Background: I'm a returning LW old hat and CFAR alum and worked briefly on the LW codebase a long time ago, but am not a moderator or authority of any kind; this is my summary based on publicly-accessible data.
The edit history is not inaccessible. What happens is that whenever an article gets deleted, all of its history entries move to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/index.php?title=Delete&action=history.
Gleb Tsipursky co-founded an organization called Intentional Insights, and is doing rationality training/outreach through it. He's been posting rationality materials on Less Wrong. He created an LW Wiki page for the org in March and made occasional updates, and on November 19 it had this text. That looks pretty reasonable, although I'd remove the language suggesting a possible CFAR collaboration unless it progresses past the "has talked with" stage. On November 29 and 30 VoiceOfRa deletes it and Gleb Tsipursky restores it, then Gjm wrote an alternative article which is intensely critical and based mostly on this thread.
That thread is too involved for me to do more than lightly skim it right now, but I will highlight this comment by jsteinhart:
...My main update from this dis
Thanks for clarifying the deletion history, much appreciated.
From my own perspective, I do feel attacked, by someone who has also engaged in ad hominem attacks against me and likely sock puppetry. It's been a pretty negative experience, and I'm trying to treat is as a "comfort zone expansion" opportunity.
I'd welcome you rewriting the wiki article since it seems that your comment received a lot of upvotes, indicating community support for your perspective.
This thread from last August pre-dates this entire incident, and it calls for the banning of VoiceOfRa. That thread also presents evidence that VoiceOfRa is the same person as Eugene_Nier, who was previously banned for retributive mass-downvoting. Reviewing VoiceOfRa's comment history since then, I found rather a lot of abuse in the past month. Each of those links is an unrelated interaction with a different person. I also note that some comments in his history have numbers of upvotes that seem implausible.
I'm not going to second the call for a ban; it'd be kind of pointless. But, VoiceOfRa, I am going to politely ask you to step back and reconsider what you're doing here. Some of your posts offer a useful alternate perspective, which no one else is bringing. But sometimes you seem to get angry, and... there's a line between debating and attacking and you end up on the wrong side of it. This causes the other person to get defensive, and it ends up exploding into hundreds of low-quality comments. People who skim the site looking for high-quality conversation see that, and they leave. There's an art to avoiding this trap, and I admit to having fallen into it in the past, but I really...
I am calling for a ban. In fact I call for a ban on anyone likely to be Nier - though it seems premature to include any other accounts I know of - because that is how you defect against someone who has openly defected on behalf of an ideology. I don't care if he tries to "step back and reconsider", that would not deter a hypothetical VNM-rational ideologue or an ideology-maximizer.
I want to note that Azathoth123, the other name for Eugene_Neir previously negatively engaged with Intentional Insights, and that my karma went from 1009 to 838 after VoiceOfRa began criticizing me several days ago.
I don't necessarily have an opinion about this dispute, but upvote for escalating the matter to the main LessWrong site as soon as the need for that became clear. The LW wiki is quite useful, and it should get more attention than it currently gets.
The article consists of Gleb self-promoting his "rationality" organization. Near as I can tell, it's "rationality" is rather dubious.
Thanks. Could you be more specific about what strikes you as not as rational as you'd like to see?
As I stated earlier, this app uses a psychometric test. It uses a 1-10 Likert scale and a series of questions drawn from scientific literature measuring meaning. The test measures answers on questions, as do other psychometric tests of states of mind such as depression or happiness. In other words, there is no unit measure of "meaning" just as there is no unit measure of "depression" or "happiness." I guess you could try to measure it in terms of Shannons if you really wanted, but that's not what the scholarly literature uses for these types of exams.
there is no unit measure of "meaning"
If you assign a numeric value to something you call "meaning", there must be a unit measure.
For example, consider IQ points. The unit measure (one IQ point) is 1/15 of the standard deviation of the distribution of IQ scores (which are basically normalised ranks) in white populations. We can argue what it corresponds to in the underlying reality, but at least it is well-defined.
Richard Kennaway has posted about an edit war on the wiki. Richard, thank you.
Unfortunately, I've only used the wiki a little, and don't have a feeling for why the edit history for an article is inaccessible. Is the wiki broken or has someone found a way to hack it? Let it be known that hacking the wiki is something I'll ban for.
VoiceofRa, I'd like to know why you deleted Gleb's article. Presumably you have some reason for why you think it was unsatisfactory.
I'm also notifying tech in the hope of finding out what happened to the edit history.