Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild"

I don't think it's a good idea to write things expressing opinions like this as if you're presenting the majority view, even when you think it is.

If it's not actually the majority view then people will downvote it or at least upvote it less. I don't think you understand how karma systems work.

For what it's worth I would love if LessWrong stuck to only decision theory, microeconomics, cognitive science, ...

So, now that you know the reason why your post was removed, do you agree with the decision? It seems that you're generally in favor of removing "stupid shit that gets upvoted". (And your post wouldn't even have been needed to be removed if you had hosted it at fanfiction.net and posted the link in an open thread.)

Seems a good test to reactivate LW dynamics.

Widespread and capricious banning of posts earns a million Phyg points.

I think your personal sense of offense is over-writing your judgement of how actually horrible will's post is. It was poorly written but contained a lot of good fragments of criticism, to the point where I couldn't decide how to vote on it. Your reiteration of how much of an obvious pile of crap it was isn't helping you out here either.

I'm also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I'm a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.

This was a concrete estimate made by looking at the most recent 35 posts, with quality threshold that happens to be close to how I perceive Will's post. (It doesn't appear to me exceptionally horrible, and I expect there are other posts that appear exceptionally horrible to me, but not to you. So if I only deleted the posts that seem to me exceptionally horrible, Will's post in particular wouldn't be deleted.)

I agree that it's better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don't like it when moderators do surprising things.

It is not clear to me that this should be an important consideration in restraining moderation.

To clarify, the "surprising things" I consider dangerous are decisions that ignore policy, not decisions that follow a policy that's unusual. With a policy of unrestrained moderation, individual acts of moderation won't be as surprising in the sense I intended, for example they won't provoke big discussions focused on them, especially if those too are against the rules.

As a constructive suggestion, I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000, or something along those lines (maybe in some form that doesn't have as much impact on poster's Karma, to minimize trauma). This at least would require multiple people to agree that something is horrible for it to be effectively removed.

You are so fascinating. I can't tell if you simply fail to understand simple ideas out of some insanely strong self-deceptive defensiveness, or if you're just consciously choosing to be a pathetic piece of shit. Given your reasoning the solution is simple. Ban me, idiot.

There are sites where the moderation isn't bad enough for me to notice it, sure. SSC and Xenosystems come to mind.

The only non-blog sites I pay attention to anymore are this and a few forums, and the only forum that's big enough to need moderation is the one where the admin is incompetent.

The most common strategy I've seen besides the Hastings Banda one is the one where moderator action is only taken to enforce near-unanimous user opinion -- though often this isn't an explicit policy, but instead an artifact of most of the old regulars being moderators. If the mods are active enough with this strategy, this brings protection against the eternal September, but with the potential cost of exclusivity. Another failure mode I've seen is conflict between moderators, but I've only seen this happen once, and it was in a case where someone who really shouldn't have been a moderator was made one: he rarely posted, but had developed a relevant site and was friends with the admin, so he was made another admin -- whereas the moderators were everyone who had over 50 posts a few months after the forum had started, and the moderator position was initially created only to deal with spambots.

Moderation is microgovernment. If a politician doesn't care about governing anymore, he should resign; if the emperor doesn't care about governing anymore, he should appoint regents. Neither should run around passing laws if they don't take the problem of governing seriously.

I miss when he cared. People give Yudkowsky a lot of flak these days, which may or may not be warranted, but when he was on form, he really produced a lot of engagingly written material. I worry that there is a feedback loop between people giving him a hard time because he hasn't produced anything to excite us recently and him not wanting to write because he only ever gets a hard time.

The silence started even before the ban was made. Kaj asked for community input and at that point Eliezer could have simply said: "Kaj, I trust you to do what's right on the issue." That would have made Kaj's job easier. Especially given what Kaj wrote on facebook over his own emotional state, that would have been a nice thing to do.

I don't think silence means that there's a unified front. To the extend that a unified front is high value, Eliezer could have said: "Hey, I like it that Kaj has taken action on this issue."

Not counting months of silence while people whined about mass downvoting in open threads.

The same reason there is a law against vigilante justice. In many individual cases it's probably ethically justified but I certainly support a general rule against it. Because I don't trust the judgement of all those other f@#$s so take the cooperative mutual suppression of the behavior as the best option.

This is a strong point and perhaps I was undervaluing it. But I wonder why 'not having sockpuppets' stands out as a rule that's so important to uphold and start talking about banning in the name of. It doesn't seem to have actually caused many problems on LessWrong, and in fact I suspect that not overly discouraging sockpuppets has had a net positive effect, as it has allowed some people to make interesting posts they otherwise wouldn't have. Of course it has also allowed for some boring people to be boring, so it's not an obvious question, but its not being obvious also means that talking about banning people for it is in my opinion pretty weird. But maybe you've seen sockpuppets become a severe problem on other fora or something? LessWrong is the only forum I have a decent understanding of, but I do think that after many years of painstaking engagement my understanding is rather decent.

The same reason there is a law against vigilante justice. In many individual cases it's probably ethically justified but I certainly support a general rule against it.

I don't think we do have a well documented rule forbidding it to have multiple accounts.

I don't have any additional accounts, but in case I would wanted to post something on LW which I wouldn't wanted to have associated with my real life identity I wouldn't think it as rule breaking if I would open an account for that conversation.

In this method, are worthy people suppose to work to get some sense in what you say? Or they are supposed to get it instantly? Because in the first case, I'm not clear what are the incentives.

Not creating drama seems to be antithetical to creating popular literature :).

I was gonna go into that in Chapter Two: Analyzing the Fuck out of an Owl. But I guess I won't, since my stupid fanfic idea seems to be attracting more drama and pettiness than could possibly be justified by the content.

I'd prefer you not give up so easily.

The drama was created by whoever arbitrarily eliminated the original post. You don't get to censor something secretly, and then allow a repost but then claim the drama around the censorship is really just drama created by the original post and then use that drama to justify the censorship.

At least not if you are still paying lip service to rationality.

Smoke dat moose! Git dem maggots! Smoke dat moose! Analyze dat owl!

[a note for them what don't get it, as our democracy demands: I am referencing someone else who wrote allegedly impenetrable and seemingly drug-fueled masses of insight in order to incentivize the creation of more things that might fit that model, and hoping to create a meta-norm that's more conducive to stylistic experimentation, for reasons which will probably not be obvious to anyone here so go try to understand continental philosophy or something. Except you don't even need to do that since the relevant ideas are already contained to some nonzero extent in the rationalist corpus! PS most of y'all lose a not-Quirrell not-point for not seeing that certain relevant issues have been discussed here before.]

You can just tell us without involving fanfiction.

But I guess I won't, since my stupid fanfic idea seems to be attracting more drama and pettiness than could possibly be justified by the content

Uhm, there isn't that much drama. Are you telling me you actually expected even less drama when you decided to post a short drunken-rambling-turned-fanfiction as a criticism of rationality/EY/HPMOR (if that is what it is, I am not sure), and then re-post it at the same place upon deletion?

I can only assume that you are pretending to be badly calibrated here.

Since that's all you've given us to work with, I can only see this as taunting us with yet another hint that something is behind the curtain.

This isn't Let's Make a Deal. Just open the freaking curtain.

Editing a post is marked by an asterisk after the original-time.

My apologies. That's an entirely plausible explanation which didn't occur to me.

If someone wants to describe LW as cultish, they can take any parody of itself and present it as further evidence for their claims.

I think something like this has already happened with the Chuck-Norris-like list of Yudkowsky facts; the "Bayesian conspirator" illustration of the beisutsukai stories; and the redacted lecture screenshot that displayed "Eliezer Yudkowsky" on the right end of the intelligence scale. -- Instead of "they are cool people who can make fun" they can be spinned into "this is what those people seriously believe / this is how much they are obsessed with themselves... they must be truly insane". See RationalWiki:

That Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts page is the most disturbing thing I have read in my life. I don't need a shower, I need the outer layer of my skin peeled off. (...) It is fanboyism at a disturbing level. (...) he is hosting this shit on his website that disturbs me

On the other hand, if someone wants to describe LW as cultish, they could also use lack of parodies, or whatever else as an evidence. Once you are charged with being a witch, there is not much you could successfully say in your defense.

So at the end, perhaps we should ignore all such considerations (which, by the way, is what most non-cults do) and simply upvote or downvote things only by their own merit. Also, any attempts for this kind of PR automatically destroys themselves if it is easy to provide a link to the discussion about the PR. (And LW being LW, such discussion will almost certainly happen.)

We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg!

Oh, OK. Then I did not clearly communicate.

I'm not worried about a clutish appearance -- I'm worried about a self-absorbed appearance. People who-have-heard-of-but-are-not-really-into LessWrong, in my conversations with them, have dismissed the site as an echo-chamber of inside references. That's what I'm worried about, and a self-parody story about Eliezer-Yudkowsky's fictional creation interacting with him does not help mitigate that impression. I'm not saying it could never be done, but it has to be really good to outweigh the costs.

I'm not a respected member of the community, but I personally see no problems with parody and criticism. I've read criticism on Less Wrong and HPMOR and I've had no problems with those (although I did have disagreements, of course).

It's just that this particular piece of parody isn't particularly good. It feels like someone critiquing "The Dark Knight Rises" for being about a guy dressed up as a bat. Sure, the movie is about that, but it's not really the core problem with that movie.

How about subcultures that are allergic to bad content?

I just really don't see the value of keeping this post up other than as some sort of "look at how not censorshippy we are" signalling statement that was explicitly argued against on here. ("You have the downvote." Well I'm gonna use it.)

.I meant that any subculture that is allergic to parody of itself is just inviting less fair and less jocular criticism

FWIW, LessWrong is definitely capable of calm self-parody, especially when the authors of the parody are not explicitly trying to stir up drama, so there isn't much need for fanfic-based perofrmance art. One example of that is Shit Rationalists say