Slate Star Codex: alternative comment threads on LessWrong?

I think this is in part due to the lack of LW-style up and downvotes.

This is likely a reason for the comment quality, yes. However, I submit that another (possibly more important) reason is that SSC contains a great deal of politics (relative to LW), which naturally causes mind-killing, even amongst the most rational of human participants. See here for a more elaborate discussion of this phenomenon.

I don't read the comments on SSC mostly because of very, very poor comment section layout (because nesting comments just significantly narrows the width for every "child" comment), not because of comment quality. Besides, if I perceived SSC comments as rather poor in quality, it would be mostly because of the significantly larger contrast between them and the main blog post. (At least here in Discussion, it's rare when one LessWronger in the main post writes significantly better than the several top commenters, whereas on SSC, Scott is, well, Scott and everybody else is just everybody else.)

Besides, I don't find the addition of a up/down vote feature an improvement, rather the opposite, especially when it comes to the kinds of topics Scott touches upon. I often don't use my own up/down vote buttons because I often feel like "who the hell am I to judge?", particularly when I know I lack expertise in something. Other people, also without qualifications, may not be as scrupulous. While it does clutter up the comment section, agreement or disagreement expressed verbally, non-anonymously (because it psychologically weighs differently depending on the impressiveness of the person it comes from), and with justifications seems to me to help the overall quality of discussion.

There is no reason one can't link a blog post here and start a discussion. I don't know Scott personally, but I am quite sure he will not mind. I am almost as sure he will not bother commenting in both places.

What I would really like to see is someone compiling a book called, say, SSCequences from his best posts and maybe best comments on them. And an audiobook. And...

This would cause me to read Slate Star Codex and to occasionally comment. It may do the same for others.

This may be a positive outcome, though I am not certain of it.

There have been occasional threads, yes. Not systematically. An obstacle is that Scott generally uses his blog to cover topics not suitable for LW: politics, psychology outside the cog-sci domain, more politics, collections of terrible puns, long meandering refutations of politics.

(This is not to disparage it; I probably comment more there than I do here.)

There's discussion of this on the LW Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/144017955332/permalink/10155300261480333/

It includes this comment from Scott:

I've unofficially polled readers about upvotes for comments and there's been what looks like a strong consensus against it on some of the grounds Benjamin brings up. I'm willing to listen to other proposals for changing the comments, although if it's not do-able via an easy WordPress plugin someone else will have to do it for me.

I'm pretty pro-this, conditional on Scott being pro-it.

1) It sort of adds Slatestarcodex back to the rotation of high-quality-content to discuss on Less Wrong, so people here can easily learn about it. (I would NOT want to add the more political posts here though).

2) Maybe it'll split the comments? Sure, but the comments there are already huge and unwieldy (possibly more-than-dunbar's number worth of commenters) so I'm actually fine with that. Discussion over there is already pretty split up among comment threads in a hard to follow fashion.

I would be more in favour of pushing SSC to have up/downvotes than to linking its posts here. I find that although posts are high quality the comments are generally not, so this is a problem that definitely needs to be solved on its own. Moreover, I read both blogs and I like to have them as separate activities given that they have pretty different writing styles and mildly different subjects. I tend I to read SSC on my leisure time, while LessWrong is a gray area. I would certainly be against linking every single post here given that some of them would be decisively off topic.

I really like the idea of blogs "outsourcing" their comments to forums. A second best option would be for Scott to use Disqus for his comments. With Disqus you're always logged in. Plus you can rate comments up or down.

I would happily take advantage of such a system. (Also I would be a little worried about regular injections of political tarbabies.)

This idea seems to have been met positively, so I posted one. Let's see how it goes.

Separate question which we should probably have a community policy on: should the existence of these alternative comment threads be mentioned at SSC? On the one hand, assuming we do succeed in getting high-quality discussion going on here, it would be good for people to be able to read it. On the other hand, if the average SSC commenter starts reading the LW-based threads then they may well start commenting here and thus drag the level of comments here down to the level of SSC. (Third alternative for consideration: mention the existence of these threads at SSC, but specifically ask people not to come over here to comment?)

Hey Tom, thanks for volunteering to do this.

Personally, I expect this would worsen my experience because it would fragment comments. I'm not going to go to LW to read comments for SSC. I prefer to read comments, if any, on SSC itself.

In general, for most of the people, all they are going to notice (if anything) is a slight decrease in quality of on-site comments, so just a handful of people desiring this does not mean that it's net positive for Scott's readership at large.

Split comment-threads would also reduce cross-pollination of ideas. It's good that LessWrong readers currently bring their ideas in contact with some people who only have vague background awareness of LW at SSC. It's a challenge in practising explaining things well, provides feedback, and spreads useful ways of thinking.

So this would be personally undesirable for me and also has some clear negative externalities on others.