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The world is locked right now in a deadly puzzle, and needs something like a miracle of good thought if it is to have the survival odds one might wish the world to have.
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Despite all priors and appearances, our little community (the "aspiring rationality" community; the "effective altruist" project; efforts to create an existential win; etc.) has a shot at seriously helping with this puzzle. This sounds like hubris, but it is at this point at least partially a matter of track record.[1]
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To aid in solving this puzzle, we must probably find a way to think together, accumulatively. We need to think about technical problems in AI safety, but also about the full surrounding context -- everything to do with understanding what the heck kind of a place the world is, such that that kind of place may contain cheat codes and trap doors toward achieving an existential win. We probably also need to think about "ways of thinking" -- both the individual thinking skills, and the community conversational norms, that can cause our puzzle-solving to work better. [2]
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One feature that is pretty helpful here, is if we somehow maintain a single "conversation", rather than a bunch of people separately having thoughts and sometimes taking inspiration from one another. By "a conversation", I mean a space where people can e.g. reply to one another; rely on shared jargon/shorthand/concepts; build on arguments that have been established in common as probably-valid; point out apparent errors and then have that pointing-out be actually taken into account or else replied-to).
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One feature that really helps things be "a conversation" in this way, is if there is a single Schelling set of posts/etc. that people (in the relevant community/conversation) are supposed to read, and can be assumed to have read. Less Wrong used to be a such place; right now there is no such place; it seems to me highly desirable to form a new such place if we can.
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We have lately ceased to have a "single conversation" in this way. Good content is still being produced across these communities, but there is no single locus of conversation, such that if you're in a gathering of e.g. five aspiring rationalists, you can take for granted that of course everyone has read posts such-and-such. There is no one place you can post to, where, if enough people upvote your writing, people will reliably read and respond (rather than ignore), and where others will call them out if they later post reasoning that ignores your evidence. Without such a locus, it is hard for conversation to build in the correct way. (And hard for it to turn into arguments and replies, rather than a series of non sequiturs.)
Which needs to be backed up by a responsive tech support team. Without the support of the tech support, the moderators are only able to do the following:
1) remove individual comments; and
2) ban individual users.
It seems like a lot of power, but for example when you deal with someone like Eugine, it is completely useless. All you can do is play whack-a-mole with banning his obvious sockpuppet accounts. You can't even revert the downvotes made by those accounts. You can't detect the sockpuppets that don't post comments (but are used to upvote the comments made by the active sockpuppets, which then quickly use their karma to mod-bomb the users Eugine doesn't like). So, all you can do is to delete the mod-bombing accounts after the damage was done. What's the point? It will cost Eugine about 10 seconds to create a new one.
(And then Eugine will post some paranoid rant about how you have some super shady moderator powers, and a few local useful idiots will go like "yeah, maybe the mods are too poweful, we need to stop them", and you keep banging your head against the wall in frustration, wishing you actually had a fraction of those power Eugine accuses you of having.)
As the situation is now, the moderators are completely powerless to prevent or even reduce Eugine's brigading, and the tech support doesn't give a fuck, and will cite privacy concerns when you ask them for more direct access to the database. At least that is my experience, as a former moderator. Appointing a new moderator, or even hundred new moderators, would not change anything about this, unless they get a direct access to the data, or a more supportive tech support.
EDIT:
And before the problem is fixed, what good will it do to send new users here? First, Eugine will automatically downvote all women. Second, Eugine will downvote anyone who disagrees with him. It's fucking motivating to write for a website where an obsessed user can de facto single-handedly remove all your content and/or moderate the whole discussion about it. And everyone is just looking away and pretending that this doesn't happen, and the real problem is... whatever else.
Come on, if LW is unable to enforce a ban of a single person blatantly abusing the rules and harrassing many users who actually contributed or wanted to contribute some quality content... the solution certainly isn't to keep telling more people to come and contribute. Let's finally talk about the elephant in the room.
(Mentioning the elephant in the room will get your comment immediately downvoted to -10 though. Just saying.)
Seriously, who are these tech support people? Clearly this database belongs to the owner of less wrong (whoever that is). As far as I can tell, when moderators ask for data, they ask on behalf of the owners of that data. What is going on here? Has tech support gone rogue ? Why do they then get their contract renewed? Are they taking orders from some secret deep owners of LW that outrank the moderators ?