LW automatically downvotes...

I would love to hear the evidence you have to back that very broadstatement. It sounds like you're against doing this yourself, and so am I, and so is Phil. That's 0/3 so far here.

I upvoted Phil's post about word per person and rigor because it was an interesting and novel idea backed by actual research and analysis (whether I agree with it or not). I downvoted this post because it's a trite idea backed by no analysis other than taking word definitions out of context.

If you really feel that LW is now entirely populated by people who wage petty wars over tribal grievances (like 90% of the rest of the internet), then what are you still doing here?

Getting five downvotes on this immediately after posting is bizarre

You are surprised? LW automatically downvotes polarizing/uncomfortable content and that goes double for anything that mentions SJWs.

Or, to be a bit more precise, you are allowed here to make people uncomfortable with the scenario of a giant paperclip chasing them. But you are not allowed to make people uncomfortable about their tribal allegiances.

I feel like general stupidity does exist, in the same way that general intelligence does? Not sure what you like about this quote. The idea that biases are diverse, maybe?

Phil, I think you're falling into the trap you accuse Pham of: getting confused about words and how people use them. Like you've noticed, Pham doesn't use "rationality" to mean the same thing we do. From the article:

What if those imperialism-driven Europeans, all passionate and roused about Manifest Destiny, were encouraged to stop and reconsider whether their violent plans were rational? We might possibly have a world that isn’t filled to the brim with oppression.

In the article Pham vacillates between using "rational" to mean "reasonably likely to be achieved" and to mean "culturally acceptable". The point of their article is that being told that decolonization is "irrational" (i.e. unlikely to be achieved and/or unpopular) doesn't mean that people shouldn't pursue it as a goal. Let's call these definitions Pham.rationality. They, especially the second one, have very little to do with "representing an accurate picture of reality" or however you want to define LW.rationality.

But it isn't just a sign of how insane the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way. The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".

Let me get this straight: you define Insane = NOT(LW.rationality), see an article that says: SJ = NOT(Pham.rationality), and then happily conclude that SJ = Insane because "rationality".

You could have attacked the article for having an undesirable goal (i.e. abolishing the police). You could have attacked it for jumping between two definitions, and creating a deepity: one interpretation is banal (we should push for decolonialization even if it's unpopular), the other is plain false (we will achieve decolonialization even if it's utterly impossible). You could have attacked the article for incorrect facts, incoherent structure and extremely poor writing. There's enough ammunition there to make whatever denigrating point you want to make about SJ writing.

What you shouldn't get away with is seeing someone else define a word in a confusing/misleading way to make a point and then immediately doing the same thing.

My most charitable interpretation of your post is that you think that:

• A. Pham is just a stupid person and was thus told by her friends they are irrational (i.e. NOT PhamFriends.rational).
• B. They have thus decided that being stupid is a virtue.

A is both unfounded speculation and unnecessary ad-hominem, B still fails as a logical argument because Pham doesn't use her friends' definition of rationality in the article.

Phil, I have read a lot of the great stuff that you've posted here on LW, this post does your reputation a disservice.

I think the subreddits should only be created after enough articles for given category were posted (and upvoted).

Agreed. This is why I shut off main and forced everything into discussion--I don't think we know enough about how LW will be used to partition things ahead of time. (I'm also pretty skeptical of doing a subreddit split on topics instead of on rules.)

Upvoting and downvoting should be limited to users already having some karma; not sure about exact numbers, but I would start with e.g. 100 for upvoting, and 200 or 300 for downvoting. This would prevent the most simple ways to game the system, which in its current form is insanely fragile -- a single dedicated person could destroy the whole website literally in an afternoon even without scripting. This is especially dangerous considering how much time it takes to fix even the smallest problems here.

Currently the limits are 10 for both upvoting and downvoting. We've already seen some innocent bystanders hit.

I think you're underestimating the difficulty in getting up to 100 karma. (One comment made a while ago is that the fragility of the voting system--especially when it comes to serial downvoters--happens in part because of how infrequently good users vote. It is problematic when we exclude people with good taste who don't contribute much, because that means the base of good votes to overcome is even shallower.)

Re. having the proposed tag "Rational fiction", but no tag for "fiction" -- this seems strange to me. Compare Politics and Art--would it make sense to change those to "rational politics" and "rational art"? No; politics and art are social phenomena we may wish to discuss. So is fiction. Irrational fiction may be as useful to discuss as rational fiction.

( Now I'm imagining a tag system with predicate logic, so you could tag a post with "not(rational(fiction))". )

Re: 2. There is now a help ticket on the github.

Re: 1. in the document now. So long as your suggestions get noticed; they can be posted anywhere. But a "place to make it easier to notice suggestions" would help greatly for both people suggesting and people trying to make progress on changes needed to lw.

Re. "Reducing total negative karma" as a goal--

Negative karma is already less common than positive karma. This is good, since it would be bad if the "average user" couldn't post. But without a justified target for what the proper amount of negative karma is, setting "reduce negative karma" as a goal isn't reasonable. How do we know we don't already have the right amount? Or too little?

Who is involved in this effort that has power to make any of it happen?

That raises the issue that "have more transparency about who runs the site and makes decisions" would be nice. The "About Less Wrong" page doesn't say anything about who runs the site, who the mods are, anything of that nature. I have no way of knowing whether Elo is a site webmaster, or some guy tossing out ideas.

This makes sense to me, but perhaps it's best expressed in the LessWrong potential changes post