Should LW have an official list of norms?

Is there a concrete proposal or problem statement we can examine?  It feels like the generalities have been pretty well discussed, and we're at the point where details and implementation is probably more useful as a predictor of impact than the high-level desiderata.  Or a more concrete metric we can discuss the ranges we want to see and the goodhart risks.

A few clarifying questions for the mods (or others tempted to declare any document "official"):

1. Are the problem cases not being downvoted enough?  Why is this orthogonal to voting?
   1.  one possible answer - harm is done before the votes start to come in.
   2. another possible answer - users are voting wrong, or on dimensions that don't enforce these norms.
2. Is this normative or positive?  Are we saying that we want posts/comments to be this way and we will ... do something new to enforce that?  Or just clarifying and describing what gets moderated already.
3. Do you think the number of posts/comments is too high, too low, or just about right?  
   1. same for the distribution of posts/comments per user.
4. Do you think posting/commenting is a skill or a talent?
   1. Does the median (or p25) user have any avenues for learning how to make good posts/comments other than trying it and getting feedback?
   2. Is there a post-quality-level that doesn't improve the site, but DOES improve the poster's skill/knowledge enough to be able to improve the site over time?
5. Is the problem mostly about Said/Duncan disagreements, among long-time posters, or about newbies and noise?  Or both (though why do you think the same solution applies to both problems)?

This post is an argument that the answer to its title question is "no", right? I agree.

Also from the Twelve Virtues:

Do not ask whether it is “the Way” to do this or that. Ask whether the sky is blue or green. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it. You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory.” But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.

I think the last three months are a pretty definitive demonstration that talking about "norms" is toxic and we should almost never do it. I'm not interested, at all, in "norms." (The two [LW · GW] posts [LW · GW] I wrote about them were "defensive" in nature, arguing that one proposed norm was bad as stated, and expressing skepticism about the project of norms lists.)

I'm intested in probability theory, decision theory, psychology, math, and AI. Let's talk about those things, not "norms." If anyone dislikes a comment about probability theory, decision theory, psychology, math, or AI, you can just downvote it and move on with your day! I think that will make everyone much happier than any more time devoted to prosecuting or defending against claims of violations of supposed "norms"!

I agree with basically everything you said. My main worries for LW are insularity and new people having lower standards. (These worries are anticorrelated, and I'm not sure if this itself is a third problem or if it means they're actually only one problem.) I think it's reasonable to try to attract new people but then throw them at material that tries to inculcate high epistemic standards. Or maybe it's even reasonable to try to design the mechanisms and incentives of LW to get the results you want.

In my experience a list of explicit norms isn't usually that helpful to users themselves. But it can be helpful if moderators need to do a lot of moderation actions, and want to stay on the same page with each other and with the users. But hopefully we can avoid that being necessary for another order of magnitude?

I would prefer to call it guidelines, and to generally frame the thing not as "you must follow this, or you will get banned" but rather "we have a community of polite and productive discourse (though we are not perfect), and following these guidelines will probably help you fit in nicely".

We already have some informal norms. Making them explicit is potentially useful. Not just for us, but maybe for someone who would like to replicate the quality of "being much better than internet's average" on some website unrelated to rationality or AI.

On the other hand, sometimes the norm proposals get so complicated and abstract, that I do not really believe I would be capable of following (or even remembering) them in everyday life. Like, maybe it's me being dumb or posting too late at night, but sometimes the debates get so meta that I do not even understand what both sides are saying, so it is scary to imagine that some of that gets codified as an official norm to follow.

Upvoted, and I think I'd probably answer "yes" if you rewrote the title to be active (specifying WHO wrote the document, not just that it came into being), and used a different word than "norm", perhaps "site discussion preferences".  

Use of the term "norm" is BOTH too jargon-ey for new users, AND too fuzzy for what you want to convey.  Norms are socially enforced, without a visible authority structure, usually very unevenly and opaquely.  Norms are evolved within a group, rather than written and durable.

When these expectations are legible, and come from an authority, we call them "rules" or at least "guidelines".  When they're explicitly not seriously enforced, "desiderata" or "preferences" are closer.  

Declaring a "true underlying commitment" to cut the enemy with every move is not the same as actually doing it, and could be counterproductive, reducing pressure from particular moves to be effective.

If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.

How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception.

Noting that I don't think pursuing truth in general should be the main goal: some truths matter way, way more to me than other truths, and I think that prioritization often gets lost when people focus on "truth" as the end goal rather than e.g. "make the world better" or "AI goes well." I'd be happy with something like "figuring out what's true specifically about AI safety and related topics" as a totally fine instrumental goal to enshrine, but "figure out what's true in general about anything" seems likely to me to be wasteful, distracting, and in some cases counterproductive.

the Way of the Void

This, TBH. Maybe also the Litany of Tarski points at the same thing. I feel like that's the wording that left the deepest impression on me, at least on the epistemic side. "Rationalists should win," I think did it for me on the instrumental side, although I'm afraid that one is especially prone to misinterpretation as tribalism, rather than as the Void of decision theory as originally intended.

I would be very worried about the effects of enshrining norms in a list. Like, we have implicit norms anyway. It's not like we can choose not to have them, but trying to cement them might easily get them wrong and make it harder to evolve them as our collective knowledge improves. I can perhaps see the desire to protect our culture from the influx of new users in this way, but I think there are probably better approaches.

Like maybe we could call them "training wheels" or "beginner suggestions" instead of "norms".

I also like the idea of techniques of discourse engaged in by mutual consent. We don't always have to use the same mode. Examples are things like Crocker's Rules, Double Crux, Prediction Markets, Bets, Street Epistemology, and (I suppose) the traditional debate format. Maybe you can think of others. I think it would be more productive to explore and teach techniques like these rather than picking any one style as "normal". We'd use the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.

I think a different perspective is “should we reify the judgments of popular, high status and locally powerful LessWrong users of virtues and vices as site norms, and provide a user guide as to how to conform to that vision of virtue?”

My first ever comment on here was dumb and got downvoted. I self corrected, bumbled along, and eventually sort of found a way to fit in that suits me OK.

I think local social pressure helped me to do that, and if you don’t respect the extant community enough to think you have a lot to learn from them, then what are you doing hanging out with them?

But I think it’s, I don’t know, a sense of fun and excitement and usefulness and novelty that makes a user see the sense of rationalist virtue and want to fit in harmoniously in the ecosystem.

So any such site norms, I think, need to be about keeping it fun and interesting for old and new users both!

Sometimes it feels like all the virtue and site norm posts are a bit stodgy/threatening/frustrated-sounding, although to be fair some of that attitude is warranted.

But on the whole I guess I would hope any such site norms would be positive and lighthearted and inspiring.

Like, I would love to see things like a list of posts and comments and dialogs that people think exemplify the True Spirit of LessWrong, and why they like them. Concrete examples of LessWrong at its best would be interesting in their own right, and I think they do more to help set people in the right direction.

On reflection, I think there is value in BOTH publishing official rules/guidelines that describe moderator actions and the rationale behind when they'll be used, AND unofficial "norms", which is prediction of what is likely to be upvoted and get good engagement, and what is likely to be downvoted and not generate useful discussion. 

The key is that official things are NORMATIVE - they include a top-down demand and specify enforcement actions.  It doesn't need to be (and IMO shouldn't be) algorithmic-level specific - there's still space for human judgement, but those humans are identified as special roles within the site, not the general populace.   Norms are NOT official, and any description of them is POSITIVE - it's a prediction of what unofficial crowd reactions will be.  

Norms tend to be FAR more contextual and uneven than rules, even fairly loose rules.   Norms are far less legible, as there's no authority to keep them consistent or understandable.  Norms are generally less egalatarian than rules, as crowds tend to weight popularity and individual fame more highly than rules do. 

Mostly, I think it's great to give newbies more advice, and it's great to give mods an easier job, but both of those jobs become much harder if you don't acknowledge that there are multiple different kinds of evaluation which are applied to posts and comments.

very insightful, but something sets me on edge that truthseeking is being compared by central example to trying to hurt other humans. My intuition is that that will leak unhealthy metaphor, but I also don't explicitly see how it would do so and therefore can't currently give more detail. (this may have something to do with my waking up with a headache.)

I tried experimenting with framing my comments in terms of norms or norm design recently, and the only things that that I found relevant with any consistency is Scott's asymmetric weapons, and incentives that make them more applicable [LW(p) · GW(p)] (though it's a tricky point, I've made a mistake of over-applying it [LW(p) · GW(p)] only 3 days ago).

I think most good discourse norms fail to be relevant to rationality in particular [LW · GW], so it's important to avoid any association between them and rationality [LW · GW].

Similarly, a rationalist isn't just somebody who respects the Truth.
All too many people respect the Truth.
A rationalist is somebody who respects the processes of finding truth.

To start making lists, there need to be already enough things that could become norms and are clearly relevant to rationality, in its non-inflated sense [LW · GW]. Norms are ornery beasts, they require great robustness in their targeting such that there is little damage when they start tramping all over nuance, and you can't swap them out once they are in place.

Hello Ruby, 

Massive Edit: I made this comment into a post [LW · GW], which I didn't want to post, in its entirety.

I still believe the essence of the comment is relevant, so I'm replacing my original comment with these two sentences from my post:

I'm writing this because I do not believe fixing peripheral things on LW is enough.

LW stands at a crossroads. Ahead lies clarification of essence, identity and focus.


Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence

It might be useful to encourage more comments along the lines of "I'm upvoting/downvoting this because of X" and have people vote agree/disagree to evolve our shared norms.

Wary of this line of thinking, but I'll concede that it's a lot easier to moderate when there's something written to point to for expected conduct.  Seconding the other commenters that if it's official policy then it's more correctly dubbed guidelines rather than norms.

I'm struck by the lack any principled center or shelling point for balancing [ability to think and speak freely as the mood takes you] vs any of the thousand and one often conflicting needs for what makes a space nice/useful/safe/productive/etcetera.  It seems like anyone with moderating experience ends up with some idea for a workable place to draw those lines, but it rarely seems like two people end up with exactly the same idea, and articulating it is fraught.  This would really benefit from some additional thought and better framing, and is pretty central to what this forum is about (namely building effective communities around these ideas) rather than purely a moderation question.