Agree, Retort, or Ignore? A Post From the Future

The ambiguities seem difficult to surmount. Conversation is a highly evolved system and random changes are usually for the worse.

There's the cost to implement it and the cost to use it, and neither is trivial. A fine idea for fans to try, but not ready as a norm for non-fans.

How do you propose to evaluate whether this feature, if and when implemented, has achieved the desired aim (or made things worse) ?

In a real-time conversation or debate, this kind of plausible deniability doesn't exist as an option.

It does: you can often change the subject, give a non-answer or even be silent for a few moments and then try to continue the conversation without giving the answer.

• I request a reply.
• No reply is necessary.

Not just a reply, but a bare position statement (that's the right term, should also work as a signal for this mode: "My position [statement]: ..."), possibly without explanation.

I can't make much sense out of this sentence.

Does the link to epistemic hygiene (sorry for using a nonstandard term) resolve this misunderstanding? The point is that knowledge about assertions leaks through, biasing intuition about facts (blog:"do we believe everything we're told?", wiki:"Dangerous knowledge"), so it's a bad idea to fill your mind with hypotheses that you have no reason to believe -- it's knowably miscalibrated availability. As a result, observing unexplained assertions is a pointless or sometimes even harmful activity, but in this case it's exactly what is asked of the last-worder.

I don't think "I request a reply" and "No reply is necessary" is enough statuses. A lot of comment replies invite perfectly reasonable interjection from third parties - does requesting a reply mean you want the parent to answer, or that you're trying to collect lots of data points, or anybody who can answer the question is welcome to do so?

Less Wrong is obviously a place for debate

Yes, observations will confirm that debate happens here.

However to say that it is a forum intended to support debate is a different matter, and there's nothing "obvious" about that. Where is the forum's charter ? The most available place to look for it is the "About" page.

What content guidelines does that page offer ? "We suggest submitting links with a short description." That is hardly an encouragement to debate.

More generally, I respectfully submit that the "About" page, as written, is more misleading than helpful as to the type of top-level posts that will be appreciated by the LW audience, and that newbies could be given more appropriate guidance. If you (I mean you-the-LW-community, not you-Wei) wanted posters and commenters to abide by certain norms, you could probably improve your results by setting out those norms explicitly in the "About" page.

Can you give an example of a situation where an author might want to rule out one of those categories of comments?

Yes. If I submit a "fiction" type post, then the feedback I want is going to be one particular kind (in my case, I would want to know how readers have interpreted my writing, so that I can improve the writing to convey a more appropriate message). If I submit a post to further my own learning, I'm not interested in agreement or disagreement, I'm interested in new ideas and pointers to information. If I submit a post to put together a virtual study group to study Jaynes' book, the response I want is yet again dfferent.

Generally, the author knows better than commenters what kind of feedback is appropriate, because the author is best judge of their own intent. So it seems more effective to leave it up to the author to encourage a certain type of comment, seek cloture or not, and recognize cloture when it has occurred.

I do not like autoresponders.

Something that could be done unintrusively and without manual intervention from users is some indicator that the author has not logged in recently. eg. A change in color somewhere, an asterix, etc.

I feel that something like bug tracking / trouble ticket software format could be appropriate for this purpose -- unresolved arguments would be marked as such, people could view unresolved "arguments" assigned to them, and it would be easy to judge the level of commitment of participants by their number of unresolved arguments.

Obviously, participating in such a system would require much higher level of commitment than that of the current blog format.

When your estimates are tracked (which was the purpose of predictionbook.com [disclaimer: financial interest]) it becomes much harder to signal with them without blowing your publicly visible calibration.

Again, any other costs, and/or ideas to minimize them?

Leaving off 'but no longer wish to continue this conversation' sounds less disrespectful without losing any information content.

One suggestion: A lot of the downsides would be avoided if this norm were reserved for issues that come up a lot with one or more people. Since it gets repeated, it's not a time drain to settle it once and for all.

The heyday of common law and privatized law which Nick spends so much time on was well before the 1500s and 1600s

By "privatized law", you probably mean jurisdiction as property, which of course is no more in England or in any other country. But on his blog, he spends quite a bit of time explaining other aspects of common law which continue to apply to this day.

property rights & institutions were often as good or poor in various eras of China. This would suggest that they have small effects, but aren't all that important in the long run.

This does not follow. Even if (as you suggest) property rights were "as good" in China as in England, there are many other features of a judicial system not captured by the phrase "country X had better property rights than country Y" that might have made a big difference. For example, starting around the time of the Glorious Revolution IIRC the English courts insisted that even the King of England had to pay his debts, as described in one of Nick's blog posts, and I severely doubt that any court in China ever dared to rule against the Emperor of China in that way.

I have not read Farewell to Alms. Is not his thesis that the unparalleled economic success of England (and certain spinoffs from England, like the American colonies) in the 18th and 19th Centuries came from the fact that the English people had been subjected for a longer time than any other nation's people to selection pressures for capital accumulation and success in capitalists enterprises in general. If not institutional differences, what if anything does Clark say created the earlier and longer selection pressures? Is it just that England, being an island, was invaded less often than territories on the Continent?

Anyway, to this day, the English-speaking countries, which, with the exception of India (which you can almost regard as a medium-sized English-speaking country inside a much larger country) are the only countries using common-law judicial systems, are better at creating wealth than any other countries, even thoroughly Westernized ones like France. I am of course not claiming that India is better at creating wealth than non-English-speaking Western countries. Average IQ is drastically lower in India than in any European country, and no choice of institutions could have conceivably overcome that handicap to economic performance. (Moreover, India's judicial system departs from the English model in some ways, e.g., they have done away with juries.)

Correlation does not alway entail causation, but when a correlation between economic performance and whether the country used the English model for its judicial system persists for centuries, well, that's evidence for causation in my book. Note that the scientific knowledge created by Newton, Hooke, Darwin, etc, were readily adopted by other nations (as was of course scientific knowledge created by other nations readily adopted by England) and the rest of the world was eager to adopt the methods of the industrial revolution (Germany being only 30 years behind England in industrialization, IIRC) but to this day, in France for example, what the French call "the Anglo-Saxon model" for governance and the economy is considered too harsh and inhumane for adoption in France. The only other feature of English society whose adoption is opposed strenuously in France is the English language, and I severely doubt that the English language is the cause of the superior economic performance of the English-speaking countries relative to France.

I readily concede that everything I wrote above is guesswork and could very easily be wrong. But given how important economic performance is (and given the potential for insights into the causes of superior economic performance to transfer to other domains of human effort, like creating better online conversations) guesswork is probably worth communicating, if the communication can be done in an honest, equivocal manner like I am trying to do here. It does not take much reading about the differences among judicial systems, and it does not take much experience with the operation of an actual judicial system (particularly if one manages or operates a business) to come to believe that the characteristics of the judical system tends to have a large effect on the economic performance of the community served by the judicial system.

What I have been after is a way to improve serious conversations, among, e.g., scientists or administrators. In contrast, unless I am very severely mistaken, Nomic players are mostly out to have fun, particularly, the same kind of fun that a person gets by watching a TV show, like Desperate Housewives or Seinfeld, where every character is always trying to one-up every other character.

Would you advise also legal scholars to learn about Nomic to improve real-world, high-stakes judical systems? I would not. I think Nomic is almost certainly irrelevant to that purpose -- unless perhaps your goal is to understand the natural human capacity to get off on status competitions and political and legalistic manipulations and trickery to discourage lawyers or judges from getting off on it.

One potential response to what I just wrote is that if we insist that no lawyer or judge derive pleasure from status competitions or manipulations and trickery then our courts would not have enough lawyers and judges even though we pay them well. My response to that is that all I meant is that it would be counterproductive to introduce more of that natural human motivation into our courts, and the need to do so is the only circumstance I can imagine in which Nomic would actually contribute positively to a real-world, high-stakes judicial system.

Suppose someone has gone through the trouble and expense of getting a degree in law and passing the bar exam, but cannot stay motivated to practice law because he or she does not derive sufficient pleasure from it (and he or she cannot become a professor of law). Well, that is a circumstance in which Nomic might have something quite worthwhile to teach that individual lawyer (namely, how to take pleasure in legal maneuvering and legal competition). But that is different from Nomic's having something to contribute to the judicial system as a whole; the judicial system as a whole is not experiencing any problems in filling its occupational roles with motivated workers.

Moreover, if you are at all interested in becoming more "epistemically" rational than the average person, it is a bad idea to learn how to take pleasure in status competitions or political or legal maneuverings.

I was thinking more for a way to self-identify as supporting certain statements.

Doesn't the group dynamics depend on how the people are split up? I'm thinking of something along the lines of agreeing with a comment and the list of people that agree with a comment being considered one team. In comments down that thread anyone on the top-level post gets associated with posts by that team, although they could disassociate themselves from certain messages. Groups would be tenuous and transient. You could even allow wiki like editing of comments by members of the same group.

I'm interested in forms of discussion that will scale up (with more than the tens of active participants we have at the moment), and also leave something useful for people to read later on.

I'm not sure what you are responding to here. I don't want to give people a label of non-foom believer or whatever. That would be one way of splitting people into groups but not the way I was thinking of.

Really? I thought it consisted mostly of elites retorting straw men and ignoring any strong arguments of those lower in status until such time as they died or retired. The lower status engage in sound arguments while biding their time till it is their chance to do the ignoring and in so doing iterate the level of ignorance one generation forward.

You will find that this is pretty much what Kuhn says.

You could have just started using it yourself and upvoted anyone who copied you. Or tried to draw out specific participants in specific threads - "I think an endcap to this conversation from you would add a lot of value, if you could just summarize..."

To be fair, I think I experienced a similar irritation to Alicorn's over certain cutesy representations of our future. But I also feel that way every time Assimov makes his characters curse 'Gee, Space!', so you're in good company.

My favorite part of the post is the hilarious suggestion that he should challenge the ignorer to a duel to the death...

I figured I'd already complained about you enough for a month, back when I was criticizing your fiction. (I also think that being the de facto guy in charge here gives you certain special leeway in the proposing norms department.)