December 2009 Meta Thread

Suggestion the first: rework the About page (possibly after a collaborative effort) to offer newbies clearer guidelines regarding what is expected in posts and in comments, what is the intended meaning of up- and downvotes, and so on.

Best compliment this site got on August 24th, 2009:

"Less Wrong. Overcoming Bias. Visiting those sites for the first time is equatable to receiving an invitation to Hogwarts."

Mormon2 has completely outlived his pretense at being anything but a pure 100% troll, so if it's all right with everyone I'm going to just start removing all his comments from this point forward. (It would be preferable to rely on readers to vote him down to -4 on everything, but we don't have that level of constant vigilance.)

Feature request: users should be notified not only of child (direct) replies, but all descendant replies (replies to replies).

Do people think that "Don't Feed the Trolls" should apply to mormon2 in all his myriad identities (sharing numerous matching spelling errors, the same personal insults of Eliezer and Less Wrongers, creationism and other baiting tactics)? He has used exploits on the karma system, lied about his credentials and the links between his identities, and regularly makes rude personal attacks on people other than Eliezer. The only plausibly positive thing mormon2 has done is ask Eliezer for info about his work at SIAI, but he ignores answers and doesn't actually seem interested in answers, only in getting at Eliezer.

I propose the following:

1) Anyone other than mormon2 who has questions they think Eliezer has been inadequately answering can put them in replies to this comment, and then collectively ask Eliezer for clear straight answers.

2) Afterwards, no one responds to mormon2 or any other aliases he comes up with.

I wonder if top-level posts should have a higher karma weighting than comments. A good post takes longer to write than an average comment, but a funny one-liner can get as many upvotes as a long, promoted post. If I wanted to maximize my karma total, which I admit does attract me at times, my time would be best spent with writing as many comments as possible, and no top-level posts. This doesn't feel entirely right.

Open Thread, Meta Thread, Rationality Quotes Thread, LW Quotes Thread... we need a forum!

I'll repeat my suggestion that posts be able to have language tags (i.e. one tag that says "English", "Español", "Français", etc., automatically set to English for currently existing posts), and that there be an option under Preferences to filter posts by language (probably defaulting to English and, if applicable, the language of the region the user is connected from).

ETA: By "posts", I mean articles, not comments.

I vote for the meta-thread convention, or for any other mechanism that keeps meta off the front page.

I am not a fan of internet currency in all its forms generally because it draws attention away from the argument.

Reddit, which this is based on, went to disabling a subtractive karma rule for all submissions and comments. Submissions with down votes greater than up votes just don't go anywhere while negative comment votes get buried similar to how they do here. That seems like a good way to organize the system.

Is the reason that it was implemented in order to be signaling for other users or is it just an artifact of the reddit API? Would disabling the actual display of the "points" simultaneously disable the comment ranking? What would be the most rational way to organize the comments. The least biased way would be for it to be based on time. The current way and the way reddit works is direct democracy and that of course is the tyranny of the majority. The current way may be the most efficient if the readers have such a high vale of their time that they only have time to read the most popular comments and skip the rest. However even if that is efficient it is not necessarily optimized to elucidate the best discussion points as users typically vote up things that they agree with rather than strong arguments.

I personally do not submit more responses and posts because of the karma system. As I have seen heavily on reddit, there is karma momentum where people tend to vote similar to how others have voted (as human nature would dictate). Based on that, I know that people will reference the total points of submitters and make decisions on how to take their comments and suggestions in light of that primed information - when the arguments should be evaluated independently.

Maybe I'm missing something though.

Viewing info-

Originally I was viewing this blog on internet explorer, and pages with lots of comments took a really long time to load and temporarily freezed the browser. Now I have been using Firefox and the pages load almost instantly.

Tags now sort chronologically oldest-to-newest, which makes them much more convenient for reading through things.

I've been retagging my old posts on an ad-hoc basis. Since code changes to the LW codebase are hard to come by, there's no good way to give other people permission to do this without giving them full admin rights.

Can you make a subreddit where people can submit and discuss links, questions, and other self-posts that are shorter than what constitutes a typical post on the home page?

A means of agreeing with a post without giving the poster karma? Ideally a full blown survey feature.

The simplest solution would be to allow posters to tag their posts as "no net positive karma". Then people could 'agree' or 'vote' by voting up a post, without giving the person karma.

The About Page has now been edited to (a) tell people who are repeatedly downvoted to take the hint (b) suggest that effort can be better spent than in responding to trolls (c) warn people about the downvoting limit at four times karma.

I am not sure where this is supposed to go (and it is now Jan) but clicking on the 'seq_mamq' link in 'Tags' causes a software error of some kind.

Karma scores >= 1000 do not fit into the green circle. That is annoying. Without changing the circle size, simply replacing 1234 with 1.2k would make this look less tacky. Eliezer's karma would be 30k and when he reaches 100k well, we can see if that fits when it happens.

The book Influence science and practice by Robert Cialdini identifies six main heuristics for which I have made a mnemonic to identify influence attempts

• Friendship and liking
• Opportunity of a scarce nature
• Reciprocity
• Commitment and consistency
• Expertise and authority
• Social proof
• FORCES of mental gravity aka cognitive bias

A little proposal for what top-level posts should be allowed:

A post is allowed if it's on-topic, not highly objectionable, and competently done. A post is considered on-topic iff it's one of the following:

• Something that advances the topic of rationality, where "rationality" means general ways of being less wrong in any field (or possibly a particular field), or of taking actions that are less wrong. We're relatively uninterested in being more right.
• Information about a topic about which the Less Wrong community would probably like to learn.
• A monthly thread originally proposed, or seconded, by someone else, which you were not the latest person to create.
• Something exceptional that you are not deeply involved in.

Note to self: "more" is a red word and "right" is an orange word.

Most posts on here would fall under the first category. The first category was made to exclude things like general posts about quantum mechanics, which are specific to a particular field, though I also tried to include posts specifically related to rationality in quantum mechanics. The second category goes and directly includes general posts about quantum mechanics, but I've tried to make it more restrictive, covering only "information about" these topics rather than useful things that aren't information (e.g. questions and suggestions). The third category, obviously, covers monthly threads, and tries to keep them useful. The fourth category, obviously, is a catch-all, and I've made it to exclude stuff like "please come and volunteer for us; you'll like it".

So, yes, I've stuck my own opinions into it, and this is probably a pretty conservative list. Discuss.

I would like to see a system where arguments could be analyzed and tagged to identify the specific cognitive biases used.

The book Influence science and practice by Robert Cialdini seems to me to identify six main heuristics for which I have made a mnemonic Friendship and liking Opportunity of a scarce nature Reciprocity Commitment and consistency Expertise and authority Social proof *FORCES of mental gravity aka cognitive bias

Here is an example John 3:16 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"

For <-- Because could be substituted for the word for and according to Cialdini because is a trigger word we like reasons and explanations god <-- authority so <-- commitment loved <-- friendship & liking the world <-- social proof ( look around god loves everyone! yes everyone! no mater how bad you or they may have been god can still love you if you believe) that he gave <-- reciprocity obligation to repay in kind with equal value his only begotten Son <-- scarcity in some versions "his one and only" doubling of scarcity that whoever believeth in him should have <-- reciprocity you give faith he owes you life believeth <-- commitment & consistency which produces behavior in the actor and social proof in the observer. Questioning and uncertainty and doubt lead to death because they are not belief which is the required state should not perish <-- loss aversion fear but have everlasting life <-- reciprocity life=high value gift = large debt obligation

It seems to me to me that many world view belief systems which are not supported by empirical fact would likely require cognitive biases to move and hold emotion

May the FORCES be with you ;)

• item 1
• item 2
• item 3

I would like to see a system where arguments could be analyzed and tagged to identify the specific cognitive biases used.

The book Influence science and practice by Robert Cialdini seems to me to identify six main heuristics for which I have made a mnemonic Friendship and liking Opportunity of a scarce nature Reciprocity Commitment and consistency Expertise and authority Social proof *FORCES of mental gravity aka cognitive bias

Here is an example John 3:16 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"

For <-- Because could be substituted for the word for and according to Cialdini because is a trigger word we like reasons and explanations god <-- authority so <-- commitment loved <-- friendship & liking
the world <-- social proof ( look around god loves everyone! yes everyone! no mater how bad you or they may have been god can still love you if you believe) that he gave <-- reciprocity obligation to repay in kind with equal value his only begotten Son <-- scarcity in some versions "his one and only" doubling of scarcity
that whoever believeth in him should have <-- reciprocity you give faith he owes you life
believeth <-- commitment & consistency which produces behavior in the actor and social proof in the observer. Questioning and uncertainty and doubt lead to death because they are not belief which is the required state should not perish <-- loss aversion fear but have everlasting life <-- reciprocity life=high value gift = large debt obligation

It seems to me to me that many world view belief systems which are not supported by empirical fact would likely require cognitive biases to move and hold emotion

May the FORCES be with you ;)

May we call this new post "Criticisms about Eliezer" so that I can completely ignore it?

For me, Less Wrong is about ideas and I am bored by these [off] and [on] criticisms. It's an interesting observation that trolls are pretty easily identifiable by their decision that the first thing that has to be done when they arrive here is challenge you with some kind personal attack. So instead of calling it, "Criticisms about Eliezer", we could equally call it "Entering Primate Chest-Beating".

I have overnight acquired 700 karma. Why?