The commenting restrictions on LessWrong seem bad

Bentham's Bulldog

I wrote a few controversial articles on LessWrong recently that got downvoted. Now, as a consequence, I can only leave one comment every few days. This makes it totally impossible to participate in various ongoing debates, or even provide replies to the comments that people have made on my controversial post. I can't even comment on objections to my upvoted posts. This seems like a pretty bad rule--those who express controversial views that many on LW don't like shouldn't be stymied from efficiently communicating. A better rule would probably be just dropping the posting limit entirely.

We don't currently have karma and agree/disagree voting broken out separately on posts (like we do on comments). But I'm pretty sure that if we did, your posts would still be heavily downvoted. The problem is not that people disagree with you; "controversial views that many on LW don't like" isn't the central issue. The problem is that you're presenting arguments which have been repeatedly floated for years and which most long-time LWers have long since dismissed as dumb. This is being correctly rate-limited, for exactly the same reasons that the site would downvote (and then rate-limit) e.g. someone who came along arguing that we can't dismiss the existence of God because epistemic modesty, or someone who came along arguing that Searle's Chinese room argument proves AI will never be an X-risk, or some similarly stupid (but not-completely-dead-outside-LW) argument.

1Spiritus Dei3y

I don't think people recognize when they're in an echo chamber. You can imagine a Trump website downvoting all of the Biden followers and coming up with some ridiculous logic like, "And into the garden walks a fool." The current system was designed to silence the critics of Yudkowski's et al's worldview as it relates to the end of the world. Rather than fully censor critics (probably their actual goal) they have to at least feign objectivity and wait until someone walks into the echo chamber garden and then banish them as "fools".

As someone with significant understanding of ML who previously disagreed with yudkowsky but have come to partially agree with him on specific points recently due to studying which formalisms apply to empirical results when, and who may be contributing to downvoting of people who have what I feel are bad takes, some thoughts about the pattern of when I downvote/when others downvote:

yeah, my understanding of social network dynamics does imply people often don't notice echo chambers. agree.
politics example is a great demonstration of this.
But I think in both ... (read more)

2Ben3y

"It wouldn't have mattered to me whose name was in the title of that post, the strong-downvote button floated nearer to me just from reading the rest of the title." I think this is right from an individual user perspective, but misses part of the dynamic. My impression from reading lesswrong posts is that something like that post, had the topic been different, maybe "Jesus was often incredibly wrong about stuff", would have been ignored by many people. It would maybe have had between zero and a dozen karma and clearly not been clicked on by many people. But that post, in some sense, was more successful than ones that are ignored - it managed to get people to read it (which is a necessary first step of communicating anything). That it has evidently failed in the second step (persuading people) is clear from the votes. In a sense maybe this is the system working as intended: stuff that people just ignore doesn't need downvoting because it doesn't waste much communication bandwidth. Where as stuff that catches attention then disapoints is where the algorithm can maybe do people a favour with downvote data. But the way that system feeds into the users posting rights seems a little weird.

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The commenting restrictions on LessWrong seem bad

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The commenting restrictions on LessWrong seem bad

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