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bogus comments on Wiki: Standard Reference or Original Research? - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: wedrifid 25 May 2011 01:13PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 25 May 2011 02:25:08PM * 4 points [-]

The wiki is content-poor enough that we ought to remove all trivial inconveniences in the way of producing content for it. Having to first write content as a post, wait for discussion to resolve, then transfer it to the wiki is a fairly major inconvenience if improving the wiki was the original goal, so we should not require people to do that.

On the other hand, it might nice to have software for transferring content in the other direction: an easy way to convert wiki-diffs into discussion posts.

Comment author: bogus comment score below threshold [+] (6 children)

Comment author: bogus 25 May 2011 04:14:42PM * -4 points [-]

Wiki and blog/dscussion software are very different media, with different strengths and weaknesses: this has been understood since Ward Cunningham's WikiWiki, with its differing workflows for "document mode" and "discussion mode". IMHO, having software replicate all wikidiffs here as "discussion posts" would be unhelpful and confusing.

It is more useful to keep the option of "starting a discussion about a wiki edit" as a means of escalating a content dispute, as wedrifid has implicitly done here.

As for wedrifid's objections, I view them as superficially understandable, but ultimately unwarranted. Bernard Crick's work is standard in political science and is used by many introductory courses in the field. Referencing him on politics poses no more risk to epistemic hygiene than referencing Kahneman and Twersky on behavioral economics or Edwin Jaynes on Bayesian probability.

As it turns out, Crick's central reflections in IDOP, warning against any sort of "ideology" or "absolute-sounding ethic", directly address one-sided policy decisions, black-and-white thinking and ingroup/outgroup bias as leading sources of epistemic bias in politics. (From this POV his work closely parallels Michael Oakeshott's cautionary essays on "Rationalism in Politics", albeit from a rather different perspective.)

Somehow, wedrifid also objects to the "distorted" emphasis in the opening paragraph: Apparently, we don't fight over politics any more, but we used to fight over it in the ancestral environment, so our instincts are misled. But this is putting the cart before the horse: Fundamentally, politics is a means of (hopefully non-violent) conflict resolution and de-escalation, achieved through increasingly complicated strategies and institutions. When we are unable to solve a political conflict through non-violent means, we can and do fight over it, as the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen have been discovering recently. Wedrifid seems to hold to the Maoist/Machiavellian view of politics as something that "flows out of the barrel of a gun": might makes right, ethics and rights be damned. This view works correctly until it doesn't, and when it fails the costs can be severe.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 May 2011 08:10:49PM 6 points [-]

As it turns out, Crick's central reflections in IDOP, warning against any sort of "ideology" or "absolute-sounding ethic", directly address one-sided policy decisions, black-and-white thinking and ingroup/outgroup bias as leading sources of epistemic bias in politics. (From this POV his work closely parallels Michael Oakeshott's cautionary essays on "Rationalism in Politics", albeit from a rather different perspective.)

Please consider writing a post about what you have learned from Crick. Please do not inject him into a wiki page that is already a loosely related reserved concept in the lesswrong namespace.

Comment author: bogus 25 May 2011 11:44:03PM * 1 point [-]

Please consider writing a post about what you have learned from Crick. Please do not inject him into a wiki page that is already a loosely related reserved concept in the lesswrong namespace.

Thanks for your suggestion. At this point, I'm willing to leave this as an exercise to the interested reader, since politics-in-the-abstract is not actually a very significant topic here, at least at present.

It would be rather more useful to discuss Crick's and others' views in the context of designing actual tools to support rationality in deliberation, negotiation, bargaining and other features of policy decision making. This is very much an open problem, one which--if solved--would seem to have remarkable potential in raising the sanity waterline.

Yes, much of politics is not about policy, but instead is driven by hidden motives such as signaling, negotiating status among groups and so on: improving policy deliberation won't make political behavior fully optimal. Nonetheless, such motives also apply to academic research and scholarship, charity, business and other enterprises which yield useful products and can make good use of deliberation tools for their private and internal decision making.

Robin Hanson has taken a first stab at this problem with his futarchy and decision market, but--needless to say--his solution is rather extreme and not very close to the actual Western ideal of political deliberation. The inferential distance here may simply be too large for comfort.

Comment author: Emile 26 May 2011 09:55:13AM 0 points [-]

I'd also be interested in reading a post on Crick, and also think that the wiki is not the best place to introduce such ideas to the community. I think quite a few regular members rarely look at the wiki unless they're explicitely pointed towards it or are looking for something specific, and don't expect that to change much.

It would be rather more useful to discuss Crick's and others' views in the context of designing actual tools to support rationality in deliberation, negotiation, bargaining and other features of policy decision making.

I'd be interested in seeing more about that, though there's already been some discussion of those.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 May 2011 08:06:09PM * 5 points [-]

Somehow, wedfrid also objects to the "distorted" emphasis in the opening paragraph: Apparently, we don't fight over politics any more, but we used to fight over it in the ancestral environment, so our instincts are misled. But this is putting the cart before the horse: Fundamentally, politics is a means of (hopefully non-violent) conflict resolution and de-escalation, achieved through increasingly complicated strategies and institutions. When we are unable to solve a political conflict through non-violent means, we can and do fight over it, as the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen have been discovering recently. Wedfrid seems to hold to the Maoist/Machiavellian view of politics as something that "flows out of the barrel of a gun": might makes right, ethics and rights be damned. This view works correctly until it doesn't, and when it fails the costs can be severe.

I consider this to be a straw man. I did not say those things. I don't believe those things. Your claims about what I believe are not a tenable interpretation of my words.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 26 May 2011 08:19:50AM 2 points [-]

I downvoted due to the strawman attack on wedrifid's views of politics. Bernard Crick's work sounds interesting but if it hasn't been discussed on LW it belongs on the wiki not our wiki.

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 May 2011 04:51:42PM 1 point [-]

With regards to your last paragraph, I would refrain from ascribing any "fundamental purpose" to politics. Things that are optimized (for example, by being designed) have purposes but politics does not seem like an obviously optimized phenomena, so saying 'fundamentally politics is X' is likely to be a mistake.

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