I'm worried that LW doesn't have enough good contrarians and skeptics, people who disagree with us or like to find fault in every idea they see, but do so in a way that is often right and can change our minds when they are. I fear that when contrarians/skeptics join us but aren't "good enough", we tend to drive them away instead of improving them.
For example, I know a couple of people who occasionally had interesting ideas that were contrary to the local LW consensus, but were (or appeared to be) too confident in their ideas, both good and bad. Both people ended up being repeatedly downvoted and left our community a few months after they arrived. This must have happened more often than I have noticed (partly evidenced by the large number of comments/posts now marked as written by [deleted], sometimes with whole threads written entirely by deleted accounts). I feel that this is a waste that we should try to prevent (or at least think about how we might). So here are some ideas:
- Try to "fix" them by telling them that they are overconfident and give them hints about how to get LW to take their ideas seriously. Unfortunately, from their perspective such advice must appear to come from someone who is themselves overconfident and wrong, so they're not likely to be very inclined to accept the advice.
- Create a separate section with different social norms, where people are not expected to maintain the "proper" level of confidence and niceness (on pain of being downvoted), and direct overconfident newcomers to it. Perhaps through no-holds-barred debate we can convince them that we're not as crazy and wrong as they thought, and then give them the above-mentioned advice and move them to the main sections.
- Give newcomers some sort of honeymoon period (marked by color-coding of their usernames or something like that), where we ignore their overconfidence and associated social transgressions (or just be extra nice and tolerant towards them), and take their ideas on their own merits. Maybe if they see us take their ideas seriously, that will cause them to reciprocate and take us more seriously when we point out that they may be wrong or overconfident.
OTOH, I don’t think group think is a big problem. Criticism by folks like Will Newsome, Vladimir Slepnev and especially Wei Dai is often upvoted. (I upvote almost every comment of Dai or Newsome if I don’t forget it. Dai makes always very good points and Newsome is often wrong but also hilariously funny or just brilliant and right.) Of course, folks like this Dymytry guy are often downvoted, but IMO with good reason.
Agreed. In my experience this problem of standard-argument-affirming shows up a lot during debates about uFAI risks. If I try to suggest some non-obvious argument against the Eliezerian position then I tend to mostly get re-assertions or re-phrasings of the standard Eliezerian arguments, which is distracting and a tad insulting. It seems some people identify me as a mainstream-view-loving enemy who is trying to unfairly marginalize the Eliezerian position, and thus don't bother to carefully check if my argument might be reasonable on its own terms.
In the last few months I've been averaging like 5 to 10 karma on my anti-Eliezerian AI risk arguments, and I think that's because I've expressed them more clearly and redundantly. But they're the same arguments that were getting downvoted to -5 or so back a year or two ago when I wasn't taking special care not to trigger local immune responses. (Weirdly, even saying that I'd spent a year or so with the Visiting Fellows talking to a lot of SingInst people who didn't think I was clearly stupid or insane didn't dissuade people from thinking I was clearly mistaken about basic SingInst arguments. I still don't really understand that... maybe I was interpreted as making an unjustified claim to authority that shouldn't be taken as evidence, or something.)
The majority of your comments which I've downvoted have been for use of improper vocabulary. That is, you repurpose words in unconventional ways which result in extremely difficult, if not impossible, translation to something I can understand.
Lately, you seem to have been taking more care to use words with their dictionary definitions.