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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community? - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's interesting, and is causing me to update in the direction of thinking that this is a real problem that resources should be devoted to solving. I think I know of one other person who's not you who has left LW because of downvoting. It's interesting how seriously we take the arbitrary numbers associated with our profiles & contributions. (I do it too.)
And it looks as though there are many people who have reported similar in this thread. Maybe talk to Kaj Sotala? Perhaps he is privately reprimanding mass downvoters?
I do think this comment of yours was a reasonable downvote candidate:
Not because I think you are wrong about global warming, but because frequency of newspaper headlines seems like a bad way to infer statistical trends. Newspapers report on what's interesting, what their readers will read, what's unusual, etc. So news stories are not all that representative of what's actually going on in the world.
I don't believe that it's more than a day or two of work for a developer. The SQL queries one would run are pretty simple, as we previously discussed, and as Jack from Trike confirmed. The reason that nothing has been done about it is that Eliezer doesn't care. And he may well have good reasons not to, but he never commented on the issue, except maybe once when he mentioned something about not having technical capabilities to identify the culprits (which is no longer a valid statement).
My guess is that he cares not nearly as much about LW in general now as he used to, as most of the real work is done at MIRI behind the scenes, and this forum is mostly noise for him these days. He drops by occasionally as a distraction from important stuff, but that's it.
This sounds like moralizing to me. Of the following two scenarios, which do you have in mind?
Someone had an idea for a solution to the problem and ran it by Eliezer. Eliezer vetoed it (because he was feeling spiteful?)
Eliezer is a busy person trying to do lots of things. Because Eliezer has historically been LW's head honcho, no one feels comfortable taking decisive action without his approval. But folks are hesitant to bother him because they know he's got lots to do, or else they do send him email but he doesn't respond to them because he's behind on his email, or he skips reading those emails in favor of higher-priority emails.
I think the second scenario is far more likely. If the second scenario is the case, I don't see any reason to bother Eliezer. We just have to stop acting as though all important forum decisions must go through him. Personally I don't see any reason why Eliezer would know best how to run LW. Expertise at blogging is not the same as expertise at online community management. And empirically, there have been lots of complaints about the way LW is moderated, which is evidence that Eliezer is bad at it (I know there are other moderators, but I'm assuming he sets the tone and has the final word). My guess is that to the extent he's given deference, it's due to his high status or some kind of halo effect. (Speaking of which, the halo effect seems like a bias that LWers fall prey to really often regarding high-status LW figures like Eliezer, Lukeprog, and Matt Fallshaw. But I digress.)
I don't know if this one particular issue is worth a revolt. But if we can brainstorm enough issues that would benefit from an overhaul of the moderation/LW leadership team, perhaps it would be worthwhile to start another thread devoted to that topic.
If you are a busy person wanting to get a lot of things done, delegate tasks and give someone else the authority do solve the task. To the extend that he doesn't want to solve tasks like this himself, he should delegate the authority clearly to someone else.
Of course it's the second scenario. My point is that this forum has dropped in priority for Eliezer and MIRI in general in the last year or so. And, as I said, probably for a good reason.
This. Eliezer clearly doesn't care about LessWrong anymore, to the point that these days he seems to post more on Facebook than on LessWrong. Realizing this is a major reason why this comment is the first anything I've posted on LessWrong in well over a month.
I know a number of people have been working on launching a LessWrong-like forum dedicated to Effective Altruism, which is supposedly going to launch very soon. Here's hoping it takes off—because honestly, I don't have much hope for LessWrong at this point.
He receives a massive number of likes there, no matter what he writes. My guess is that he needs that kind of feedback, and he doesn't get it here anymore. Recently he requested that a certain topic should not be mentioned on the HPMOR subreddit, or otherwise he would go elsewhere. On Facebook he can easily ban people who mention something he doesn't like.
Given that you directly caused a fair portion of the thing that is causing him pain (i.e., spreading FUD about him, his orgs, and etc.), this is like a win for you, right?
Why don't you leave armchair Internet psychoanalysis to experts?
I'm not sure how to respond to this comment, given that it contains no actual statements, just rhetorical questions, but the intended message seems to be "F you for daring to cause Eliezer pain, by criticizing him and the organization he founded."
If that's the intended message, I submit that when someone is a public figure, who writes and speaks about controversial subjects and is the founder of an org that's fairly aggressive about asking people for money, they really shouldn't be insulated from criticism on the basis of their feelings.
You could have simply not responded.
It wasn't, no. It was a reminder to everyone else of XiXi's general MO, and the benefit he gets from convincing others that EY is a megalomaniac, using any means necessary.
Circa 2005 I had a link to MIRI (then called the Singularity Institute) on my homepage. Circa 2009 I've even been advertising LessWrong.
I am on record as saying that I believe most of the sequences to consist of true and sane material. I am on record as saying that I believe LessWrong to be the most rational community.
But in 2010, due to some incidence that may not be mentioned here, I noticed that there are some extreme tendencies and beliefs that might easily outweigh all the positive qualities. I also noticed that a certain subset of people seems to have a very weird attitude when it comes to criticism pertaining Yudkowsky, MIRI or LW.
I've posted a lot of arguments that were never meant to decisively refute Yudkowksky or MIRI, but to show that many of the extraordinary claims can be weakened. The important point here is that I did not even have to do this, as the burden of evidence is not on me disprove those claims, but on the people who make the claims. They need to prove that their claims are robust and not just speculations on possible bad outcomes.
You keep saying this and things like it, and not providing any evidence whatsoever when asked, directly or indirectly.
A win would be if certain people became a little less confident about the extraordinary claims he makes, and more skeptical of the mindset that CFAR spreads.
A win would be if he became more focused on exploration rather than exploitation, on increasing the robustness of his claims, rather than on taking actions in accordance with his claims.
A world in which I don't criticize MIRI is a world where they ask for money in order to research whether artificial intelligence is an existential risk, rather than asking for money to research a specific solution in order to save an intergalactic civilization.
A world in which I don't criticize Yudkowsky is a world in which he does not make claims such as that if you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
A world in which I don't criticize CFAR/LW is a world in which they teach people to be extremely skeptical of back-of-the-envelope calculations, a world in which they tell people to strongly discount claims that cannot be readily tested.
I speculate that Yudkowsky has narcissistic tendencies. Call it armchair psychoanalysis if you like, but I think there is enough evidence to warrant such speculations.
I call it an ignoble personal attack which has no place on this forum.
Sorry. It wasn't meant as an attack, just something that came to my mind reading the comment by Chris Hallquist.
My initial reply was based on the following comment by Yudkowsky:
And regarding narcissism, the definition is: "an inflated sense of one's own importance and a deep need for admiration."
See e.g. this conversation between Ben Goertzel and Eliezer Yudkowsky (note that MIRI was formerly known as SIAI):
Also see e.g. this comment by Yudkowsky:
...and from his post...
And this kind of attitude started early. See for example what he wrote in his early "biography":
Also see this video:
That's the dictionary definition. When throwing around accusations of mental pathology, though, it behooves one not to rely on pattern-matching to one-sentence definitions; it overestimates the prevalence of problems, suggests the wrong approaches to them, and tends to be considered rude.
Having a lot of ambition and an overly optimistic view of intelligence in general and one's own intelligence in particular doesn't make you a narcissist, or every fifteen-year-old nerd in the world would be a narcissist.
(That said, I'm not too impressed with Eliezer's reasons for moving to Facebook.)
I feel that similar accusation could be used against anyone who feels that more is possible and instead of whining tries to win.
I am not an expert on narcissism (though I could be expert at it, heh), but seems to me that a typical narcissistic person would feel they deserve admiration without doing anything awesome. They probably wouldn't be able to work hard, for years. (But as I said, I am not an expert; there could be multiple types of narcissism.)
Thinking that one person is going to save the world, and you're him, qualifies as "an inflated sense of one's own importance", IMO.
First mistake: believing that one person will be saving the world. Second mistake: there is likely only one person that can do it, and he's that person.
Well, I'm sorry but when you dig up quotes of your opponent to demonstrate purported flaws in his character, it is a personal attack. I didn't expect to encounter this sort of thing in LessWrong. Given the number of upvotes your comment received, I can understand why Eliezer prefers Facebook.
Yudkowsky tells other people to get laid. He is asking the community to downvote certain people. He is calling people permanent idiots.
He is a forum moderator. He asks people for money. He wants to create the core of the future machine dictator that is supposed to rule the universe.
Given the above, I believe that remarks about his personality are warranted, and not attacks, if they are backed up by evidence (which I provided in other comments above).
But note that in my initial comment, which got this discussion started, I merely uttered a guess on why Yudowsky might now prefer Facebook over LessWrong. Then a comment forced me to escalate this by providing further justification for uttering this guess. Your comments further forced me to explain myself. Which resulted in a whole thread about Yudkowsky's personality.
Just curious: what else do you consider the big problems of CFAR (other than being associated with MIRI)?
Indeed, it is perfectly fine if someone downvoted that post. I probably deserved a -3 there. However, rather than be given the opportunity to learn from that feedback in the way karma is supposed to work, I instead received one downvote to every post I ever made on the site.
I don't think people are entirely on the same page about how karma is "supposed to work". For some, it may be feedback to get people to post better. For others, it may be stifling the posts from who they perceive as a low quality poster.
Karma bombing seems rather jerk faced to me, but do you really need to care? You've got enough karma to post articles. You have good evidence that the karma drop was due to one lone jerk off.
Therefore, what does he matter? Why is this a problem for you?
I suppose if you use comment karma to evaluate how people like what you write, blank downvoting masks the useful signal.
Yes. A while ago I suddenly lost like 50 points (which is a lot for me). The signal that gives isn't 'don't write stuff like this', but 'we don't want you here, go away', and I almost did.
But he knows the source of the karma drop, therefore the useful signal has been unmasked.
I don't see the point in telling people that they shouldn't have the emotional reactions that they keep having. It may be possible to fade those reactions out in the long haul, but caring about karma is a typical reaction (and it seems to be at least common), then it's better to take it into account.
If you were mugged, but the cops caught the mugger and you got all your money back, would you not care about the mugging? You seem to be putting results over process.
I would want to see the guy strung up. But I wouldn't refrain from going out of my house because I had once been mugged. I consider that a dysfunctional response. If I knew someone who was "living" that way, I'd encourage them to change.
See previous comment (downvoted into oblivion) on people refraining from posting because people downvoted them. I walk the talk. It just isn't that hard.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfj/downvote_stalkers_driving_members_away_from_the/b255
Then taking the trouble of explaining why the comment is problematic is much more helpful to the discussion than simply clicking on the thumbdown.