What is the Main/Discussion distinction, and what should it be?

I don't think moderator privileges are sufficient to promote or move posts: or if they are, I've missed the link on the interface. I can only delete comments and posts, not affect where they are. (Besides moving my own posts, of course.)

Weight votes based on who voted. The simplest would be to just multiply an upvote (or downvote) by the voter's karma score. That would make a few users have a nearly overwhelming vote, so maybe weight by the log of the karma or another suitable function.

Or, since this is a site about Bayes, use an actual Bayesian estimator for ranking/location conditional on votes. The current article locations provide a prior for where articles should be, and the existing votes provide priors for each user. The likelihood functions for how users vote conditional on the quality/topicality/location of a post could be estimated from ordered voting/location history, e.g. P(upvote_at_t | post_belongs_in_main, post_in_main_at_t) != P(upvote_at_t | post_belongs_in_main, post_in_discussion_at_t). P(upvote | posts'_current_score) would be useful for adjusting for priming and follower effects. I don't know how much temporal information about votes/locations is retained by LW. If there's no temporal information stored, at least there would be P(upvote | post_in_main), P(downvote | post_in_discussion), P(no_vote | post_in_X), etc. which is probably still better than purely karma based estimates.

When you go to the Discussion page, there is a permanent disclaimer on top: "This part of the site is for the discussion of topics not yet ready or not suitable for normal top-level posts" (emphasis mine). That would indicate that at least originally Discussion was meant for lower-quality content.

A modification to take care of this: when a post passes +20 karma, the author opens a poll asking whether it should go to Main, and the vote of the community decides.

It looks fairly obvious that they're much more stream-of-consciousness than his LW content. The difference between RobbBB's recent writeup and the related comment thread on the OPFAI facebook group is marked. I'd take his statement that he finds it an extremely easy medium to get content written in (compared to LW, or essentially any formal writing) at face value.

I will try it when the time comes, thanks!

So you think LW should get credit for progress not made on LW and not posted on LW?

I'd view them more like a clustered-condition akin to this sort of thing, where you need some varying strengths of some of the content conditions to activate (not necessarily saying it as simple as a single threshold that they all contribute to, mind you, nor am I saying that those are the only relevant properties.).

Frankly, I don't think these nutrition posts score that highly on any of those counts, though. I mean, it obviously doesn't discuss core LW topics, and you've said as much. Going through the others:

• The material in your post seems especially important or useful.

Well, it's not useless or unimportant - Taubes is a moderately big name in the nutrition discussions I've seen around, and with the paleo folk I've seen, and there probably are plenty of people giving him more weight than they should, but it's not a especially important thing around here is it?

• You put a lot of thought or effort into your post. (Citing studies, making diagrams, and agonizing over wording are good indicators of this.)

It's good writing, but it doesn't seem particularly high-rigour. I'm aware this might change with future posts, but you can't blame people for not considering unposted articles. If this is the case, maybe a reason to combine posts in the future.

• Your post is long or deals with difficult concepts. (If a post is in Main, readers know that it may take some effort to understand.)

I don't see this, frankly, and I doubt you do either.

• You've searched the Less Wrong archives, and you're pretty sure that you're saying something new and non-obvious.

This might be closest. I haven't done the requisite searching, but I doubt this has been gone over before, and while I haven't read Taubes, enough people seen to like him that it may well be rather non-obvious. However, it's not mind-blowing, and with nothing on the other criteria... let's just say that if I were given this list and had to choose based solely on that, this would be solidly in Discussion.

Now, I'm extremely sympathetic to the claim that these criteria have not been what the Main/Discussion distinction has been made by in the past, and I agree that there should be a discussion about how that distinction should be made in the future. I agree with much of what has been said about the growing necessity of encouraging good new content (which I do consider the nutrition series to be) as well as discouraging poor content.

If I was to decide the distinction, I think my preference would be some kind of minimal standards, including something along the lines of the bulletpoints, as a threshold for entry (such that weaker versions of them are necessary, or at least very close), and after that, the only bar should be quality. I'm not saying it should be automatic, but posts with karma above a certain level (say, 20), should need a specific reason not to be promoted.

(Just my 2 cents. This comment was written straight through, so I'm responding to more than just this above comment. sorry about that - it would've been a pain to split it.)

Hard to say if I'm atypical (Typical Mind Fallacy and all). But I doub tit.

Again, I wasn't really looking. But the fact that this is a thriving forum certainly didn't jump out at me form random visits to the site, including the main page.

Is there any reason LW doesn't just have a Reddit/HN style homepage?

"I will give more justification for this later,"

Did people complain about this?
I'm sure you paid more attention than I did, but I only remember this complaint on part 1, the part that was better received. Moreover, I only remember you saying this in part 1. I think the more popular complaint about parts 2 and 3 is that they were not central to Taubes and not interesting topics. But those complaints might have been avoided by having a single post.

One thing I'm wondering about is how much people didn't like them because I was saying controversial things while also saying, "I will give more justification for this later," which would have been avoided by not splitting the posts.

I didn't downvote them, but think they would have been a better fit for discussion than for main. While a summary of research or case studies on nutrition would have made a good post for main, I don't think a criticism of a popular book on nutrition (that I haven't read nor even heard much about here) is as generally interesting and useful.

One thing I'm wondering about is how much people didn't like them because I was saying controversial things while also saying, "I will give more justification for this later," which would have been avoided by not splitting the posts.

Well, to be frank the reason I don't like the posts in question is that their main argument is the same kind of intellectually dishonest strawman you accuse Taubes of making.

The second most recent post on main, Cognito Mentoring started on discussion. It was promoted not because of the quality of the argument, but because it is an announcement.

shrug I subscribe to Main and not Discussion, but that's in part because I only subscribe to things that don't generate more content than I can read or a large proportion of content that I'm not interested in. So Main posts come to me automatically, and then I usually check Discussion manually and just pick out the more interesting-sounding threads

Ironically, this comment was actually extremely helpful. I certainly don't downvote things that I think are bad ideas, only things that I think violate standards of discourse or are inappropriate for the venue in which they are posted.

If downvote is just being used as the "I disagree" or "I don't like this" button, I think LessWrong has far bigger problems to deal with!

(Oh, also the reason your comment is surface-level unhelpful is because "I thought it was a bad idea" isn't a real explanation of your decision process, not because explaining votes is inherently bad-- but of course you knew that already.)

I don't care if you get frustrated or annoyed at downvotes. That's the WHOLE POINT. As you make comments and continue to be voted up and down you learn the kind of things the community approves and disapproves of, or you get out. Downvoting isn't designed to optimize for being welcoming. It's a moderation strategy designed to improve conversation for the existing participants.

Actually, the more I think about this idea the more I dislike it. It's much easier to learn what is and isn't acceptable behavior if people just tell you rather than you having to suss it out yourself. Further, in many cases the reasoning for downvotes is far from clear, even for established users.

I have >4000 karma, I've written multiple top-level posts, I'm frequently on the top 30-day karma list, I know many community members in real life, and I've donated to and volunteered for both MIRI and CFAR-- and even I am not always sure why some posts get downvoted. Imagine how much worse it must be for new users!

I've often heard people complain that LessWrong isn't welcoming enough, that it's intimidating, that it's hard to participate in discussions here, etc. In some cases, this simply means that LessWrong's level of rigor is too high for the person making the complaint, and that's totally fine. But I also know a lot of intelligent, level-headed people who are interested in rationality and other core LessWrong concepts, but don't post here because they find the site's attitude towards newcomers off-putting.

There are various efforts being put in place to help address this-- for instance, many of Eliezer's original sequences are being compiled into an edited ebook format that should make it much easier for people to access the "core" of LessWrong. But I think that changing either the actual architecture of LessWrong or the culture so that we give more of an explanation for downvotes would be a great help for both existing users and newcomers.

Lastly, it's certainly the case that well-kept gardens die by pacifism, and we should be careful about lowering the standards on LessWrong. I think the current standards on LessWrong are part of what makes the site valuable, and I don't want to lower them-- but making them more transparent would IMO certainly help.

I'm primarily concerned with downvotes that nobody explains at all. As Alsadius pointed out, if someone else has already explained their reasoning well, you can simply downvote the main comment and upvote their reply.

But there are many posts that I see being downvoted for unclear reasons with no replies at all. I've also noticed that when I call this out by making a comment that says "why is this being downvoted," the voting trend often reverses. This strikes me as a problem.

That's unfortunate, though it might of course still be possible to accomplish this shift on a cultural level or with more minor code changes.

Heavily downvoted comments, yes. This proposal is more oriented towards everyday voting situations.

(just look at Lumifer's posts)

?

How would this discourage posting? Seems like it would make it easier for high-quality posts to get promoted (because they're posted with the same bar as discussion has today, and can get selected for promotion directly from there).

I should probably have been less specific about who gets to promote things - "site founders" or "a few designated site ambassadors" is mostly what I was thinking, not "anyone who collects enough karma". I'm not sure how one pursues karma at the expense of quality or clarity - don't unclear or low-quality posts get downvoted enough?