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drethelin 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)
The concern has frequently been voiced on LW that rationality needs obvious wins in order to demonstrate its utility. If LW can't even get moderation right...
One of the many reasons I left academic philosophy was that I saw how academic philosophy was run. No one liked it, and it seemed that very few people liked how colleges in general were run, but still I saw nothing being done about it. If people who basically get paid to think can't even sort out the internal affairs of their own field, there's no reason to assume they're particularly good at thinking. If some of the most prominent practitioners of rationality can't even come up with a sane moderation policy for a rationality site, either their brand of rationality is flawed or they aren't applying it correctly.
You're asking the wrong question. It's not "why should it be here?"; it's "should it be deleted?". It's not necessarily the case that every post you think ought not to be here should be deleted. You may not always be right -- and the positive karma of the original post suggests that you weren't generally agreed with in this case -- but even if you are, unannounced, unexplained arbitrary rule is decidedly suboptimal. The indirect consequences of moderating actions must be considered.
Vladimir_Nesov is right: people don't like it when moderators do surprising things. I've seen this happen before: on a forum I'm on, the admin demodded one of the moderators for questioning some of his actions, and then banned four of the regulars because he decided he didn't like them. A lot of people left after that.
Arbitrary, muddled personal rule without concerns of the indirect consequences of actions seems to be the default mode of human organization. That doesn't mean it's at all justified. Rationalists should be able to do better than Hastings Banda.
This is the second time this week that an administrative action has been taken that was obviously not thought through. Either LW's brand of rationality is flawed or -- more likely -- LW's moderators aren't applying it well enough.
to be fair, bounded rationality is very reasonable, since rationality takes mental effort bothering to apply it to contexts that don't really matter to you is probably not worth it. I doubt Eliezer gives much of a shit about how Lesswrong.com is going these days, and his ban was almost certainly because that post annoyed him (as it did me).
Moderation is microgovernment. If a politician doesn't care about governing anymore, he should resign; if the emperor doesn't care about governing anymore, he should appoint regents. Neither should run around passing laws if they don't take the problem of governing seriously.
I miss when he cared. People give Yudkowsky a lot of flak these days, which may or may not be warranted, but when he was on form, he really produced a lot of engagingly written material. I worry that there is a feedback loop between people giving him a hard time because he hasn't produced anything to excite us recently and him not wanting to write because he only ever gets a hard time.
I think he's also just busy. Between a rabid fanbase clamoring for new HPMoR chapters and his actual MIRI work, I imagine that dicking around on LW has pretty diminished marginal returns for him (especially now that the core Sequences stuff is all written).