Discussion forum growth is not quite the same as general website growth. Having forums grow a lot while maintaining the culture that drew the initial contributors there is still something of an unsolved problem, and fast enough growth can kill forum cultures dead through the eternal September effect. It basically happens at the level of comment-response pairs. Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there's not much left maintaining the older culture. And if the outside users come from The Internet In General, the new forum culture is going to end up looking like The Internet In General.

Active and clueful moderation can help, but that requires moderators who can spend a lot of time daily doing active and clueful moderation.

Some forums make things work a bit better by managing to make their content interesting enough that people are willing to pay $5 or $10 for making a new account, and then asking that. Drive-by trolling and spam becomes harder, but regular users with various issues can still make lots of work for active and clueful moderators.

There are plenty of general website growth experts, but who are the long-term forum growth experts? Matt Haughey of MetaFilter maybe? Paul Graham has been running Hacker News for a while, but I don't think he's exactly doing it full-time.

I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to -3 to -4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.

It doesn't bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I'd be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they're not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I'm just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is "contrarian" really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it's worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it's the latter, well,

I don't think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I will elaborate later may have some truth to it. Explanation ③ seem far fetched considering social conservatives are such a tiny minority of the readership and can be discounted as an explanation for what you say you experience. Of these explanations I think ① is the most likely. I think any of us talking about politics regardless of our positions probably eventually catch the attention of someone who feels like throwing a hissy fit. Right leaning posters have complained of people going through their comment history and down voting every post they've ever made. I've experienced such karmassasiantions in the past too.

Now having said this there have been signs of escalating tensions. Posters have been saying they feel more and more unwelcome and I can totally see why since there are more and more posts that signal "liberal" tribal affiliations. Some like the article criticized by the links I gave are pretty blatant about this. Even some old time well respected posters like Yvain have recently been called out on not being bothered to avoid dog-whistling affiliations.

Now obviously you have some right wing digs like that in recent articles and they may be escalating too, but they are of a more alt-right not conservative nature. And yes any kind of alternative right sentiment, be it Moldbugian Neoreaction or consistent Paleoconservatism is basically being an intellectual hipster. This brings us back to ③ and I think also explains why left leaning users like Multiheaded fear they are losing the battle of ideas.

But it's like I said before - it might be the wisest and most truth-seeking 3% (Vladimir_M alone has more life experience and practical wisdom than many other folks here combined, I'd say), the rest of us might be lagging behind in the race of ideas! I wouldn't have gotten so worked up if I didn't fear that might be the case.

If due to such superior intellectual fire power LessWrong ever got even 10% of conservative readership (still a tiny minority), the metacontrarians would probably cycle back to an exotic form of liberalism. And if that exotic form reached 10%, I'm betting some kind of libertarianism would be back in vogue... I need to again emphasise for the reader who didn't follow the link that where something lands on the metacontrarian ladder does not tell us its truth value.

Now this kind of cycling is I think mostly self-corrective, since it is an intellectual fashion. The real problem in my mind is how political identification can create and escalate conflict between these somewhat shifting fads.

I suppose all I can do is mention that I don't downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.

This. Posters should be encouraged to avoid down voting just political comments they disagree with. Also I think putting more emphasis on keeping your identify small or even apolitical might do us good.

Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse was a good thing that should be restored.

EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU'RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.

Don't be freaked out. People politely complaining about being down voted seem to always get up voted on LessWrong. :)

I've been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.

I'd like to think that it's just someone who doesn't approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don't seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)

So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating "race realism", sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around -1 to +1.

It doesn't bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I'd be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they're not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I'm just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is "contrarian" really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it's worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it's the latter, well, I suppose all I can do is mention that I don't downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.

(I don't mind if this comment gets downvoted, by the way. I feel uncomfortable with discussions of the voting system, as they can become a meta rathole.)

EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU'RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.

we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect

Well, it's not like we have no evidence either way. We have weak evidence for a positive effect.

For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women [...] so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women

It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can't count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.

I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or "red states" vs. "blue states" within the U.S. ...

But somehow I can guess that you do trust the negative results shown... right?

As it usually happens in the social "sciences," it's very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question. Even ignoring the intractable problems with disentangling all the countless non-obvious confounding variables, there is still the problem of unintended consequences -- which may be unaccounted for even if the study seemingly asks all the relevant questions, and which may manifest themselves only in the longer run.

Take for example this nurse-family partnership program. Even if the study has correctly proven that these positive outcomes have occurred in the families covered by the intervention, and that they are in fact a consequence of the intervention -- a big if -- we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect. For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women, both by providing assistance and by lowering the stigma and fear of such an outcome, so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women, especially the least responsible, resourceful, and competent ones, eventually increasing the total measure of child poverty, neglect, abuse, etc. Of course, this may or may not be the case, but there's no way to know it based on these studies that purport to give a definitive evaluation of the program's success.

As an aside: To what degree do you agree with Haidt's analysis of religion and tradition in relation to human psychology in that interview?

I would very much like to know. Feel free to PM me a one-sentence answer instead of posting, if you wish.

Even within the pure feedback-egoist framework (really?) do you think people haven't had that post in mind in later discussions with you?

I would taboo the word "autonomy" in this context, or at least give a clear definition, because there are at least 2 different things that it could refer to.

In Haidt's six foundations theory, the closest thing to "autonomy" as it is being used in this discussion is probably the liberty/oppression foundation (the 6th foundation to be added):

Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.

The liberty/oppression foundation is somewhat underdeveloped in Haidt's book, and discussed separately from the other foundations in a way that's organized a bit strangely, probably because the book was already in progress when he decided to count liberty/oppression as a sixth foundation. Haidt does not seem to have any published papers yet on the liberty/oppression foundation, but he does have one under review which focuses on libertarians.

In Richard Shweder's three-area theory, which was the original basis for Haidt's theory, "autonomy" has a different meaning. It is one of the three ethics - "autonomy" is the blanket label given to the individualistic/liberal approach to morality which involves harm, rights, and justice. The ethic of autonomy is contrasted with the ethic of community (ingroup and hierarchy) and the ethic of divinity (purity and sacredness). In one of Haidt's earlier papers, which used Shweder's system, experimental participants were given this definition of autonomy:

The ethics of Autonomy Individual freedom/rights violations. In these cases an action is wrong because it directly hurts another person, or infringes upon his/her rights or freedoms as an individual. To decide if an action is wrong, you think about things like harm, rights, justice, freedom, fairness, individualism, and the importance of individual choice and liberty.

If you look at that definition and think "but that's all of morality, mushed together in one big category" then congratulations, you're WEIRD. In Shweder's approach, being obsessed with autonomy is precisely what is distinctive about liberals. The utilitarian, who applies cost-benefit analysis to everything and is willing to make any tradeoff, is just one member of the autonomy-obsessed family of moral perspectives. People who rigidly apply concepts of rights, liberty, or justice are part of that same family. The grand Kant-Bentham debate is just a factional squabble which is happening in one corner of the moral triangle.

Haidt's six-foundation approach can be considered a refinement of this view, which keeps Divinity, splits Community in two (ingroup & hierarchy), and divides Autonomy in three (harm, fairness, and liberty). Although there are some complications (fairness is somewhat Community-tinged, and liberty might be too).

Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness.

How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) "the environment". I would also extend the notion of a "single object" to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).

In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven't read any of Haidt's books, I've listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the "groupish" qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.

Autonomy doesn't seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. "Individual autonomy" is a "single thing" at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.

In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don't get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can't serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren't sure that they're all worshiping the same thing.

People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of "my autonomy" or "your autonomy" or "her autonomy". These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we're talking about a bunch of different "autonomies", which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.