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gjm comments on Weirdness at the wiki - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: NancyLebovitz 30 November 2015 11:37PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 01 December 2015 09:25:43AM 16 points [-]

Background: I'm a returning LW old hat and CFAR alum and worked briefly on the LW codebase a long time ago, but am not a moderator or authority of any kind; this is my summary based on publicly-accessible data.

The edit history is not inaccessible. What happens is that whenever an article gets deleted, all of its history entries move to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/index.php?title=Delete&action=history.

Gleb Tsipursky co-founded an organization called Intentional Insights, and is doing rationality training/outreach through it. He's been posting rationality materials on Less Wrong. He created an LW Wiki page for the org in March and made occasional updates, and on November 19 it had this text. That looks pretty reasonable, although I'd remove the language suggesting a possible CFAR collaboration unless it progresses past the "has talked with" stage. On November 29 and 30 VoiceOfRa deletes it and Gleb Tsipursky restores it, then Gjm wrote an alternative article which is intensely critical and based mostly on this thread.

That thread is too involved for me to do more than lightly skim it right now, but I will highlight this comment by jsteinhart:

My main update from this discussion has been a strong positive update about Gleb Tsipursky's character. I've been generally impressed by his ability to stay positive even in the face of criticism, and to continue seeking feedback for improving his approaches.

The content of the Less Wrong Wiki is pretty inconsequential; if not for this post it wouldn't be seen. But fights like this can be very destructive to motivation, and if I were in Gleb's shoes I'd be feeling unjustly attacked. I'd prefer to see that stopped, and replaced with something more constructive.

Comment author: gjm 01 December 2015 10:42:52AM *  4 points [-]

FWIW, "my" version was intended to be neutral (it says what InIn is trying to do and the criticisms that have been made on LW, and adds that it isn't known how correct either "side" is about InIn's effectiveness) and Gleb has said on the article's talk page that he's OK with it.

It was made in response to Richard Kennaway's post about the edit war, in the hope of stopping it by having an InIn article that demonstrably isn't just promotional puffery. [EDITED to add: that is not an accusation that Gleb's version was just promotional puffery; but clearly it looked that way to VoiceOfRa, and probably to others too.]

So far as I can tell, the wiki weirdness is a combination of suboptimal cache-control headers and the odd way deletion is implemented, and is not a consequence of hacking or other abuse.

Comment author: jimrandomh 02 December 2015 01:23:12AM 1 point [-]

I do realize you were trying to be neutral, but it didn't come out that way. The main problem was that the bit discussing criticism was full of fnords; there's no sentence you can put next to "lowbrow oversimplified caricature creepy unnatural offputting" that can result in an overall impression of neutrality.

Comment author: gjm 02 December 2015 10:02:43AM 0 points [-]

You may be right. On the other hand, the "anti" side of the debate was really strongly negative and there's something to be said for conveying that. Regardless, your re-re-written version of the article looks fine and I hope it will suffice to stop the likes of VoR deleting it again.