I hope this and other venues will draw discussions of race realism, pickup, etc., and associated metadiscussions away from Less Wrong.
Agreed, and that's from someone who is interested in some of those discussions. I just don't feel they work well here.
I'm in the "glad there is a space for those conversations but that it is not here" camp. I'd have been worried that the self-selection of people who participate in the blog would distort in a different way than the posts here get, but that's alleviated somewhat by the closed-to-comments thing.
FWIW, I agree that 'factionalism' is a far better term than tribalism. In fact, I am surprised that this has not been pointed out before - as it happens, I think I have actually been using 'factionalism' (and 'faction') consistently to mean what others on this site seem to call 'tribalism', although I am not going to take any credit for this. Factionalism is the accepted term in politics and political science, and the term 'tribalism' (also, 'neotribalism', or 'new tribalism') has other uses, for instance advocacy of small, self-contained communities (not exceeding Dunbar's number of about 150 members) focused on a dense social network and relative egalitarianism.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
The average comment isn't too great on LW either.
We have recieved substantial feedback via that mechanism already.
And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia - wait, is that example so excellent that you don't even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this 'trivial inconvenience' was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.
For example, I've told you on IRC how I think the tribalism post is bullshit, but I have zero interest in writing up an email and sending it off and the email either never being seen or at best quoted.
The letters to the editor system is superior to moderated comments when it comes to optimizing for high signal to noise ratio
And you've based this on careful experimentation, of course.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
The average comment isn't too great on LW either.
There's a large difference between "mostly awful" and "not too great".
And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia - wait, is that example so excellent that you don't even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this 'trivial inconvenience' was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.
Apparently these editors have decided that rather than getting as much activity as possible, they're willing to settle for smaller amounts of activity if it means they don't have to deal with all the shit you get by moderating after the fact. I can't fucking blame them the tiniest bit.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
The average comment isn't too great on LW either.
This is the iron law of blogs and web forums: the quality of the average comment is always well below that of the average post.
I don't especially want to defend my criticism, but my basic point was that quoting reams of material on tribal warfare does nothing at all towards addressing the LW 'tribalism' view of personal identity & group solidarity as fundamentally motivated cognition and is a giant non sequitur, and his attempt to contextualize the Byzantine isn't much better because pointing out that factions latched onto the mobs is like saying there is no such thing as xenophobia or nationalism because in China the xenophobic nationalist mobs protesting Korea or Japan are manipulated by the government and shut down when necessary - if people really are easily manipulated and propagandized as part of group conflict, you would expect various factions to exploit this.
This is not an encyclopedia gwern.
Yet, it is a group blog. Why, that sounds like my other example...
Sorry, Gwern is right. I would comment there, and I know that you have indeed been looking forward to my input in particular, and might even fast-track my letters due to having confidence that I make for an interesting opponent... but even with all that, the entry barrier is too damn high!
You're basically inviting me to write short but reasonably complete essays in which I'd have to cover the inferential distance from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum... explain where exactly I agree or disagree with your criticisms of the dominant liberal worldview... figure out how much I should adjust for Least Convenient Possible World and whether it'd make sense for me to concede some claims outright... provide an introduction to some schools of thought which a right-wing audience might've never encountered outside of a strawmanned pop-culture form [1] (and which even the MoreRight authors likely misunderstand in some subtle but crucial ways, as has been my impression whenever I tried to talk feminism with you)... explain why I think such traditions might have an advantage over an epistemic-learned-helplessness defense of conservative liberalism... provide such a defense where I fe...
Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx.
Never mind Marx, that's pretty obvious if you know anything about the non-straw version of Ayn Rand's ideas. For all that she liked to frame her arguments in individualist terms, Rand's deal was basically all about a conflict between creative and exploitative classes as mediated by social and technological changes; her idea of the creative class just included people like entrepreneurs and financiers (though it's worth noting that her heroes were usually artists or engineers), and didn't include most ordinary laborers. Once you pick this up, Atlas Shrugged basically -- and not without some irony -- becomes Class Warfare: The Novel.
She and Marx also had similar ideas about the role of religion in the public sphere, and both liked to express their ideas as deriving from a small set of abstract principles (though Marx's take on it is basically Hegelian, and Rand's got some kind of strange quasi-Aristotelian thing going on). I haven't read as much Chesterton, but from what I gather he's more of a status-quo paleocon, and of course became famously Catholic.
Shit, I've got a .txt file open right now with a Frankenstein's monster of a long comment intended to attack the neo-reactionary ideology with regards to issues of structural power and social dominance... epistemology and the biases/rationalizations caused by privilege (building on a "cheap shot" about your pals all being straight white tech-minded guys, having at least modest economic security, living in modern liberal democracies and communicating freely in a de facto libertarian-socialist network)... the way historical narratives are formed and how they relate to social psychology/self-image/intergroup relations (re: all conservative talk of a Relatively-Golden-Age)...
I would be highly interested in reading such a post, either here at LW or somewhere else. You shouldn't worry too much about it becoming too long or its style being unsatisfactory; these are complicated issues, and getting some editorial commentary from other users would also help.
I do agree that More Right itself won't help much wrt. non-right-wing political commentary. Really, we need to start embracing friendly, benign factionalization and create a network, 'planet' or blogroll of political/ration...
This is easily checked, isn't it? I propose that you keep the current policy for a month, then switch to regular pre-moderated blog comments for a month.
For example - and sorry for descending to object-level current politics- I wanted to reply to Mike's off-hand mention of Putin as a successful and efficient modern authoritarian ruler with something along the lines of:
"Goddamnit, I actually live here, and I get to see the bureaucracy paralyzed with nepotism and corruption, the unsustainable loot-n-run resource-extracting economy, the barely functional public sector under perpetual directionless reform, the brewing sense of anger and despair due to social inequality, the uncontrollable and semi-criminal repressive apparatus, the growing cultural and ethnic rifts destroying what sense of shared identity us "Russians" had remaining..."
Yet such a simple listing of complaints about Mike's characterization doesn't feel like enough to fire up an email for, and I don't feel like going deeper into it. Would you view something like this as even marginally useful input?
Of course I agree that unmoderated comments would be a clusterfuck. Don't think anyone was suggesting otherwise.
"Want to see amateurs in home-made crowns pretend to open kindergartens? barelyregal.com" - some commenter there.
With the implicit point that there isn't muv difference between moderated comments and emailed in comments.
Which is stupid, and I refer you to my original comment, and particularly encourage you to re-read all articles and comments mentioning 'trivial inconveniences'.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
This sentence remains equally true if you remove the phrase "right wing" from it.
With moderated comments over email only it's more akin to an old-style editor-reviewed column/journal than to a blog. Consider renaming.
I am torn between finding the naming schema slightly distasteful and so clever that I have to give it a pass.
This blog is very annoying. First, for some reason you guys keep writing posts and deleting them or something; I got several RSS notifications for posts that subsequently didn't exist. Second, no comments means no opportunity to give feedback, even of the writing variety. For example, I don't understand the Parable of the Unstoppable Mad Man. The author writes like it's obvious what the mad man is, but I'm genuinely confused. (The typo in the third sentence didn't help either.) And what's the deal with the prisoner? I don't get this post at all.
Do you guys really think writing with no feedback is a good idea? (Requiring emails for comments is a deadly trivial inconvenience. You'll end up only getting feedback from the loudest people, which doesn't seem to correlate at all with the most useful feedback.)
First, for some reason you guys keep writing posts and deleting them or something; I got several RSS notifications for posts that subsequently didn't exist.
My apologies for the inconvenience and the tardy reply. One of the disappearing articles was my Parable of the Unstoppable Mad Man which I accidentally published out of order in the sequence, before Against Moral Progress. I have since reposted it.
The other four missing posts where those written by James Goulding. He decided to start his own blog and asked me if it would be ok to move his posts there, I said it would be. Looking back I now think this was a mistake on my part. You can read the articles with very minor changes there:
His site is interesting and well worth following in general. I will likely soon make an interesting links post where we will among other things share these with an explanation for why they aren't on the site anymore.
Having more experience with the interface future mistakes are now less likely. More importantly, because of readers feedback...
Suggestion: if you're going to start a new group blog, look at the group blogs that are most popular (like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Bleacher Report, etc.) and think about copying them. My suspicion is that the LW "shame them in to maintaining quality" model sucks, and instead you're better off encouraging the production of lots of content and then building filter mechanisms on top of that.
Where are they now? No link is working for several days already. Are they renewing the internet infrastructure or what?
I believe this was a deliberate design choice:
Politics is difficult to talk about due to the human tendency to form coalitions and then insult the opposing side, so the comments are closed except on the monthly open thread. If you have something noteworthy to say about a particular article, email us at comments[at]moreright.net and we will add it there or even dedicate a separate post to it.
Ever moderated anything? (Curious.) And that is far, far, far from the only unpleasant experience I've ever had as a moderator.
I think I've dealt with enough shit on Wikipedia - over the Bogdanov affair, if nothing else, maybe you've heard of it? - to be able to tell you that you brought a lot of this shit on your own head, which was my original point before we began swinging moderator-dicks around.
I think this may be partially due to the poor design of LW which makes deletions visible.
Maybe, but it's probably also going to be the userbase causing an extremer form of the Streisand effect. I mean, deleting comments? You might as well wave a red flag and say 'hey nerdy libertarian free-speech guys - please pattern-match onto censorship to be righteously opposed, thanks!' Facebook is a different interface, but also a different userbase with a different set of expectations.
Then it would also be easy and safe to give all posters the ability to banish comments from their posts ... I don't know if we'll ever have the programming resources for that.
Various people (including Konkvistador who has been talking about it the most) have launched their blog More Right
"A group blog, More Right is a place to discuss the many things that are touched by politics that we prefer wouldn’t be, as well as right wing ideas in general. It grew out of the correspondences among like minded people in late 2012, who first began their journey studying the findings of modern cognitive science on the failings of human reasoning and ended it reading serious 19th century gentlemen denouncing democracy. Surveying modernity, we found cracks in its façade. Findings and seemingly correct ideas, carefully bolted down and hidden, met with disapproving stares and inarticulate denunciation when unearthed. This only whetted our appetites. Proceeding from the surface to the foundations, we found them lacking. This is reflected in the spirit of the site."