NSFW Content on LW

It's difficult to ordain beforehand what sort of sexual content is fit for LW, because it's just as much how you write it as it is about what you write about. Rationalist culture emerged from rationalists on LW1.0 discussing experimenting with alternative lifestyle choices, and the ones which worked for some rationalists tend to spread. To be fair, polyamory and other sex-related behaviour are more viral among rationalists in this regard: when a bunch of single people who have difficulty relating to most others around them suddenly find they can relate to each other very well; are willing to make the otherwise taboo tradeoffs that sex-positivity introduces into one's life; and tend to have be (relatively) deprived of sexual/romantic expression that's anywhere close to what they get out of relationships with other rationalists or rationalist-adjacent people, they're going to be more open about this sort of this. That's not going away.

Since the rationalist diaspora is going to be talking about sex somewhere anywhere, I'd prefer conversations intending to match the map to the territory on sex-related topics take place on LW, if the likely counterfactual would be them taking place somewhere else and having a toxic impact. Just because everything seems hunky-dory on LW doesn't necessarily mean they're aren't other schisms in the community borne over epistemic disagreements over charged issues. What's more, if we can bring epistemic discussion of sex onto LW, while keeping separate the interpersonal and political aspects of it in our lives, it's not so muddled we can't be confident there are non-zero conversations among rationalists where intellectual progress is being made and recorded.

LessWrong aspires to be like academia in quality, but not necessarily like academia in culture or content. Much discussion of sexuality in academia probably either sucks or is too dry and abstract to be useful for much, to say nothing of how the research quality may have declined with the replication crisis, and how LW should aspire to do better than that.

So some conversations about sex can take place here. I don't think anything is inherently wrong with it. I don't think there's anything inherently right about it either. I'd like conversations about sex on LW to have rationality be the focus, and sex the object of discussion rationality is being applied to. The examples provided in 'The Typical Sex Life Fallacy' were relevant to illustrating the point, but personal anecdotes about your favourite kind of tea don't add much. Also, not that I think Ozy would do this, but they're close enough that others might see what was written and mistake that for using intimately detailed examples from their own personal lives on LW, including the nature of their private relationships with other community members. I think this is a mistake. I think at least switching out some of the details and replacing the names of real people with Alice and Bob and Charlie and Dana so nobody's privacy is even remotely close to being compromised without their consent is a good idea.

Content warnings seem appropriate, and when and for what they're used should be up to the user posting, unless someone in the comments indicates a preference for content warnings on a particular topic going forward after that, or even just signals they found coverage of some content offputting.

Cursing, except in cases where it's hard to find any suitable alternative for describing the thing (e.g., "genderfuck"), seems like an unnecessary aesthetic flourish. I guess "fucking" is less icky than "humping", but "sleeping together" seems to fit just fine. If we're writing about sex on LW, I don't see why we shouldn't try to write it as SFW as we can, except for when changing up the tone might be key to the theme of a well-intentioned post.

I think if we write about sex, we need to remember this is *still LessWrong*. If we're writing about sex, is for nerds, by nerds. If the information value of a post about sex is high enough, it's fine if it's written in a boring rather than titillating fashion, and it might have better results that way.

By now there's more comments than I can easily read, but leaving this here for "tallying up preferences" purposes. Most important point is A:

A) I expect sex to have very strong and weird impacts on epistemology (for similar reasons to why politics does). I think it's actually pretty bad that we haven't talked about that in more detail. Epistemology is weakest and weirdest when sex and power are on the line.

I think Ozy's recent post, among the recent 2.0 posts, contained the most novel and important considerations for epistemology (probably tied with some of Connor Moreton's material). [Specifically, the "things people do in private are most vulnerable to typical mind fallacy and secret diversity]

B) That said, we may not want it on the front page for the same reason we don't want politics there. It ends up being an attractor for things that lead us down an incentive gradient we don't like.

C) I share Ozy's concern that it's in fact pretty bad that teenagers don't get to learn much about sex until it's too late.

D) I do think the "informal crassness" of the post is a marked departure from the LW Overton window. I think it's debatable whether that's bad, but it sounds like Ozy was fine with toning that down, and I don't think anything particularly important would be lost.

I think academic discussion of some sex-related-topics (i.e. STIs) on the front page could be done totally reasonably.

I don't see anything wrong with sex-related content, especially if it's marked by appropriate content warnings. By the way, I think we should also have a system of tags and various options to filter by tags.

I'm not sure where in the linked post is "cursing". Is "pussy" a curse?

Going one meta-level higher, I want to observe that much of the potential value of LW is precisely the aggregation of all discussions in the rationalsphere into a single place. If we end up with a set of norms that will cause bloggers to avoid cross-posting, or to cross-post censored versions, much of this aggregation value is lost. A plausible result of this is that people will keep reading the blogs and ignoring LW.

One of my goals for the site is to have magic tags; I think that having a 'nsfw' tag which both prevents posts and comments on those posts from showing up when a user doesn't have the 'show nsfw' user flag checked mostly solves this problem. (And, going a step further, we can likely have the user set sessions / MAC addresses / whatever the kids use these days so that their work computer automatically has it unchecked and their home computer automatically has it checked.)

Until we have that power, I think we should strive to keep LW safe for work.

• Do we want content about sex on LW at all?

  • Content about sex on LW seems fine, so long as the discussion of sex is used to make some rationality related point, or is necessary to include because of the subject—say, discussing sexual norms and their impact on society/individuals from a sociological perspective, psychological perspective, other academic perspectives, etc.—or some combination thereof. I think your post handled the discussion of sex well, because you used sex to emphasise the thesis of your post: “The rule follows: for things that are private and rarely discussed, there may be a good deal of unacknowledged diversity.” The opening example—how people shower—was good as an opener, but the discussion of sex helped make clear how important it is for people to consider how generally your thesis can be applied when they are conducting research/thinking about how the world works—especially regarding the “bubbles” issue highlighted in Scott’s Different Worlds post that you also mentioned.

  • There should be content warnings, because some people browse LW in public places, at work, are squeamish about various subjects, etc.

  • I think tags could be a good idea, though I don’t know how that would necessarily help if a NSFW post makes it on to the front page. Maybe a Tumblr-esque “Safe Mode” filter could be added to the site and people could opt-in to seeing NSFW content on the front page—including comments on NSFW content—through their profile settings, but if they didn’t opt-in, they wouldn’t see NSFW on the front page. Would that kind of filter also need to apply to people’s personal profiles? Or should people have two things to opt-in to: Front page NSFW “Safe Mode” filter plus a separate Personal page NSFW “Safe Mode” filter? I think that might be a decent option.

• It is probably a good idea to have at least a little idea what "about sex" means. Do STD etymology fact posts count? Or posts about rational romantic relationships?

  • I think it would be difficult to have a narrow definition of what “discussing sex” means on LW without tremendously censoring what kind of posts might appear on LW. Perhaps posts with NSFW content should have to be approved by moderators…but how does the poster know to mark their post as NSFW? It would be useful to have a somewhat broad definition/rule on what “discussing sex” means for LW.

• Cursing: is it off-limits entirely? Certain words only? (Which ones?) No excessive cursing?

  • I like cursing, I think when used well it can help emphasise points, convey emotions (especially the strength of those emotions), and generally make things more fun. However, I hate cursing when it’s not used well…nor do I really have much of a definition for when it’s used well…this is one of those “I know it when I see it” kind of things for me. Perhaps people should generally be cautious about cursing, unless it seems particularly relevant to the subject matter at hand or is needed to emphasise an important point, or convey an emotion more clearly, etc.

• What norms apply to titles?

  • Titles should probably not be flashy or attention-grabbing, but should instead convey as much information about the subject matter—including its NSFW-ness, or lack of NSFW-ness, perhaps through tags—while not being terribly long.

• Even if the content is content-warned or on people's own blogs, the recent comments show up in the recent comments feed, which could make some people feel uncomfortable browsing LW in public.

  • Perhaps the site should hide all comments on NSFW tagged posts from the recent comments feed unless someone is logged in and has explicitly marked affirmative: “allow NSFW tagged posts on the recent comments feed” in their profile settings? That way, by default no NSFW related comments should show up in the recent comments feed, and people who are okay with those comments can simply opt-in to seeing them—thus making the site more “presentable” in public and still allowing users the freedom to see those sorts of comments.

The naive social rules are that you don't talk about sex, politics or religion on the dinner table. The three topics can easily trigger strong emotions and take over attention.

When wanting to illustrate an abstract rationality principles it's therefore good to stay away from them and use less emotionally laden examples for the reasons Eliezer laid out in his "Politics is the Mindkiller"-post.

When it comes to explicitly forbidding either sex or politics, I don't think that's a good move. It's useful to have a place where rational discussions over both can be had. I find it okay to keep both away from the front page and leave them to the individual blogs. I don't think we need to use banning to do this as karma voting works for setting community norms.

I would be okay with a post who summaries STD facts on the front page or a post that's about politics that goes beyond personal opinion and is well researched and I think karma voting is a good vehicle to decide on edge cases.

It would be nice to have a way to tag posts and afterwards have a way for people to filter out sex and/or politics posts they don't like to see.

At the LessWrong Europe community weekend one session had a group discussion about sex and the session was well-received.

I was very uncomfortable while reading your post. I don't think we should explicitly discuss sexuality on the front page of Lesswrong.

I link teenagers to LW. I am trying to get as many young people as I can into rationality. I do not feel comfortable linking them to a place in which explicit sexual discussion appears on the front page. Getting young people involved in rationality is very important for growing the community, and I think explicit sexual discussion hinders that.

I think such messages should be confined to your personal blog (possibly your Lesswrong blog (I don't know the norms regarding this yet), and/or rationalist tumblr.

Lesswrong is an intellectual community, the closest analogue I can point to is Math/CS stack exchanges. If someone was trying to analyse sexual relationships using graph theory, in a Stack Exchange question and/or answer, they would remove explicit sexual references. I think adding explicit sexual references greatly limits the range of people who can read your posts, and limits the range of people who can use Lesswrong. I think we need more teenagers involved in Lesswrong, and it should be a place where the kind of teenager interested in Lesswrong (mainly nerdy/geeky, high-IQ kids) would be comfortable in.

I think Lesswrong is like an academic forum. I would never discuss sexuality explicitly (or even in passing references) in an academic forum, and I think this should apply to Lesswrong as well.

I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual. I am not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are reasons why most intellectual forums explicitly (or implicitly) prohibit explicit sexual discussion. I suspect explicit sexual discussion may be a deterrent to academics who may be interested in rationality, and who we may want to attract to the community.

I view the diaspora as having its functions, as Scott says:

The Rationalist Diaspora isn't a coincidence caused by contingent factors, it's caused by the social reality that the rationalist community has a lot of different projects and people who need different levels of prestige and normalcy along different dimensions. If people who need high levels of prestige/normalcy along some dimension publicly affiliate with people who need low levels of it, it doesn't work.

So everyone talks about their sexual fetishes on Rationalist Tumblr, designs AI at MIRI, spreads social gossip on Discord, and promotes charitable projects at the effective-altruism hub. I can talk about gender differences all I want on SSC without worrying about whether I'm bringing down someone talking about animal suffering somewhere else, and if a third person wants to talk about their sociological experiment consisting of communal chanting and group sex, they don't have to bring down either of us.

In my opinion:

• The Discord is for socialising and chatting, hanging out and leisure. It is the third place:

• Tumblr is for fun and socialising, sexual discussion goes here.

• Tumblr, Discord and rationalist blogs form the "home".

It is my opinion that Lesswrong is the work place. It is the intellectual hub of the diaspora. Lesswrong should be formal, and have the highest epistemic standards. Content on the LW front page should be explicitly rationalist, intellectual (and while not quite as rigorous as academia) should still be modelled after academia. Content that is inherently Not Safe For Work should not appear in the workplace. I view Lesswrong as very much a workplace, and think we should treat it as such.