different topics.
I upvoted your original post-- I saw it as marginal for Main, but certainly interesting and potentially relevant. However, the following posts talked less and less about rationality and more and more about specific disputes in nutrition science, which made me think that the series as a whole would be better in Discussion rather than Main.
Seriously, I don't understand this moderation decision at all. I didn't agree 100% with your sequence, but I definitely thought it belonged in Main.
I suppose Main now (as opposed to when the wiki was written) belongs solely to MIRI/CFAR propaganda.
In my opinion it shouldn't be in Main because it doesn't meet this:
Also to answer those questions:
Yup, a little bit.
Many people seem to have already voted with their feet and the quality of posts has dropped significantly. I hope you aren't next.
ETA: and as katydee pointed out, some people simply have moved on to more important tasks. I'm sure people disappear for other reasons too.
"Voting with your feet" seems inaccurate here because it implies that people got fed up and left.
In practice, it instead seems to me that many of the more advanced users now post less frequently because they're out there in the world doing cool things and don't have as much time for LessWrong, which seems far from an undesirable state of affairs!
I'm not sure who you're referring to, but apparently many of those people still have the time to write in their personal publishing venues. Also many have stopped commenting too, which isn't really that time intensive.
It's great people are doing cool stuff in the real world, but LW will have little value if it consists of ducklings advising each other how to fly.
Here are several of the users I had in mind and what they're up to now:
Several of these users-- I believe all of them, in fact-- still post and comment from time to time, but less frequently than they once did. Yvain still writes his own blog, but he did that even while he was still posting on LessWrong.
This isn't to say, of course, that the only factor preventing advanced users from posting a lot on LessWrong is that they have more important things to do. But it is a significant element, and IMO one that it's important to be aware of.
I'll point out that Yvain has explicitly said (in the thread I linked above) that the reason he no longer blogs much at LessWrong is because the standards at LessWrong keep it from being fun. And when he talked about those standards, the things he's talking about are things I don't think everyone agrees on - just things some people are vocal about (see e.g. Kaj's reply to him).
Because of that, I seriously think that you are harming the LessWrong community.
And having said that, I'm done replying to you in this thread, because it's far from clear to me that very many people agree with you.
I agree with you that LW is sometimes too harsh, and that encouraging good content should be emphasized, and discouraging bad content perhaps de-emphasized. But I agree with katydee that this particular sequence seems inappropriate to all be in main. As written, the series seems to be about nutrition, with one (possibly two) rationality points as subtext. I get that impression primarily because each post is about a fairly short nutrition point- of the two meat posts so far, one has been about Atkins, and another about sugar.
If, instead of an n-post series arguing against Taubes on the object-level of nutrition, you had written one (potentially long!) post on those rationality points, I would be happy.
The primary rationality point seems to be "don't choose a side in a controversy after only listening to one side." This seems like very good advice, and Taubes seems like a good example: I haven't read him directly, but I get the impression that both what he's arguing against is wrong and Taubes's proposed replacement is also probably wrong. If I were writing this post, I would write it with the halo/horns effect and meta-contrarianism in mind- rather than defending mainstream nutrition against Taubes, I would emphasize the underlying uncertainty, that low-carb diets seem to work but Taubes is probably wrong on why, and specific underhanded tricks Taubes does (like failing to point out that the FDA recommends against both sugar and fat).
But the way I would handle the first point conflicts with the second point, which is 'trust the expert consensus.' There was a great blog post by a physics graduate student I saw ~5 years ago, which I can't find now, where he wrote up in a short post why he was convinced that dark matter was the best explanation for the observed data. He discussed three alternatives (like MOND), how each of them explained a portion of the data better than dark matter, but that when you considered all of the data together, dark matter was the clear winner because it did okay on three issues instead of great on one issue and terribly on two others. The link to "don't affiliate early" is clear- a single proponent can be very convincing (and be right!) about their belief's strong points and the weak points of other sides, but generally the experts are familiar with the weak points of all the sides, and so if they discount something it's probably for good reason.
I, too, thought that these posts were rather short and that it would have been better as one post. But they've generated 100 comments per post. People like talking about nutrition. Splitting it into multiple may have better organized the discussion. Or maybe it created lots of duplication. Actually, since I think the discussion has been unproductive, actions that impeded it, like stuffing it all into one post, might have been better for everyone.
Sometimes I feel LW is very harsh for Main articles, but not harsh enough for Discussion articles. It is very difficult to write a Main article, but many kinds of trivialities get posted in Discussion.
It's like if you measure quality from 0 to 10, then a typical Main article is 9 or 10, a typical Discussion article is 1 or 2 (you must get to 0 to get downvoted)... and the articles between 4 and 7 somehow don't belong anywhere.
And maybe it is this category of articles -- not good enough for Main, but already too good for Discussion -- that people prefer to take to their own blogs.
In retrospect, I think I may have made a mistake breaking the series up as finely as I did. However, the idea that taking a post that would be Main-suitable, and breaking it up into pieces of no less than 750 words would turn those posts into "discussion" posts strikes me as really odd.
My comment saying that this post would be more appropriate in Discussion has more karma than the actual post itself. That seems like fairly clear evidence to me.
I agree it's an important element, and for some reason I didn't entertain the thought before you made it available. Do you agree that some people don't post here anymore because of the overly critical environment, and that we might have lost important contributors that way?
I agree. That said, established users generally have high status in the community, which can help mitigate this effect. I think that LW being overly critical is more of a problem for newer users, and even then it's important to consider that one man's "overly critical enviroment" might well be another's "high standards of rigor."
It's true that criticism deters new users much more easily than established users, but I think losing established users is orders of magnitude worse than losing new users.
That old familiar post you linked discusses karma, and I think karma has evolved to be something very different from what it was intended to be. Almost nobody has a happy trigger like that. You can't simply dictate what kinds of signals voting is supposed to send because it will acquire new meanings by usage, and stubbornly going against the grain is going to send unintended signals to people.
There's no shortage of internet fora which lack LessWrong's highly critical environment. They also have much less intelligent discussion. I think there is a connection between these two.
The connection is obvious. Now that I've thought about this some more, maybe some good people leaving is an unavoidable side effect. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be tactful with the criticism, unless you want certain people to leave and not change their minds, which might sometimes be an understandable goal too.
Er, forgive me, but could you explain what you just said?
"Voting with your feet" means "exercising your exit right" — leaving a (business or political) situation that you believe has ceased to be to your advantage.