[Link] More Right launched

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'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.

Could you give a quick summary here? I'd be interested in seeing it, since at a glance the post seemed reasonable to me.

And you've based this on careful experimentation, of course.

I so love your sarcasm when it is directed at someone else.

OB published everything sent to it

The one post I sent to OB was rejected. (Which it deserved to be, since in retrospect it was pretty poor.)

I will take your word that OB (the old OB before the creation of LW) published everything sent to it, but there was no way for a regular reader of OB to have become confident of that.

The average comment isn't too great on LW either.

Still a helluva lot better than the average comment on (say) Youtube or Facebook.

Trivial inconvenience is a feature not a bug. I mentioned it explicitly when arguing for this system to be adopted for the early days of the blog. I may be wrong, but I think it acts as a filter for those who can't be bothered to expend the small amount of effort in reply. This correlates with a less useful reply.

This is not an encyclopedia gwern.

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/rationalist venues inspired by other political ideologies. As you say, even just the inferential distances among differing worldviews and ideologies make a centralized treatment quite hopeless. And that's before taking all kinds of legitimate controversies into account, which mean that the 'network' approach will probably be trusted to a greater extent by potential users.

I am just asking people to use their email client rather than their browser to write comments. And in a regular open thread they can write comments in the way they are used to when they primarily seek interaction with other readers or off topic discussion.

You underestimate how much nonrightwing people would be scared off by an actual right wing comment section. We are not therefore discussing expectations of quality or moderation here but only the trivial inconvenience of emailing them in.

I suspect your and gwerns comments are getting a lot of upvotes because of Far mode considerations and vague feelings of goodness around open discussion. Let me push that into Near mode and explain why unmoderated comments where never an option on the table. I very much expect that sooner or later we would end up at best with Unqualified Reservation's comment section or at worst with that of Alternative Right's. First I encourage the reader who is unfamiliar with them to google up both. Now tell me how many non right wing rationalists would comment there no matter how reasonable or interesting a hypotheticl article by an author?

The filter of moderation may keep interesting some comments at bay but eliminates far more of mindless politicking than pf the former. Ultimately that ratio is what I think matters.

I think these long rants are exactly what they want to avoid.

I think that's still insufficient.

I'm a feminist, and we should put all women in prison

cannot be coherently asserted, but

I believe murderers are agents who should be treated accordingly, and put in prison

can be coherently asserted, so it cannot be the idea that we should treat women as agents that is generating the contradiction. You also need some additional premises about women being agents with certain moral properties. Equally,

I'm a feminist, and women are all stupid

cannot be coherently asserted, but

I believe stupid people are agents who should be treated as such, and that they are all stupid

can be coherently asserted, so it cannot be the belief that women are agents and deserving of appropriate treatment that is generating the contradiction.

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.

Thank Cthulhu for small favors.

programming resources

Since you've mentioned this before, here's an offhand idea for how to maybe get some: put an announcement on the sidebar or banner asking for developers (and maybe noting that LW is open source - so it's ok to ask people to work for free), that's visible on every page and that links to a page with your list of wanted features and instructions for how to get involved. There could be a bunch of potential developers that don't even know LW needs them, since the subject has only come up in some comment threads. Maybe you guys have already thought of this or know of a reason it wouldn't work, just wanted to put it out there.

How gnarly is the reddit/lesswrong codebase? $5000 worth sounds terrifying to one with a shaky, Learn Python the Hard Way knowledge of programming and very basic familiarity with html, css and sql. But I'm probably going to be taking 4 hours a day five days a week for a month this summer to try and make myself hirable as a junior programmet this summer and work that valuable would make an awesome portfolio piece, paid or not. It would certainly make one a shoo in for Hacker School.