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gwillen comments on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (310)
I'm honestly not too sad about that. After The Redacted Incident, I think the community lost a lot of trust in Eliezer. (I know I did.) If he wants a space where he can moderate according to his whims, LessWrong need not be that space. Frankly I trust the mods here more than I trust him to make good mod decisions.
What in particular was wrong with his handling of this incident? I'm not aware of all the details of his handling so its an honest question.
Most obviously, the Streisand effect means that any effort used to silence a statement might as been used to shout it from the hilltops. The Basilisk is very heavily discussed despite its obvious flaws, in no small part because of the context of being censored. If we're actually discussing a memetic hazard, that's the exact opposite of what we want.
There are also some structural and community outreach issues that resulted from the effort and weren't terribly good. Yudkowsky's discussed the matter from his perspective here (warning: wall of text).
((On the upside, we don't have people intentionally discussing more effective memetic hazards in the open in contexts of developing stronger ones, nor trying to build intentional decision theory traps. There doesn't seem to be enough of a causative link to consider this a benefit to the censorship, though.))
I just realized that it has become pretty low-status to spend time talking about decision-theoretic memetic hazards around here, which might be a good thing.
Cheers, that all seems to make sense. I wonder if the Basilisk with its rather obvious flaws actually provides a rather superb illustration of how memetic hazard works in practice, and so doing so provides a significant opportuntity of improving how we handle it.
Oh, be serious. I wasn't crazy about Eliezer's handling of the basilisk, either, but ubermenschen do not grow on trees. Who do we have around who is willing and able to become LessWrong's great leader now that he has left? All of the potentially strong leaders I can think of are busy running their own websites, projects, and/or communities.
Any particular reason you feel the need for a Great Leader?
I wouldn't say Less Wrong needs a single leader, but in general good communities tend to have figures that can serve as "pillars of the community." They tend to help group cohesion and provide good content. They can also serve the role of tutor for new people or by mapping out the direction a community can/should go in.
I think we have some excellent pillars. For example, I see Yvain as a pillar, more than Eliezer.
I tend to think of Eliezer, Yvain, and Gwern as the three pillars of our community. Their styles are all very different but they're all enormously respected.
I actually almost mentioned Gwern along with Yvain, so I'd tend to concur.
Yeah but he's got his own blog.
Yeah, and I'm much sadder that Yvain doesn't post to LW as much as he used to. I'd love to hear from him about why. (At least I'd love it if he'd post links or crosspost.)
Yvain doesn't post to LW because he finds it too stressful. Partly this the stress of the watching the number after posting, but mainly the uncertainty ahead of time about whether his posts are good enough or appropriate.
Added: I was probably thinking of this comment, but it doesn't mention karma.
That seems analogous to the reasons EY stopped posting on LW, so maybe we can form a hypothesis about things that drive highly visible posts away from LW?
Writing a good article is a lot of work. When you write it for LW, you risk that (a) at the end your hard work will get downvoted, or (b) the thread will be off-topic or otherwise bad and you will have no control over it.
A solution is to post your articles somewhere else, and only submit a link with a short summary on LW. The disadvantage of this solution is that the debate is now split in two places: your blog and LW.
It sounds different to me. I thought Eliezer didn't like the comments.
Why does it matter where he writes?
I like reading SSC as much as most people here, but Yvain doesn't guide or lead conversations on LW. This is less true for the greater Aspiring Rationalist Community where SSC posts can cause plenty of ripples across the pond.
Can you (or someone else) list some other people they see as pillars? (Genuinely asking; I have trouble noticing users being frequently insightful because the lack of avatars.)
More to the point, what's so Great about him?
I don't think greatness in that sense is very much related to the position of "Great Leader". I would assume speaking of Eliezer that way is to be flippant about the LessWrong phyg thing.
What is the Redacted Incident?
Is that the one in which a post was deleted as a memetic hazard?
Starts with 'B' and ends with 'asilisk', I'm presuming.