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Will_Newsome comments on Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild" - Less Wrong
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Comments (204)
I really like HPMOR too. I joined the Singularity Institute just to discuss ideas like those found in HPMOR. That's why I don't want people like you making comments like the above. Because that sort of self-absorbed naval-gazing defensiveness is more toxic than any lighthearted parody I can spew. You must thoroughly research this.
Could you elaborate? Is it you don't want <fans of HPMOR> making <blunt and/or condescending comments> like the above? Or you don't want <mean people> making <aggressive comments> like the above?
Sorry for being unclear. I meant that any subculture that is allergic to parody of itself is just inviting less fair and less jocular criticism. Eliezer has already greatly damaged LessWrong's reputation by making it seem cultish. Making comments about how people are sensitive to appearances of cultishness and thus it's good for parody of that alleged cultishness to be banned, is just sowing the wind. I think that there are many interesting and independent intellectuals on LessWrong and I don't want them to be tarred as discreditable cultists. And that's why I would like it to be known that LessWrong is capable of self-parody and isn't going to pathetically grasp at credibility it never had in the first place.
If someone wants to describe LW as cultish, they can take any parody of itself and present it as further evidence for their claims.
I think something like this has already happened with the Chuck-Norris-like list of Yudkowsky facts; the "Bayesian conspirator" illustration of the beisutsukai stories; and the redacted lecture screenshot that displayed "Eliezer Yudkowsky" on the right end of the intelligence scale. -- Instead of "they are cool people who can make fun" they can be spinned into "this is what those people seriously believe / this is how much they are obsessed with themselves... they must be truly insane". See RationalWiki:
On the other hand, if someone wants to describe LW as cultish, they could also use lack of parodies, or whatever else as an evidence. Once you are charged with being a witch, there is not much you could successfully say in your defense.
So at the end, perhaps we should ignore all such considerations (which, by the way, is what most non-cults do) and simply upvote or downvote things only by their own merit. Also, any attempts for this kind of PR automatically destroys themselves if it is easy to provide a link to the discussion about the PR. (And LW being LW, such discussion will almost certainly happen.)
I like how your critique is strong but no one is upvoting your comment because it can't be used to support any of their petty policy narratives. I'll upvote it, anyway. ETA: Welp, people are upvoting it now, sweet. Retracting this comment.
I'd still be happy to remove the EY facts post, although I've been hesitant to do so because it would affect many other people's comments and hiding things might itself be construed as sinister. (I guess your point is that it doesn't matter, but I thought I'd mention it.)
Removing it at this point would be counterproductive. The problem is not that this is a community that can generate halfway-tongue-in-cheek hero worship from time to time: I've seen that in literally every community I've been part of, from both sides, and it's relatively harmless. The problem is that it's perceived as taking that hero-worship too seriously, and deleting the post over PR concerns would only reinforce that impression.
I liked that post. Okay, maybe not all the "facts" are equally funny, but that's how creativity works.
Also:
Oh, OK. Then I did not clearly communicate.
I'm not worried about a clutish appearance -- I'm worried about a self-absorbed appearance. People who-have-heard-of-but-are-not-really-into LessWrong, in my conversations with them, have dismissed the site as an echo-chamber of inside references. That's what I'm worried about, and a self-parody story about Eliezer-Yudkowsky's fictional creation interacting with him does not help mitigate that impression. I'm not saying it could never be done, but it has to be really good to outweigh the costs.
In my experience, this is one of the most common patterns of dismissal out there. It's also one of the easiest to dismiss: every intellectual movement will contain communications among insiders, and those communications will use terms that outsiders won't be familiar with.
"Wow, you mean people write for their audience? What a surprise!"
Or: "Every field has inside references." And then list examples from whichever mathematical or scientific field you're most familiar with.
Now, whether or not this is a desirable pattern to fall into is another issue entirely.
From my anecdotal evidence, it seems that this impression goes away after "real life" interactions with Less Wrongers. There seems to be a (perceived?) discrepancy between the lesswrong.com community and the aspiring rationalist community attached to the site.
What could possibly appear more self-absorbed than censoring without comment, recourse, or discussion, for the purpose of promoting a certain image?
Or do you possibly take seriously the idea that you can censor your way to an excellent reputation among those who love the truth?
I'm not convinced this is a serious question. If you spent 2 minutes writing down ways to appear self-absorbed, do you honestly think you would not come up with a better plan? If your answer is "no", then we need to move way back to find common ground.
The mission of the LessWrong discussion board is not to collect pictures of funny cats. Deleting pictures of funny cats does not stifle dissent. Deleting pictures of funny cats does not obstruct the search for the Truth. Deleting pictures of funny cats does not make you look self-absorbed, even if you do so explicitly to cultivate a better image.
I guess it comes down to a question: was the original post deleted without comment because it was just another "funny cat" posting, or was it deleted without comment because it parodied a funny cat who is taken gigantically seriously around here.
I do know that at the time it was deleted it had fairly positive karma. I do know that on its face it did not appear to be a funny cat post, that is, it referred to a lot of the same things that acceptable posts refer to as opposed to being completely unrelated to the kinds of things the site is intended to discuss.
I honestly don't have any idea who or how or why it was deleted. At least for me, that is part of the problem.
You said "hero-worshipping", but okay, I retracted the comment. Also, very clever how you made it seem like you accidentally mis-typed "cultish".
We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg!
I'm not a respected member of the community, but I personally see no problems with parody and criticism. I've read criticism on Less Wrong and HPMOR and I've had no problems with those (although I did have disagreements, of course).
It's just that this particular piece of parody isn't particularly good. It feels like someone critiquing "The Dark Knight Rises" for being about a guy dressed up as a bat. Sure, the movie is about that, but it's not really the core problem with that movie.
I know it's not good parody. I know I'm a bad writer. That's why people should downvote it. It's only the deleting it despite its being upvoted part that I object to.
It is bad enough to border spam quality, especially if you just skim it. The person who took it down probably looked at it, saw that it is mostly nonsense with negative connotations (and written by someone who was inebriated at the time) and took it down. Do you seriously think that if you had instead written a normal criticizing post, which isn't vague as hell, that post would've been deleted, too?
Nobody should consider a post that sits at +7 as spam. The voting shows that enough people valued the post to keep it.
'It is bad enough to border spam quality' does not mean 'It is spam'. I am only talking about the quality of the content.
/shrugs. I know I'm biased and all but I didn't think it was that terrible. I spent like two hours editing it before posting. People sure are being mean about it though, so idk. I guess maybe I'll give up on trying to improve my fiction writing skill for now... Maybe it's a 'you have it or you don't' thing.
If it makes you feel any better, Eliezer's April 1st fiction post wasn't accepted well, and was deleted in the end as well.
At any rate, you had some clever things in there, but it was mostly too vague and random to convey your point much further than telling us that you have some sort of a criticism.
I do not believe this to be the case, based on having seen some people's improvements over time, but I have not researched this.
Well, there are definitely a lot of people who're bad enough that I'd write off the idea of trying to give them advice as hopeless. But I'd suggest that posting bits of fiction directly to Less Wrong's discussion board isn't a very good place to look for that sort of advice in the first place.
1) "bad enough... especially if you just skim it." So moderation is IMPROVED if the articles deleted are just skimmed. A more careful or thoughtful reading might raise questions and we certainly don't want that on a site like this. Or do we?
2) The post had +7 karma. Where were the downvotes for this horrible post? And why do so many posts with massive downvote levels survive on the site, while this one with positive votes is deleted? Are you that dismissive of the other readers of this site that you support someone just skimming an article and deleting regardless of karma?
Probably not. Just downvoted. SO the lesson is you may criticize our ox but only if you are polite and do not gore it? What kind of human bias is that intended to avoid?
Where do I say this? I can see situations where this will be the case (if the workload is massive), but I am not claiming anything like that.
eye rolling
7 Karma is not a lot, so it probably hasn't been a factor in the deletion. In fact, I suspect that the post wouldn't have been deleted if it had a lot of karma (not that I necessarily agree with that).
Because posts aren't deleted based on Karma.
As dowvoted as this criticism of EA with 59 karma on Main, or as downvoted as this thorough criticism of MIRI(http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/), which is the most upvoted post on the site ever (249 Karma on Main)?
Nope, the problem here isn't politeness and I never claimed that.
I'm actually more comfortable with it being deleted despite the upvotes, than if it had been downvoted and deleted. Deleting bad content that's getting downvoted anyway feels like censorship. Deleting bad content that gets upvoted might just be gardening. Hacker News doesn't shy away from doing this, for example.
What distinction do you draw between "censorship" and "gardening"?
Removing it for sinister reasons, versus removing it for the mundane reason of "this content is bad and we don't want bad content to be prominent".
Huh. I'd think that content that was bad in the community's eyes (i.e. heavily downvoted) would be more likely to be bad by whatever set of presumptively objective standards the mods should be working from. Or is that automatically sinister?
I mean that downvoted content is already not-prominent. You don't need to remove it; the signal has already been sent that we don't want this kind of thing here.
If there's stuff that we don't want, but that gets upvoted, then the signal still needs to be sent, and one way (not the only way) to send it is to remove the stuff in question.
Two points where we may differ, but I probably don't care enough to argue them:
It seems obvious to me that, at least in theory, stuff can get upvoted that we don't want here, for reasonable values of "we don't want". Do you disagree with this? (And in practice, I think this particular post is an instance of such stuff.)
I don't necessarily think mods should be working from objective standards.
Yes. Although we will allow comments that don't gore any of our oxes but aren't particularly good to stand, perhaps with negative karma to label them, the one thing we insist upon when our faith is challenged is that at least the parody must be good, or else it should just be eliminated.
In this way we insure we are not a cult. Amen.
I do not agree with the deletion of the post. I believe that the karma system should be sufficient moderation for most content. The fact that the post ended up having positive karma is baffling to me, but a poor-quality post at positive karma does not indicate that anything should be deleted. I don't know what the people deleting the post were thinking.
How about subcultures that are allergic to bad content?
I just really don't see the value of keeping this post up other than as some sort of "look at how not censorshippy we are" signalling statement that was explicitly argued against on here. ("You have the downvote." Well I'm gonna use it.)
Those who are allergic to bad content would never wind up here. I would imagine they killed themselves long ago. Life is an endless procession of bad content.
And who judges the badness of content? How many posts have been left to stand with their large negative karma as their badge of disapproval? And yet this post was obliterated from the website while carrying largish positive karma.
Is there possibly any value to a subculture being allergic to arbitrary censorship for reasons which can only be speculated upon, while pretending to be a moderately fair forum for those interested in avoiding human biases? What could be more promotional of human biases than giving some human the right to remove posts he doesn't like without needing to explain himself publicly?
FWIW, LessWrong is definitely capable of calm self-parody, especially when the authors of the parody are not explicitly trying to stir up drama, so there isn't much need for fanfic-based perofrmance art. One example of that is Shit Rationalists say