buybuydandavis 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

3 Post author: Will_Newsome 08 July 2014 02:53AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 09 July 2014 12:19:44AM *  34 points [-]

I agree that it's better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don't like it when moderators do surprising things. In particular, the post didn't have more serious pathologies sometimes present in other posts (that are usually still not banned), such as hosting a bad prolific discussion or getting downvoted to minus 20.

(If I were to ban posts on the grounds that I consider them bad for LW, I would ban maybe a quarter of Discussion posts. I don't have authority to do that, and don't expect good consequences unless the procedure is accepted by the community on some level. This doesn't seem likely or even desirable in the sense that there are better alternative procedures such as weighted votes, which would have less blind spots.)

Comment author: drethelin 10 July 2014 09:34:03PM 8 points [-]

I would be interested in a month-long experiment to see how the quality of Discussion changes with you banning whatever you felt like.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 11 July 2014 03:26:33AM *  3 points [-]

Widespread and capricious banning of posts earns a million Phyg points.

Comment author: drethelin 11 July 2014 03:36:24AM 6 points [-]

shrug. At this point MIRI is already doing workshops with relatively well-known mathematicians so I don't think anyone who is a candidate to seriously help is going to be turned off by the cultish forum moderation. And it would only be for a month anyway, unless it resulted in a drastic improvement in quality of posts

Comment author: Will_Newsome 11 July 2014 10:18:33AM *  3 points [-]

I suspect Nesov in particular would put forth and uphold relatively fair-minded, non-ideological, and straightforward rules for deletion, and so Phyg points would be held to an acceptable level. But Nesov is somewhat singular in that regard. If Eliezer or other similarly ideological moderators tried to ride Nesov's coattails then Phyg points would naturally shoot through the roof.

I vote Nesov for LessWrong Dictator.