LESSWRONG
LW

Comment Permalink
abramdemski50

I created the Truth, Semantics, and Meaning tag. Then I noticed that there was an empty map/territory tag. I tagged most of the truth stuff as map/territory.

Map/territory strikes me as a better tag than truth. The huge overlap between the two makes me think maybe truth shouldn't be a tag. However, these two tags are different.

  • Truth, Semantics, and Meaning is about the philosophy/metaphysics, and the more formal side. This means stuff about the liar paradox fits well here, whereas it doesn't so obviously belong in map/territory (though it certainly could).
    • Anything which talks about truth in itself -- rather than truth as a way of getting at semantics -- is like this. EG, arguably Eliezer's essay The Simple Truth is not about map/territory at all, and is rather directly trying to discuss the word "truth" -- its usage and meaning.
  • Map/territory includes stuff like the mind projection fallacy. This doesn't really belong in Truth, Semantics, and Meaning, since it's more psychological and less about ideal rationality.
    • In fact, the tag description makes me think it was intended primarily to be about the "psychological" side.
    • Is the psychological side worth distinguishing from the formal-epistemological side?
Reply
Ruby110

I missed this comment till now, sorry. Seems no one else opined yet, so my thoughts:

I don't feel like I can confidently say something about the value of distinguishing the two, but I can offer the broader questions I see.

  1. What is the extent of our ability to maintain nuanced distinctions in the tags?

I've seen already that tag creators will have one narrow thing in mind when they make a tag, and then other people will come along and apply it very broadly, e.g. Biology getting applied to anything involving a biological system at all even if it'd be of no inte... (read more)

Reply
See in context
by Ruby
1 min read
81

30

The LessWrong dev team is hard at work creating Talk Pages/Discussion pages for tags. When they're done, every tag page will have a corresponding talk page which lets users discuss changes and improvements related to that tag.

We don't have that yet, so in the meantime, please make comments you have about tags (generally or for specific-tags) here. If you're talking about a specific tag, of course, make sure to link to it. You might also want to link back to your comment in the body of the tag description, e.g., "Tag Discussion here"

Examples of things you might comment about a tag:

  • Wow, this is a great tag! / I think this tag makes no sense.
  • I propose renaming this tag to X for clarity.
  • I want feedback on these proposed changes to this tag description.
  • I am confused why <post> has been tagged under this tag.
  • I have made several improvements. Mods, please review this tag's grading. I think it is now a B-Class tag.

Or:

  • Why doesn't a tag for Z exist?
  • I really want <feature>, that would make my life much better.
  • <Thing> seems broken.

Also, feel free to use this space to claim credit for tags you've worked hard to make great! (we'll give you karma!)

Other relevant pages about tagging

Wiki/TaggingSite Meta
Personal Blog

30

Mentioned in
Tags Discussion/Talk Thread
New Comment
81 comments, sorted by
top scoring
Click to highlight new comments since:
Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings
[-]abramdemski220

I edited the Bayes Theorem / Bayesianism tag. There was a bracketed statement (something like [needs more]) next to the description of Bayesianism. At the time the description of "Bayesianism" was just:

Bayesianism is the broader philosophy inspired by the theorem.

I kept that text in there for now. It is accurate but seems misleading to me. Bayesianism is not primarily about Bayes Theorem at all. Which brings me to my main point:

1. Should the Bayes Theorem / Bayesianism tag be split up into two tags?

It is conceptually awkward to lump these two things together.

  • Bayes' Theorem is a theorem in probability theory. It holds true whether you are a Bayesian, a Frequentist, or most anything else.
  • Bayesianism is an interpretation of probability theory. It holds that probability is subjective. So these two are very different things.
    • As a consequence of this belief, Bayesians are more interested in applying Bayes' Theorem (while frequentists prefer other techniques such as p-values for similar purposes). But Bayes' Theorem has little to do with Bayesian philosophy. Indeed, Bayesians need not accept Bayes' Law as an update rule.

On the other hand, I expect this to never be a problem in practice.&nb... (read more)

Reply
4Ben Pace
I find the "A / B" to be fairly ugly in tag naming, and think that even "A (and B)" is more attractive. My guess is that we should just go with Bayesianism, because it feels more general? Like, if it's a wiki page later, the page on Bayesianism would naturally have a section on Bayes' Theorem that explains it.
5Ruby
I introduced the '/' convention in naming and think it 1) looks fine, 2) is very necessary to lump adjacent-enough concepts or things with two likely names into a single tag. Parentheses for the second thing would also likely imply it it lesser even more than being second already does.
4DanielFilan
FWIW I vote for "Bayes' Theorem" over "Bayes Theorem".
2abramdemski
Changed it.
[-]abramdemski120

Just putting this here for now:

It seems to me like there should be a "logical uncertainty" tag that's more general than "logical induction", or at least the "logical induction" tag should be renamed to the more general one.

Probably the more general one should be made, rather than re-naming. But collecting all the stuff about logical uncertainty sounds like uncommonly much work (because I don't expect searching for "logical uncertainty" to necessarily get all the important stuff?).

Reply
2Ben Pace
(I'm pro renaming for now.)
[-]Ruby100

(Ben.) (Why do you talk in brackets?) ()

 

 

 

(Is it a test for GPT)?)

Reply
2abramdemski
I decided not to rename, because (iiuc) the address of the "logical uncertainty" tag would then be https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/logical-induction, which would be weird given that there would also be a "logical induction" tag. Instead I created the new tag and tagged everything under "logical induction" to also be under "logical uncertainty". What I wasn't able to do was remove the inappropriate stuff from the logical induction tag. There are a number of things with that tag which are not really about logical induction, only logical uncertainty.
2Ruby
By default, if you rename a tag, the url will change to match the new name and the old url will be redirected to the new one (thus preserving any existing links to it). In the case we want to use an old url for one tag as the url for another (this has happened), we'd need to do some manual database stuff (but it can be done) and then ensure all existing links go to the right place. We can also delete tags easily. At this point, would it just make sense to delete the logical induction tag and have its url redirect to the new logical uncertainty tag? Or if you prefer, we can remove help remove tags. Eventually, assuming tagging continues to get used enough, I think we'll build proper tools to handle these splitting/merge situations.
2abramdemski
I don't think just deleting the logical induction tag is the right thing. I did what I did because I think there should be two separate tags. I think the next step is to remove the logical induction tag from any posts which aren't LI-specific. I have personally upvoted the logical induction tag on the items I think should be tagged "logical induction" and downvoted it on things which I especially think aren't appropriate. So (assuming you can see which things I personally upvoted) you could use that as a basis for removing tags.
2Ruby
Ah, my bad, wasn't clear to me that you thought Logical Uncertainty should be a superset of Logical Induction, and that Logical Induction should still exist separately. I misread it as being about maintaining url addresses. Yeah, I can look at those votes and then vote with you (maybe help from another LW team member).
[-]Ruby110

Addendum to this comment:

While the LW team are currently the final arbiters of what makes tags and tag descriptions, and I've been assigning the tag grades in almost teacher-like way, people are encouraged to argue with and debate any feedback or norms we've proposed. I do want the community to feel they have a large say in how the system is.

If you think the tag grade system should be different in some way, feel free to say so.
If you think a tag has been given the wrong grade, feel free to say so.
If you think feedback I've given about what would make a tag better is wrong, feel free to argue with it.

I've formed various opinions about what makes for good tags (and also changed those opinions a lot, particularly in response from other LW team members so far) but I doubt I've yet arrived at the perfect opinions, so feedback and pushback welcome from all.

To me, a good state is where we're collectively established enough of an idea of what good tags are that the ability to grade tags is granted to a larger group of tag moderators. And also that people are giving feedback and suggestions (or just making the changes in a do-ocracy way) a bunch between themselves. I think that'll be easier once Talk Pages are live.

Reply
[-]brook100

Edited the courage tag, think it's C-class (Not sure if it needs integrating somehow with the groupthink and/or heroic responsibility tags? certainly some things in each of these don't fit under the others but there is a fair amount of overlap at present)

Edited self-deception & superstimuli, think they're now C-class (self-deception in particular, I'd like somebody who's actually read Elephant in the Brain to have a look over it, because it seems relevant but I'm not overly familiar)

Edited evolution and think it's now B-class

Reply
3Ruby
Just had a chance to look at these. Thanks!! I really like what you've done with Self-Deception and Superstimuli. They're both really solid. Courage is good too, though I find it slightly hard to read. "here" references seem less good than just using the post name. Evolution I found myself bouncing off a bit for some reason. Gave it C-Class for now, but I still hope to revise the grading-scheme/description-improvement-system following all the useful feedback/advice you gave. I'm just getting back on top of things following our team-retreat, and next priorities are getting drawn up now. Similarly, we need to decide about doing a push to get tag a basic description, which was also a good thing you suggested.
1brook
Hmm, ok. I think both courage and evolution I found more difficult because they're less well-defined clusters in postspace (compared to self-deception and superstimuli). I'm glad you found the feedback helpful. I've also edited gears-level and spaced repetition. I think they're probably C and B class respectively, but I'm still very unconfident about that. Gears-level in particular I'm not sure if it might not just be better to point to Gears in Understanding, as it's pretty well-written and is pointing to an odd (& specific) concept.
[-]brook70

Are there any plans to implement tagging of whole sequences? I understand that tagging the first post in a sequence has a similar effect, but it might be more productive in some instances to have, for instance Slack and The Sabbath as the top link under the slack tag, rather than the individual posts from this sequence appearing in an order based on relevance.

Obviously that then creates issues about whether you want posts that appear in sequences to also appear individually or not, and whether you want all sequences to be taggable or not, and so on. I&apo... (read more)

Reply
4Yoav Ravid
I also left a comment suggesting this. for now i'm just adding "Related Sequences" to the description with links to relevant sequences (see Epistemology for example), i hope in the future this can be done with actual tagging.
3Ruby
Yeah, I thought about this early on and it seemed very necessary. It's not lost on me though how it's kinda bad to have 20 posts from the same sequences just filling up the tag. As you point out, there area bunch of challenges in figuring out all the right behaviors. There might be a solution where the benefits are worth it, but it's gonna be work to figure out what it is. We're first dealing with a heap of low-hanging fruit on tagging stuff. In short, seems like a good idea to figure something out here, also seems tricky and so would be a bit further down the roadmap. For now, I think the Related Sequences is the best solution even if some people miss the section.
5brook
For sure! I figured the team wouldn't have missed this, just wanted to give my two cents. For what it's worth I think the tagging system is actually really nicely implemented already; I feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these posts that were just thoroughly inaccessible to me until now.
3Ruby
Your cents are appreciated! Really helpful to know which things stick out to people. That was the goal! <3 Don't eat too much candy. I'm joking. Knock yourself out, this is the good stuff.
[-]Multicore60

My suggestions for changes/merges:

Change Alpha(algorithm family) to DeepMind, which would then include DM's other projects like Agent57 and MuZero. I think it's what more people would look for and it has more forwards compatibility.

Merge Blues and Greens and Coalitional Instincts; they're about basically the same thing. I don't like either name; "Tribalism" would probably be better. Blues and Greens is jargon that's not used enough, and coalitional instincts is too formal.

Merge Good Explanations(advice) into Distillation ... (read more)

Reply
5Kaj_Sotala
I don't have an opinion on the Blues and Greens merge - I wouldn't expect anyone to be specifically interested in posts that happen to use that particular analogy - but I would somewhat lean towards keeping the Coalitional Instincts term. I considered several terms for that tag, including "Tribalism", but I feel like there's an underlying concept cluster that's worth carving out and which is better described by Coalitional Instincts. Though this feels like a somewhat subtle difference in what I feel that "Tribalism" connotes, and if others disagree with me on those connotations, then I'm certainly willing to switch. Basically, it feels to me like "Tribalism" generally refers to a somewhat narrow set of behaviors, whereas Coalitional Instincts includes those but also includes the underlying psychological mechanisms and somewhat broader behaviors. For example, Eliezer's post Professing and Cheering includes this excerpt: To me, "believing in something because it is outrageous, and not even trying to make it legible according to the other people's epistemology" is a phenomenon that's covered by coalitional instincts - it's holding up the standards of explanation of your group and flaunting the fact that you don't care about the other side's. But it doesn't quite fit tribalism as I usually understand it? I feel like "tribalism" usually refers to things that are more explicitly about "explicitly attacking anything that is seen to support the other side", and not so much about "simply being proud about your side". But I'm not completely certain of that myself, and if others disagree with this assessment, then I'd be willing to change the name to tribalism.
3Ruby
People knowing what a tag is about straight away is quite valuable. Tribalism is very close to the broader thing. What if was "Tribalism" and the description was changed to:
3Kaj_Sotala
I think that people knowing what the tag means right away, is potentially a problem if that instant understanding is slightly wrong. E.g. if people only look at the tag's name (which is what they'll generally do if they have no reason to explicitly look up the description) they might feel that some posts that fit CI but not Tribalism are mis-tagged and downvote the tag relevance. Coalitional Instincts being less self-explanatory has the advantage that people are less likely to assume they know what it means without looking at the tag description.
3Ruby
I see the argument. I do think that people downvoting in order to maintain the tag are much more likely to have read the text vs people adding the tag. But I predict the largest effect is most people don't look at descriptions they don't recognize and therefore don't look at the tag at all, which is a shame because I think a lot of people are interested in the topic. Gut feeling is a 2-5x reduction in how much the tag gets looked at with the unfamiliar name, and I think that matters. PS: I don't want to make the decision here, I have enough tagging decisions to make already, so I'm leaving it up to others even though I'm offering some thoughts.
4Kaj_Sotala
That's a reasonable point. After this discussion, I think that I do lean towards just renaming it after all.
2jimrandomh
I like Blues and Greens being separate, reserved for posts using that specific analogy, as opposed to other posts on the topic the analogy bears on. The analogy is flavorful, and it's made its way into our jargon.
5Yoav Ravid
I suggest a Tribalism tag, and adding (analogy) or (metaphor) at the end of the current Blues and Greens tag
3Ruby
If it's specifically a subset of the Tribalism tag for that analogy, I think putting that restriction in the description and mentioning in the broader Tribalism tag's description covers it. I think it'd be bad if people thought Blues & Greens was for all tribalism posts and overlapped/was a synonym, but that can be cleared up in the description I hope.
2Ruby
Yeah, those seem like sensible merges to me. Habryka mentioned something about wanting to do a big merge/clean-up in a couple of weeks. We might also want to build tools to make merging/splitting for the occasion. I've pinged the four tag creators now, though, in case they want to argue in particular directions now.
[-]brook50

I've edited the Heuristics and Biases tag. I think it's probably A-grade (I'm still getting a handle on exactly what an A-grade tag should feel like though, honestly).

That said, I'd like it if somebody could check the specifics of the three definitions, because I'm actually not completely sure, and check that it scans ok.

Reply
5Ruby
Me too. Maybe I'll get a chance to write some of my own today or tomorrow and we can compare notes. Probably the hard thing is that what counts as A-Class for one posts isn't for enough for another. For Heuristics & Biases, man, it's such a central tag for LW so it's gotta be really good. Probably we should hold off declaring this one A-Class until we're ready to say it really doesn't merit more work, which could be a while. One thought is that this a topic with some amazing posts introducing it and the tag description should lean on them, maybe even quoting them a lot and pushing them to read them. The current tag description is alright, but it feels like it doesn't get at the heart of the topic in the few paragraphs or make me feel like I should care much. Contrast with the engagingness of ...What's a bias, again? In Conservation of Expected Evidence, I basically thought to myself "there's no way I'm gonna write a better explanation than Eliezer on this", should just quote him. Though sometime's Eliezer's explanations are too long to quote and it makes sense to rewrite them.  Other thoughts: - I think posts in this class should heavily mention and describe top posts close to the top (including pretty related ones like "Your Intuitions Aren't Magic"').  - Relatedly, it should guide your reading of the topic much more explicitly. What is Predictably Wrong? What does it contain? - I think it'd be good to have a more explicit list of different heuristics and biases. As kind of a parent tag, it should maybe even have a nice table of all "sub-tags" - The way "fallacies" is used on LW isn't about explicit logic, really. I think it's more that a fallacy is a bad inference/step of reasoning, whereas heuristics and biases are properties of the algorithm that does the reasoning.  [I also moved the Related Tags to the top because I think it's good if someone can immediately see whether a related tag is what they're after (even in the hover-over which you can hackily incl
[-]brook120

I've updated the Heuristics and Biases tag again btw. I don't think it's A-grade based on "I'd like to see more work done on it", but I think it's about as good as I personally am going to be able to get it. I'd really like somebody (yes you, fellow user reading this) to have a read through and make any adjustments that make sense and/or make it more comprehensive.

re: fallacies, I thought about it, and I think they're actually used pretty similarly, at least here on LW. Planning fallacy could easily be described as a bias generated by an 'imagine your ideal plan going correctly (and maybe add, say, 10%)' heuristic. At the very least, there's plenty overlap. Really what I envisioned for that section was making the point that a heuristic can be good (or just ok), because that was something that I didn't realise for a long time.

Reply
4brook
OK. So you see the grading as being more of a "neglected-o-meter" in the sense that it describes the gap between how a tag currently is and how it would be in an ideal world? (i.e. a more important tag would have a higher bar for being A-grade than a less important one?) I think that makes more sense than an absolute-quality stamp, but I think the tag grading post as is currently written should make that clear (if it is the case)-- currently it implies almost the opposite, at least as I read it. For instance phrases like "It covers a valuable topic" in A-grade, and "tagged posts may not be especially good." in C-grade. To me these read as "quality/importance of topic and of posts are as important for grading as description". I think actually the way you're describing tags now is more useful (for e.g. directing peoples attention for improving tags), but I'm not sure if it came across that way (to me) in the initial post. I would be interested to hear how other people read it.
6Ruby
Yes, "neglected-o-meter" is a good way of putting it. The idea was a bit tricky to convey, I guess I didn't have it super well-articulated in my own head. The idea was that: * Tag grades identify tags in need of work. * For each grade, there's a set of standard things to do to improve them. (This seemed better than individually marking tags as "needs more posts" or "needs better description") And also additionally that tags reflect absolute quality as well, such that if you only want the best tags, you can filter for that. I didn't realize that what I'd consider A-Grade for an obscure topic with limited content would be different for a major topic where there's lot to be said. Another difference is how fundamental and introductory a topic is, where topics that a person is early on in someone's LW journey need extra polish. Now that people are writing more tag descriptions, the gaps in the system are coming out. I've felt somewhat that I should give any tag that seems to meet the criteria a grade, but then in some cases there's still more I'd want. This might be solved by making the criteria better and clearer. I apologize for the confusion. We're about to go on team retreat, but when we get back maybe taggers in this thread and the LW team can refine the system/schema. Thanks for your patience.
[-]abramdemski50

I created the Truth, Semantics, and Meaning tag. Then I noticed that there was an empty map/territory tag. I tagged most of the truth stuff as map/territory.

Map/territory strikes me as a better tag than truth. The huge overlap between the two makes me think maybe truth shouldn't be a tag. However, these two tags are different.

  • Truth, Semantics, and Meaning is about the philosophy/metaphysics, and the more formal side. This means stuff about the liar paradox fits well here, whereas it doesn't so obviously belong in map/territory (though it certainly could).
    • A
... (read more)
Reply
[-]Ruby110

I missed this comment till now, sorry. Seems no one else opined yet, so my thoughts:

I don't feel like I can confidently say something about the value of distinguishing the two, but I can offer the broader questions I see.

  1. What is the extent of our ability to maintain nuanced distinctions in the tags?

I've seen already that tag creators will have one narrow thing in mind when they make a tag, and then other people will come along and apply it very broadly, e.g. Biology getting applied to anything involving a biological system at all even if it'd be of no interest to a biologist or someone look for biologist content. If two tags are very adjacent, I might expect things to haphazardly go in one or the other or both.

      2. If it's important, how do we maintain two tags?

I could see preserving a space to just discuss the formal side separately from the psychological being quite valuable. Especially if there's a sustained back-and-forth on technical stuff. If it is, then I think there's effort we could put in to maintain the distinction in the face of entropy.

  • The tags need to be optimized a set.
  • The tag names directly should imply the tag boundary, e.g Truth (formal) and Map
... (read more)
Reply
[-]John_Maxwell*40

What are the norms around the number of tags that are appropriate for a post to get?  There are some posts of mine that I wish more people would read, and piling relevant tags onto them looks like an easy way to accomplish this.  However, I'm looking at some of the other tagging effort that's being done, and it seems like sometimes posts are being tagged with just one or two of a larger collection of say 4-5 tags that could be considered relevant.

Edit: Thanks for the responses, all.

Reply
9Kaj_Sotala
I'd say that the appropriate number of tags for a post is "as many or few as seem to match the contents of the post". I expect that many posts that have just a few tags are that way simply because the tagger didn't happen to think of the other possible ones. Or someone might be focusing on some particular tag and tagging all relevant posts with that, without also looking at those posts to see what other tags might be suitable.
4Multicore
I put 1-3 on most posts, but I've gone up to 5 or more on some. Probably many of the posts I've tagged could have other tags applied to them that I didn't think of at the time. It's not about a hard number, it's about asking for each individual tag, is it likely someone exploring this tag would think this post was relevant to it?
2Ruby
I'm glad you asked! I feel a bit uncomfortable with "piling on tags" (maybe the phrase more than what you're actually suggesting). I think it's because when I've seen authors apply lots of tags to their own posts (I'm assuming the motivation), half the tags seem like a stretch and the posts were low karma/quality (less true of yours, but it's an association now in my mind). That said, I do think 4-5 tags can be reasonable, and more posts might hit that or more as we have more tags and people do more tagging. I'm mostly responding to the phrasing "piling on for easy visibility". The heuristics Kaj and Multicore suggest feel right to me. If the relevance is really there, it's good to tag.
[-]Yoav Ravid30

I made a Hard Problem of Consciousness tag. it seems distinct enough from the Consciousness tag, which already has 46 posts.

Reply
[-]Kaj_Sotala30

A tag that I'm about to create would have the following description:

________ is a strategy for dealing with confusing questions or points of disagreement, such as "do humans have free will" or "when a tree falls in a forest with no-one to hear, does it make a sound". Rather than trying to give an answer in the form of "yes", "no", or "the question is incoherent", one seeks to understand the cognitive algorithm that gave rise to the confusion, so that at the end there is nothing left to explain.

Eliezer... (read more)

Reply
8Yoav Ravid
Out of these I think Dissolving the Question is probably the right name for the tag. Dissolving the Cognitive Algorithm is in interesting alternate name for the technique, but since it isn't known it's not very good for the tag name. How an algorithm feels from the inside doesn't feel like a tag name, and wouldn't be intuitive to put on posts that aim to dissolve questions. Though Dissolving the Question also feels awkward for a tag name. Perhaps 'Dissolving Questions", of if anyone has better ideas?
3Multicore
+1 Dissolving Questions
5Ruby
I've felt like I've wanted a tag for "Confusions" and I guess by extension one about "Deconfusions"? "Deconfusioning?" I'm really not sure, but I think there's a broader thing here that should a be a (the?) tag.  Something about the broader phenomenon of getting deconfused, of which "dissolving the question" is an instance. Of the three things listed tough, definitely Dissolving the Question.
[-]brook30

I've edited the Effective Altruism tag pretty heavily, and I now believe it qualifies as A grade.

I've also edited the Epistemic Modesty tag, and think it's now C or B grade.

I'd also like it if the X-risk and S-risk tags are consistent with one another-- I propose that "S-risks (Risk of astronomical suffering)" and "X-risks (Existential risk)" is the best format.

Reply
3Ruby
Phenomenal job on the EA tag! Definitely A-Class.  Quick thoughts that occur to me for it: Should probably link to the EA Forum too? And I think it might be clearer if the See Also section was divided into two sub-sections, one for related LW tags and one for external resources? I made Epistemic Modesty C-Class. The central idea is conveyed but I'd want to reserve B-Class for things that touch on more of the arguments, e.g., for and against. Inadequate Equilibria posts are tagged, but would be good to mention what position gets laid out in them. (Especially as the quote might make it seem that Eliezer is plain in favor of epistemic modesty as virtuous.) PS: See a note on tag feedback in this comment.
[-]John_Maxwell20

We have both an AI tag and an AI Risk tag.  When should one use one or the other?  Maybe we should rename AI Risk to AI Risk Strategy or AI Strategy so they're more clearly differentiated.

Reply
2Ben Pace
I think AI Risk is open to improvement as a name, but it's definitely a more narrow category than AI. AI includes reviews of AI textbooks, explanation of how certain ML architectures work, and just anything relating to AI. AI risk is about the downside risk and analysis of what the risk looks like.
3John_Maxwell
BTW, "productivity" and "akrasia" are another pair of tags that feel a bit poorly differentiated to me.
5Multicore
Productivity seems to include both "improve productivity by fighting akrasia" and "improve productivity by optimizing your workflows", for example What's your favorite notetaking system?, so it's not a full overlap. Procrastination is the tag that feels most redundant next to Akrasia to me.
3Ruby
Yeah, there's also Willpower in that cluster too. I think I want a good meta-cluster for that whole bundle but haven't thought of what it'd be called. There's overlap between each, but also some differentiation, so I'm not sure, would be interested in proposals for how to carve up and tag that space. Oh, and Motivation(s). However, that tag has grown kind of huge and I haven't got to thinking about what it really should be,
5John_Maxwell
FWIW, I'm not a fan of "akrasia"--seems unnecessarily highfalutin to me.  Most stuff tagged with "akrasia" is essentially about procrastination, not akrasia as a philosophical problem.  (Just found this article on Google.)  I think it's OK for LW to use jargon, but we should recognize jargon comes with a cost, and there's no reason to pay the cost if we aren't getting any particular benefit. (crl826 mentioned that "procrastination" is another related tag in the latest open thread.)
2John_Maxwell
So it sounds like the underlying content categories are: * Technical AI safety * Nontechnical AI safety/AI strategy * AI content unrelated to safety Is that right? I guess my complaint is that while "AI content unrelated to safety" always gets tagged "AI", and "Nontechnical AI safety/AI strategy" always gets tagged "AI Risk", there doesn't seem to be a consistent policy for the "Technical AI safety" content.
2Ben Pace
All of them get tagged AI. Not all of the technical content gets tagged AI risk – for example, when Scott Garrabrant writes curious things like prisoner's dilemma with costs to modelling, this is related to embedded agency, but it's not at all clearly relevant to AI risk, only indirectly at best. The ones that are explicitly about AI risk get tagged that way, such as What Failure Looks Like, or The Rocket Alignment Problem get tagged AI risk.
[-]Gyrodiot20

Should all HPMOR posts be tagged with the Fiction tag? Only the very first chapter is, currently, which makes sense. Conversely, all chapters of Three Worlds Collide are tagged with it. Which convention shall prevail?

(sidenote: I'm volunteering to mass-tag HPMOR if it's greenlighted)

Reply
4Ruby
I think we should definitely not tag every chapter of HPMOR. So to be consistent we should probably untag the later chapters of 3 Worlds and make that the norm. I guess that should be added to the description. Thanks for the very generous offer though!
2Gyrodiot
Roger that! Later chapters of Three Worlds Collide, and The Bayesian Conspiracy have just been untagged. I also updated the tag description to reflect the norm (in bold and near the top so it appears on the tag hover text, if I understand correctly the meta-norm about such disclaimers). Edit: the tag is still there for 3WC c1, I didn't have enough power to remove it.
1Multicore
This raises the question of what serial fiction posts should be tagged as, because some of the posts you untagged are now at the top of the untagged posts page. Maybe we could have "serial fiction" as a containment tag much like "Newsletters". Or are we going for a norm where some posts do not merit any tag at all, and the untagged posts page is doomed to become a list of them?
3Ruby
Yeah, that's a good point. I think the correct thing is to build a way to remove them from the untagged page (perhaps a special kind of tag for the purpose) rather than trying to come up with a spurious tag. The thing about HPMOR is it's a sequence that's easy to see from the Sequence buttons on the page. A tag doesn't add much, and tagging ~100+ posts won't really help it. For now, I think it's best to ignore and trust the team will save the untagged posts page from the non-taggables!
6Ruby
Raemon surfaces some other reasoning (paraphrased): That makes sense to me? What do people think? Thanks and sincere sorry to Gyrodiot who didn't skip a beat in executing the previous norm.
[-]Gyrodiot120

Tagging everything makes sense to me as well, and, yes, the first installments should be relevance-boosted.

I perceive the consensus to have shifted in favor of the mass-tagging, which will begin soon. I'll report back.

Edit: all of HPMOR, 3WC, TBC have been tagged, and the tag description has been reupdated. Please boost the first chapters, and standalone pieces!

Reply
2Ruby
Woop!
[-]abramdemski20

Is the "site meta" tag taking the place of https://www.lesswrong.com/meta?

Reply
2Ruby
I believe yes, though we haven't gotten around to fully deprecating/redirecting, etc.
2abramdemski
I'm curious how it'll work. I felt like meta content was pretty hidden before. If there's a desire to make meta stuff hidden by default, maybe it could be a hidden-by-default tag, but controlled via the same tag filtering as everything else, so that it's pretty obvious that it's hidden and how to un-hide it. Or maybe hiding it is bad.
4Ruby
My personal sense is that usually meta stuff should be neither hidden nor promoted, excluding announcements that should get extra exposure temporarily. I definitely want people to feel an affordance to discuss site meta, and also see thinking behind and past records. I wasn't around when past decisions about meta were made, nor am I completely sure what others on the team think. We are, of course, open to feedback from others.
[-]Gyrodiot20

I created the Growth Stories tag, but that may have been a mistake, since the Postmortem & Retrospectives tag already exists. Apologies!

Reply
3Matt Goldenberg
I created a "Case Study" tag which seems to overlap with both of these a bit?  Definitely seems like it could be different.
3Ruby
Those both feel distinct to me from P&R (if anything, Postmortems & Retrospectives is too big, idk). Growth Stories has ended up with several posts that seem like a good collection and don't really fit under P&R. The same could be true for Case Study except I don't know if we have enough posts to justify it? As a general heuristic, we don't want tags unless they've got several posts int them. (And we won't add them Tag Portal until they do, barring very rare exceptions.)
1Gyrodiot
Ah, and now there's Updated Beliefs (examples of), which is less about personal growth in rationality skill, and more about evolution of personal beliefs and the updating process. Slightly different!
3plex
After reading the Arbital page on Mild Optimization, it seems like a distinct cluster so I'm going ahead and making a new tag. And adding a link to that page from the Mild Optimization tag.
3Ruby
Sounds good to me!
[-]Yoav Ravid10

I made an Epistemic Spot Check tag. i wasn't sure if i should create it at first, because although the content fits posts from anyone (i myself am thinking of making a post in that style), it currently only has content from Elizabeth. i decided to go ahead and create it anyway, even if just to experiment. also only after creating i remembered that there's an Epistemic Review tag, oh well.

Reply
[-]Multicore10

I think there should be a tag for discussion of present-day AI progress outside of the context of alignment. For example "Understanding Deep Double Descent" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FRv7ryoqtvSuqBxuT?lw_source=posts_sheet . Right now the only tag for that is the core tag "AI", which is too broad.

But I'm not sure what to call it. Ideas: "Prosaic AI", "Machine Learning", "Neural Networks", "AI Progress", "AI Capabilities".

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
2Ruby
Also thanks for your prodigious tagging effort! Let me know if you want to chat (send you a DM).
2Ben Pace
I'd use the machine learning tag.
Moderation Log
More from Ruby
View more
Curated and popular this week
81Comments