2018 Nominations — LessWrong

Meta-tations on Moderation: Towards Public Archipelago

The recent moderation tools announcement represents a fairly major shift in how the site admins are approaching LessWrong. Several people noted important concerns about transparency and trust.

Those concerns deserve an explicit, thorough answer.

Summary of Concepts

The Problem of Private Discussion – Why much intellectual progress in the rationalsphere has happened in hard-to-find places
Public Discussion vs Intellectual Progress – Two subtly conflicting priorities for LessWrong.
Healthy Disagreement – How to give authors tools to have the kinds of conversations they want, without degenerating into echo chambers.
High Trust vs Functioning Low Trust environments – Different modes of feeling safe, with different costs and risks.
Overton Windows, Personal Criticism – Two common conversational attractors. Tempting. Sometimes important. But rarely what an author is interested in talking about.
Public Archipelago - A model that takes

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habryka18d20

Unless you have another admin-only moderation log which does show deletedPublic: false, which Ox Alpha tells me you don't

Of course we do. I do most of my analytics and auditing with direct database access using agents.

In case you care, here is the full set of deletions by non-admin authors on their posts over the past year:^[1]

Date	Post	Deleted by	Comment author	Reason
2026-08-21/22	Wei Dai's Shortform	Wei Dai	17 comments, authors above	—
2026-08-04	Returning to ARC	paulfchristiano	phoenix (×2)	"Duplicate"
2026-07-09	SFF is very suboptimal	Zach Stein-Perlman	Jonas V	—
2025-12

... (read more)

8Wei Dai19d

Bug report: author "delete without trace" deletions don't appear on the moderation log The moderation log page (/moderation) says it "will show you all moderation actions and bans taken across the site by anyone, including any deleted content (unless the moderators explicitly deleted it in a way that would hide it from this page, which we do in cases like doxxing)." But this isn't currently true for author moderation. When a post author deletes another user's comment using the "Delete Without Trace" option (which is the option available to authors via the comment menu, alongside "Delete"), the comment is stored with `deletedPublic: false`, and the Deleted Comments section on /moderation filters with `WHERE deleted = TRUE AND "deletedPublic" = TRUE` — so the deletion never appears on the page at all. I hit this today: a comment on my shortform was deleted without trace, and it doesn't show up anywhere on the log, even though the page's stated policy implies it should (the doxxing exception is described as something moderators do explicitly, not something that happens by default). Two possible fixes, depending on intent: 1. If the intent is that all non-doxxing deletions should be publicly logged (as the page text says), the server could set `deletedPublic: true` for author deletions, or the log's query could drop the `deletedPublic` filter. Note the legacy moderation log component already shows all deleted comments regardless of `deletedPublic`, so the new page is a regression relative to that. 2. If "delete without trace" is meant to be genuinely invisible even in the log, the page text should be updated to say that author deletions without trace are excluded. Separately, the page caches all sections for 30 minutes (`revalidate: 1800`), so even qualifying deletions take a while to show up — worth mentioning in the page text or lowering for this section.

2jimrandomh19d

Should be fixed now. I believe introduced in this PR; the version of /moderation prior to that was terrible in other ways but I think (based on skimming the code, I didn't go back and check carefully) it showed comments deleted with the delete-without-trace checkbox checked. The caching will probably stay (though I might make it shorter), because that page has historically been an accidental honeypot for bots that don't respect robots.txt, which find that each Next button on the page is a separate URL parameter and that they can find infinitely many pages by visiting permutations of page-offset

2Raemon19d

Yeah we also noticed this today, yep, is a bug. Will fix.

The Intelligent Social Web

259

Valentine

Epistemic status: Fake Framework

When you walk into an improv scene, you usually have no idea what role you’re playing. All you have is some initial prompt — something like:

“You three are in a garden. The scene has to involve a stuffed bear somehow. Go!”

So now you’re looking to the other people there. Then someone jumps forward and adds to the scene: “Oh, there it is! I’m glad we finally found it!” Now you know a little bit about your character, and about the character of the person who spoke, but not enough to fully define anyone’s role.

You can then expand the scene by adding something: “It’s about time! We’re almost late now.” Now you’ve specified more about what’s going on, who you are, and who the other...

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Eli Tyre19d40

The "wife" can't be as clingy and anxious if the "husband" opens up, so "she" enacts behavior that "she" knows will make "him" close down. "She" can't really choose to change this because "her" thwarted desire for change is part of "her" role.

There's a simpler model here.

"'Wife' is covertly optimizing for 'husband' to behave in a way that she declares that she doesn't like, because it gives her an opportunity to enact a comfortable and familiar role" is definitely something that happens sometimes.

(Or something like it at least. When I've asked a person t... (read more)

5Eli Tyre19d

I think this is not really the main thing, per se, or at least that this emphasizes the wrong things. I think the main thing is social friction is uncomfortable, because if people are stubborn/assertive about a point of social friction, that turns into social conflict, which can sometimes even turn into physical conflict. __Conflict__ is costly (it both has it's own direct costs and makes cooperation hard), and so there are a bunch of mechanisms to paper over social friction, including "pretending not to have noticed", or laughing to signal that something is no big deal, or (as is relevant for this post) playing a role in relation to the social premises laid out by others.

The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge

236

Ben Pace

Recently someone pointed out to me that there was no good canonical post that explained the use of common knowledge in society. Since I wanted to be able to link to such a post, I decided to try to write it.

The epistemic status of this post is that I hoped to provide an explanation for a standard, mainstream idea, in a concrete way that could be broadly understood rather than in a mathematical/logical fashion, and so the definitions should all be correct, though the examples in the latter half are more speculative and likely contain some inaccuracies.

Let's start with a puzzle. What do these three things have in common?

Dictatorships all through history have attempted to suppress freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Why is this?

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johnlawrenceaspden20d20

This is a wonderful post and your summary has gone in my anki deck. Thank you!

Nominated Posts for the 2018 Review

Nominated Posts for the 2018 Review

2018 Review Discussion

Summary of Concepts