So, after reading the comments, I figure I should speak up because selection effects
I appreciated the deleting of the original post. I thought it was silly, and pointless and not what should be on LW. I didn't realize it was being upvoted (or I would have downvoted it), and I still don't know why it was.
I endorse the unintrusive (i.e, silent and unannounces) deleting of things like this (particularly given that the author was explicitly not taking the posting seriously - written while drunk, etc), and I suspect others do as well.
There's a thing that happens wherein any disagreement with moderation ends up being much more noticable than agreement. I wouldn't be surprised if there were many who, like me, agreed with decisions like this and weren't speaking up. If so, I urge you to briefly comment (even just "I agree/d with the decision to delete").
Yeah, the original post was banned. I've unbanned it. There seems to be no good (i.e. standard/accepted) reason for banning the post, so whoever did it should comment/private-message before escalating further. (Will got on a list of ban-able users a few years back for not responding to heavy downvoting of many of his comments, but for the last two years there were no problems with the comments, so they should no longer be easily banned. I've looked through the comment history, and there appears to be no other recently banned content, except that one post.)
(Will: Maybe remove the copy of the text from this post, so that it's only in the original, while this post is focused on discussing the mysterious banning of the original post?)
Your decision seems very obviously wrong to me. I don't want to overrule you directly without further conversation, but I don't understand at all why you unbanned the post. There's a forum for ridiculously terribly written fanfiction, and it's fanfiction.net which is famous for taking everything. The post is of quality less than zero. Why should it be here?
Because you underestimate how off-putting it is to people when things are deleted with no clear accountability or visibility. It's way worse than having an off-topic lousy post sitting on the page for a few days. It is like a hundred times worse.
You have to provide transparency (e.g. a "see deleted" section or a list of moderator actions) or rationale (e.g. Metafilter's deletion reasons and MetaTalk) or people get paranoid that there is weird, self-interested censorship and that the moderators aren't acting in the interests of the community. This is an Ancient Internet Feeling.
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.)
For what it's worth I would love if LessWrong stuck to only decision theory, microeconomics, cognitive science, &c; I'd lurk and do what I could to maintain the relatively high standards of quality that LessWrong used to have. But look at how User:badger's excellent sequence on mechanism design went basically ignored compared to all the stupid shit that gets upvoted. I posted what I did because LessWrong has mostly been a signaling and self-help cesspit for years now and I thought my post would quietly attract a few readers who enjoyed it while those who didn't would just downvote and move on. Pissing in a swimming pool is immoral, but I'm pissing in an ocean here.
This isn't the should-world. LessWrong is irrevocably a cesspit. The stupid shit will continue to flow. So no, I do not agree with the decision, unless someone like Vladimir_Nesov gets to ban all the stupid shit, which will never happen. Arbitrarily banning my stupid shit in particular just means Eliezer making a fool of himself. There is no sympathetic magic to it that will change the equilibrium.
I would be interested in a month-long experiment to see how the quality of Discussion changes with you banning whatever you felt like.
I think your personal sense of offense is over-writing your judgement of how actually horrible will's post is. It was poorly written but contained a lot of good fragments of criticism, to the point where I couldn't decide how to vote on it. Your reiteration of how much of an obvious pile of crap it was isn't helping you out here either.
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 decid...
What does getting moderation right look like? Are there sites you recommend as well-moderated?
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.
Given the way the situation with Kaj banning Eugine Nier played out with you staying completely silent and not saying anything do you think that's the right time to delete stuff silently in the background? To the extend that calls for moderator attention on the issue of mass downvoting get ignored for month it feels very iffy to do use power to delete criticism.
The silence started even before the ban was made. Kaj asked for community input and at that point Eliezer could have simply said: "Kaj, I trust you to do what's right on the issue." That would have made Kaj's job easier. Especially given what Kaj wrote on facebook over his own emotional state, that would have been a nice thing to do.
I don't think silence means that there's a unified front. To the extend that a unified front is high value, Eliezer could have said: "Hey, I like it that Kaj has taken action on this issue."
Not counting months of silence while people whined about mass downvoting in open threads.
I think someone in a position of power ought to be particularly wary of appearing to censor things which are (apparently) critical of themselves. If something is truly terrible it will get heavily downvoted.
Your decision seems very obviously wrong to me.
I believe there are well-known human biases involving humans trying to evaluate things which mention them by name.
Could you be subject to that kind of thing?
The post is of quality less than zero.
You aren't the judge of that, Herr Yudkowsky. LessWrong is the judge of that.
Why should it be here?
That's not the question to ask when deleting posts. The question to ask when deleting posts is whether there's a reason to delete and hopefully whether that reason is based in rules that can be understood.
The karma system exists for punishing low quality content.
"There seems to be no good reason for banning the post" Drunken (by author admission) fanfic isn't what people come to LW to read. Multi-layered sarcastic incomprehensible stories that have no discernable point other than mockery aren't helpful.
Sure, there are plenty of sequences that use dialogs, but they are used 1) to make a comprehensible point, and 2) have to show their working and explain the conclusion and why it's applicable.
Fanfiction.net is the place for stuff like the original post.
/For ref, I'm not a mod, just a pleb.
It's impossible to tell now, because presumably people are now voting on the drama, not on the content.
I'm slightly torn here.
My first impulse was to point out that, just because there happened to be seven people on this site with the poor sense to upvote this unintentional self-parody, that doesn't justify an eighth person having the poor sense to unilaterally delete it.
Then I remembered kuro5hin's decline and death. A self-moderated forum can transition from "temporary lull in activity" to "permanent death spiral" if a critical mass of trolls pounce on the lull, and it's not a pretty thing to witness. The "critical mass" doesn't have to be very large, either, since self-moderated forums generally weight their users' opinions proportionately to amount-of-available-free-time, which most trolls have in surplus. I suspect it wouldn't have taken too many swings of the banhammer to save that site.
There's got to be a better solution, though. I'd hope there's even a simple better solution. Maybe a "trash" category alongside "main" and "discussion"? Then moderators can move posts between categories, while users can upvote/downvote within each. That would still allow moderators to keep the new users' queue cleaned up in a way that can't be "gamed", but makes moderator mistakes much less significant. "They're deleting me!" is a half-decent rallying cry; "They're calling me names!" not so much.
I don't know who unbanned this post, but I would be interested in hearing why before I reban the original.
Reason for banning original: It is super obvious that filling up Discussion with such posts would not be good for LW, I have no idea who the hell upvoted that and wonder if they were fake accounts. Will Newsome is a poster with known mental problems and the possibility that he's making fake accounts is one I've considered before. The post contributes nothing to LW and seems like a no-brainer to ban before it happens again.
Who unbanned the original? Why?
Sorry to hijack this Eli, but I don't get why it's not obvious that you should recuse yourself from moderation when there is strong appearance of personal rather than community consideration. Flag it to one of the other mods to consider.
It makes you look bad, whether or not the decision was well founded, and makes people question the fairness of the moderation process. Please don't do this.
(Upvoted because transparency is valuable and to be encouraged.)
Will Newsome is a poster with known mental problems and the possibility that he's making fake accounts is one I've considered before.
He almost certainly has or had fake accounts at various times. I think I've even suggested banning him for that violation. That said, Will's claim that he has not upvoted his own posts via sockpuppets is entirely believable. Take action against Will if necessary for whatever other reason (like a track record of active, insane trolling) but if action is taken against him based on the assumption that a positive reception of his contribution must be fake that would be troubling.
and seems like a no-brainer to ban before it happens again.
Making decisions 'no-brainers' is easy if one is willing to disassociate oneself from the consequences.
It would make sense to me if action were taken against a plague of drunken fan fiction, or possibly after the first half dozen, but the first such rates a warning and discussion, not deletion.
For some reason, I'm amused that the karma for this and the original post have converged (54% and 53%).. Maybe LW really does have a group mind.
He almost certainly has or had fake accounts at various times.
I did. I barely used them, and haven't in a long time. I don't see why that is banworthy or even against community norms; my other accounts all have positive karma and good upvote/downvote ratios, and with one minor exception I used them for the obvious non-antisocial reasons. IIRC you accused me of being TillNoonsome et al, which is false; the real person behind those accounts offered to reveal their identity to clear my name, but I declined, 'cuz at that point there wasn't really any need for it. Also you might have noticed that I haven't engaged in any "insane trolling" for years now. There is no justifiable reason to ban me; the only reason Eliezer would do so is, of course, that he's a punk-ass bitch.
I don't see why that is banworthy or even against community norms; my other accounts all have positive karma and good upvote/downvote ratios, and I used them for the obvious non-antisocial reasons.
The same reason there is a law against vigilante justice. In many individual cases it's probably ethically justified but I certainly support a general rule against it. Because I don't trust the judgement of all those other f@#$s so take the cooperative mutual suppression of the behavior as the best option.
The appropriate response to willfully ignoring a rule that I approve of for practical reasons is (all else being equal) to encourage the enforcement of said rule. (At the time and without prejudice. Not now or with personal enmity.)
IIRC you accused me of being TillNoonsome et al, which is false; the real person behind those accounts offered to reveal their identity to clear my name, but I declined, 'cuz at that point there wasn't really any need for it.
I don't recall the details but I'll believe you if you say I guessed the specifics incorrectly.
Also you might have noticed that I haven't engaged in any "insane trolling" for years now.
True, and at your worst you wer...
I've never upvoted my own posts with sockpuppets. In fact I barely vote at all. Of course I can't be sure someone else didn't use their own sockpuppets to upvote my post multiple times.
I for one would rather Will found another forum for his obscurantist nonsense. It was cute two or three years ago, but now it's just cringe-worthy.
You need to work on your hyperbole. Calling moderators "great gods" just doesn't go far enough into absurdity for a decent rant. I feel like you're on the event horizon of a black hole, lacking the last bit of acceleration you need to pass through and reach the singularity (of the black hole, not of some other kind).
Honestly, if you're looking to become a martyr of censorship, you're going to need to write something worth censoring.
P.S.: "This site IS a cult. And I don't say this for the usual reasons." This is an outright lie. Getting verklempt over the censorship of Roko is an internet subculture past-time.
I like the idea of this fanfic, it seems like it could have been executed much better.
EDIT: Try re-writing later? As the saying goes, "Write drunk; edit sober."
Next up: Harry attends a Wesleyan seminary and studies apologetics, in Harry Potter and the Rationalizations of Methodism.
I was gonna go into that in Chapter Two: Analyzing the Fuck out of an Owl. But I guess I won't, since my stupid fanfic idea seems to be attracting more drama and pettiness than could possibly be justified by the content.
I'd prefer you not give up so easily.
The drama was created by whoever arbitrarily eliminated the original post. You don't get to censor something secretly, and then allow a repost but then claim the drama around the censorship is really just drama created by the original post and then use that drama to justify the censorship.
At least not if you are still paying lip service to rationality.
Smoke dat moose! Git dem maggots! Smoke dat moose! Analyze dat owl!
[a note for them what don't get it, as our democracy demands: I am referencing someone else who wrote allegedly impenetrable and seemingly drug-fueled masses of insight in order to incentivize the creation of more things that might fit that model, and hoping to create a meta-norm that's more conducive to stylistic experimentation, for reasons which will probably not be obvious to anyone here so go try to understand continental philosophy or something. Except you don't even need to do that since the relevant ideas are already contained to some nonzero extent in the rationalist corpus! PS most of y'all lose a not-Quirrell not-point for not seeing that certain relevant issues have been discussed here before.]
Do you know who I am?
I can't help myself...
...It was the final examination for an introductory English course at the local university. Like many such freshman courses, it was designed to weed out new students, having over 700 students in the class!
The examination was two hours long, and exam booklets were provided.
The professor was very strict and told the class that any exam that was not on his desk in exactly two hours would not be accepted and the student would fail. Half an hour into the exam, a student came rushing in and asked the professor for an exam booklet.
"You're not going to have time to finish this," the professor stated sarcastically as he handed the student a booklet.
"Yes I will," replied the student. She then took a seat and began writing. After two hours, the professor called for the exams, and the students filed up and handed them in, all except the late student, who continued writing.
Half an hour later, the last student came up to the professor who was sitting at his desk preparing for his next class. She attempted to put his exam on the stack of exam booklets already there.
"No you don't, I'm not going to accept t
are you suggesting that your movement is about writing lame parodies with a few clever jokes in them in order to criticize what you dislike
Yes, Tenoke. That is a completely fair and accurate summary of my "movement".
I'll admit that to an outsider who is not interested in HPMOR, the piece above looks even less intelligible than the famous Sokal paper.
Can someone who is acquainted with the fanfic tell me if this has some sense to them? Or is Newsome trying to create some literature so involved that looks like noise to everybody but him?
a discussion post with (at least) 7 upvotes and (at least) 5 comments
It had 17 comments upon deletion. I was actually pretty disappointed because I enjoyed the comments on it and now I can't see them.
I really like HPMOR. I joined LessWrong just to discuss HPMOR.
I thought the post lent LessWrong the appearance of a self-absorbed, naval-gazing, hero-worshiping clique. Appearances are important. LessWrong is vulnerable to this image. I was glad to see the post go.
I'll emphasize that the post did not negatively affect my opinion of you. The post would have been fine in the right context. But the impression that this community squees over drunkenly written fanfics of a fanfic because they mention the right memes is bad, and bad in a way I think many people here have a bind spot for.
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:
That Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts page is the most disturbing thing I have read in my life. I don't need a shower, I need the outer layer of my skin peeled off. (...) It is fanboyism at a disturbing level. (...) he is hosting this shit on his website that disturbs me
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, per...
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.
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.
Nobody should consider a post that sits at +7 as spam. The voting shows that enough people valued the post to keep it.
How about subcultures that are allergic to bad content?
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.
Eliezer's comment is at -2 (40% positive) and Will's is at 2 (75% positive)-- evidence that LW is not a cult.
the divers models of Harry Potter-Yudkowsky gathered dust
Divers has gradually been replaced by diverse, in fact this is the first time I've seen it in a text written after 1900. Unless you are going for an 'archaic' feel in your work, I'd suggest limiting your use of homonyms like this.
It has a different meaning. It implies "sundry", with connotations of "diverse". (Also, that's not quite what "homonym" means.) I'm okay with some archaism if I get some precision thereby. If that gets lost on the audience then that audience isn't the one I'm most trying to speak to. But I appreciate the critique!
Hey, I realize my writing sucks. If you want to delete this post for that reason then do so and say so, even though this was at +7 when it was deleted the first time.
Eliezer, you can censor what I put on LessWrong, but you can't censor what I say to journalists who want a juicy target, and I've been in your social circles for many years now. Consider that carefully. If you deleted my post then lay off the cult leader habits a bit, and if you didn't, then call off your pathetic guard dogs. Thanks! <3
My stupid fanfic chapter was banned without explanation so I reposted it; somehow it was at +7 when it was deleted and I think silently deleting upvoted posts is a disservice to LessWrong. I requested that a justification be given in the comments if it were to be deleted again, so LessWrong readers could consider whether or not that justification is aligned with what they want from LessWrong. Also I would like to make clear that this fanfic is primarily a medium for explaining some ideas that people on LessWrong often ask me about; that it is also a lighthearted critique of Yudkowskyanism is secondary, and if need be I will change the premise so that the medium doesn't drown out the message. But really, I wouldn't think a lighthearted parody of a lighthearted parody would cause such offense.
The original post has been unbanned and can be found here, so I've edited this post to just be about the banning.