I've previously marked V_V as a probable troll. It seems a lot of feeding is going on.

I agree that it's possible that V_V is trolling. I think it's more likely that they're just educated enough to cut themselves, thinking in terms of fallacies and warning signals, rather than causal models.

But I responded to V_V because you have the critics you have, not the critics you want, and because they do sometimes raise concerns that are worth considering. It is a questionable idea to share secrets in a public setting, but I suspect that V_V and other observers overestimate the social distance between the attendees; I know I would be comfortable telling the regulars at my LW meetup quite a bit about myself, because I've been friends with them for quite some time now. When you cast it as "we're friends that would like to deliberately be friendlier, and that includes targeted attempts to get to know each other better," it loses much of its danger.

(It still has the awkwardness of "how dare you be deliberate in your dealings with other humans!", but I don't think it's possible for that awkwardness to go away, and that's something that most posts on social issues seem to be open about.)

Responding positively demonstrates open-mindedness, encourages superior criticism, and gives me an opportunity to improve the thing criticized.

When I was doing OB and the Sequences, I realized at one point that Caledonian was making it un-fun for me since each post was followed by antihedons from him, and that if I didn't start deleting his comments, I would probably stop continuing (though I certainly didn't know as much then about reinforcement psychology, I still appreciated this on some instinctive level). I'm not going to tolerate that kind of negative stimulus being applied to community organizers.

Deleting people's comments because of your negative emotional reaction is a strategy I strongly recommend against, and admitting to that in response to deleting someone's accusation of cultishness is a mistake. Your refrigerator is unplugged, and you should plug it back in before the ice melts and the food starts to spoil.

I've previously marked V_V as a probable troll. It seems a lot of feeding is going on. This post in particular is not an appropriate place for it. I'm thinking of adding a term to the Deletion Policy for, well, this sort of thing on any post that reports a positive community effort - see Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate for the rationale.

When I was doing OB and the Sequences, I realized at one point that Caledonian was making it un-fun for me since each post was followed by antihedons from him, and that if I didn't start deleting his comments, I would probably stop continuing (though I certainly didn't know as much then about reinforcement psychology, I still appreciated this on some instinctive level). I'm not going to tolerate that kind of negative stimulus being applied to community organizers.

I think it might actually be a good idea to give any poster the power to delete replies in their post's comments thread - Facebook does this automatically and I don't think it's a problem in real life, except of course for the trolls themselves - but that would require development resources, and as ever, we have none.

Other kinds of posts are also deleted! This post was arbitrarily removed. REPOST:

This arbitrary decree fully shows that Less Wrong is no "community" but a front for the Singularity Institute: a tool to entice donors. Any of the "socialists" or "liberals" (per Survey) who take LW seriously as a forum should reconsider their premises.

(And when has E.Y. ever shown enough integrity to trust him with discretion.)

please think about this for five minutes before upvoting or downvoting

Before upvoting your comment, or Eliezer's post?

(If the latter, it seems that you are operating from the assumption that votes on the post reflect how much people agree with the proposed policy. This may not be true. I have upvoted the post although I oppose the policy, because I want to encourage discussing similar policies beforehand.)

This post seems incoherent to me :-( It starts out talking about personal utilities, and then draws conclusions about the social utilities used in utilitarianism. Needless to say, the argument is not a logical one.

Proving that average utilitarianism is correct seems like a silly goal to me. What does it even mean to prove an ethical theory correct? It doesn't mean anything. In reality, evolved creatures exhibit a diverse range of ethical theories, that help them to attain their mutually-conflicting goals.

See this sequence of comments on my post arguing that saying expectation maximization is correct is equivalent to saying that average utilitarianism is correct.

That thesis seems obviously wrong: the term "utilitarianism" refers not to maximising, but to maximising something pretty specific - namely: the happiness of all people.

You've just gained an immense amount of my respect, which an upvote alone could not properly convey.

Gwern would have gained more respect from me if he withdrew with tact rather than making an exit in a way that also scores a point and reinforces the frame that Alicorn is behaving irrationally*. This doesn't mean I am saying gwern's approach was somehow inappropriate (I'm actively saying nothing either way). Instead I'm saying that being able to withdraw without losing face or causing the other to lose face demonstrates strong social competence as well as the willingness to cooperate with others. Exiting with a pointed tap-out does demonstrate wisdom and a certain amount of restraint but it is still crude and neutral at best when it comes to respect for the other and their emotions.

* Standard caveat for all my comments: Unless explicitly stated I am not making any claim about sincerity or intent when I talk about what effect or social role a given action has.

Agreed. Though of course, I don't really see Faramir as disagreeing -- it was, after all, the Rangers of Ithilien who ambushed the Haradrim and killed the soldier they're talking about.

I'm a little bit proud that I don't know who all these people are.

And why was it deleted, when I've posted far more "objectionable" matter?

Because the moderators don't have access to a "ban account' feature for accounts that only post 'objectionable' material.