Another source of confusion is that often, the stated rules presented as concise or comprehensive are just lies not meant to be taken seriously, and the only real rule is "The moderators shall do whatever they want."
On the one hand, this is true. On the other hand, it may be useful to have a system where the only real rule is “The moderators shall do whatever they want”, but there are nonetheless a bunch of other rules which (explicitly!) serve to give users some idea of what the moderators in fact want.
After all, if I am the king and I say “the only law is whatever I command”, surely the response of my subjects will be “yes, Your Majesty; and what do you command?”. Given almost any plausible goal I might have, it seems like I will achieve that goal more effectively if I provide a practical answer to the question, rather than “nothing for now, but be ready to carry out all my whims at a moment’s notice”. Yes, the latter is in some sense implied, but it’s not actually very useful by itself. If my whims are inconstant, then my kingdom will just be less effective, at almost anything.
Thus also with moderation.
Mhm, I do think that sometimes happens and I wish more of those places would say "The rule is the moderator shall do whatever they think reasonable." That's basically my moderation rule for like, my dinner parties, or the ~30 person discord I mostly use to advertise D&D games.
But uh, I also suspect "The moderators shall do whatever they want" (and the insinuation that the moderators are capricious and tyrannical) is a common criticism leveled when clearness is sacrificed and the user disagrees with a moderation call.
Imagine a forum with two rules. "1. Don't say false things, 2. don't be a jerk." It would not surprise me at all to hear Bob the user saying that he was being perfectly reasonable and accurate, the other user Carla was lying and being a jerk, and the mod just did whatever they wanted and banned Bob. Maybe the rule was secretly "The moderators shall do whatever they want." But maybe the rule wasn't clear, the moderator made a judgement call, and the correct tradeoff is happening. It's really, really hard to legislate clear rules against being a jerk. Even the 'false things' line has a surprising amount of edge cases!
This is all true, but sometimes people assume the opposite:
"Rules which are not-concise must be clear and comprehensive".
This is trivially false, but rules can often end up falling into this pit by keeping on adding new rules to handle unexpected edge cases. But each new rule creates further edge cases which have to be handled until the whole system becomes so complicated that nobody sure what's allowed or isn't and you call the work done.
Hence even in areas where comprehensiveness is important, like the tax code, it can be valuable to push for simplification. Because if verbosity isn't actually buying the comprehensiveness or clarity you need, might as well at least be concise.
Yeah, it's easy to not be on the pareto frontier. Sometimes you can just make things better, and most people aren't going to argue much against doing that. They might argue a little, because change is a cost. A few people will argue a lot, because they have some unusual benefit. If lots of people argue a lot, that suggests a tradeoff is happening.
My observation is that some people do not prioritize one of the three corners of this triangle, and are confused when others argue about tradeoffs they don't see as important.
Well, or as is often the case, the people arguing against changes are intentionally exploiting loopholes and don't want their valuable loopholes removed.
Yep, in what's possibly an excess of charity/politeness I sure was glossing "exploiting loopholes and don't want their valuable loopholes removed" as one example of where someone was having an unusual benefit.
A lot of forums have open-ended rules which give moderators discretion (hence unclear), but in my opinion LessWrong takes the cake by not only having unclear rules, but unclear rules combined with high standards on a fuzzy "signal to noise" measure.
In this answer by habryka:
Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don't fit well within that culture and those standards.
[...]
Signal to Noise ratio is important
Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone's comments don't seem actively bad, doesn't mean I don't want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works. There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn't sufficient, and you may still end up partially banned (rate-limited) if they decide you are more noise than signal. Instead, people invest a lot only to discover this when it's too late.
I think there should be a clearer warning about this.
Let users decide what to see:
I suggest that instead of making rate-limited users (who used up their rate) unable to comment at all, their additional comments should be invisible, but still visible to other rate-limited users (and users who choose to see them).
Rate-limited users should see a special emphasis on comments by other rate-limited users, or normal users who choose to see invisible comments. This way they know who are able to read their comments and interact with them. The same applies to posts instead of comments.
I would like to see the comments by rate-limited users, and I think a lot of other users would want to see them. Anyone who once was rate-limited in the past would probably want to, and should be encouraged to.
Believe it or not, I haven't been rate-limited on LessWrong (yet!), but I've been banned from other places, hence this attitude.
EDIT: see RobertM's reply below, it seems there are pretty clear warnings, I was wrong and I somehow didn't remember them. (But I still think letting users decide what to see is a worthwhile idea)
1I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works. There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn't sufficient, and you may still end up partially banned (rate-limited) if they decide you are more noise than signal. Instead, people invest a lot only to discover this when it's too late.
In addition to the New User Guide that gets DMed to every new user (and is also linked at the top of our About page), we:
Show this comment above the new post form to new users who haven't already had some content approved by admins. (Note that it also links to the new user's guide.)
Open a modal when a new, unreviewed user clicks into a comment box to write a comment for the first time. Note how it's three sentences long, explicitly tells users that they start out rate limited, and also links to the new user's guide.
Show new, unreviewed users this moderation warning directly underneath the comment box.
Now, it's true that people mostly don't read things. So there is a tricky balance to strike between providing "sufficient" warning, and not driving people away because you keep throwing annoying roadblocks/warnings at them[1]. But it is simply not the case that LessWrong does not go out of its way to tell new users that the site has specific (and fairly high) standards.
- ^
On the old internet, you didn't get advance notice that you should internalize the norms of the community you were trying to join. You just got told to lurk more - or banned without warning, if you were unlucky.
2This is fine for new users; what about for existing users?
I just went to the front page of the site, and it’s not obvious to me where to click to find “The Rules”. The “About” page? Doesn’t seem to be a list of rules. The New User’s Guide? Not really. (There’s a “Rules to be aware of” section at the very, very end of that post, but… surely this isn’t meant to be a list of the rules…? It’s just… three kind of random things.) The LessWrong FAQ? Not really…
If I want to know what rules (or guidelines, or… anything, really…) are supposed to be governing my behavior on LW, I actually don’t have any idea where to look. And I’ve been using Less Wrong for a very long time.
Related point: when the rules change, how do existing users learn about this?
P.S.: What happened to the table of contents on LW post pages? Why can’t I see it anymore?
I don't think much has changed since this comment. Maybe someone will make a new wiki page on the subject, though if it's not an admin I'd expect it to mostly be a collection of links to various posts/comments.
re: the table of contents, it's hidden by default but becomes visible if you hover your mouse over the left column on post pages.
I don’t think much has changed since this comment. Maybe someone will make a new wiki page on the subject, though if it’s not an admin I’d expect it to mostly be a collection of links to various posts/comments
That’s… pretty bad. Frankly, I don’t understand how you expect anyone to have any idea of what to expect from the site and the moderation thereof, given this utterly shambolic state of affairs.
I’ll just repeat my question from two years ago (which did not receive any answer at the time):
Here’s a question: if you asked ten randomly selected Less Wrong members: “What are the rules of Less Wrong?”—how many of them would give the correct answer? Not as a link to this or that comment, but in their own words (or even just by quoting a list of rules, minus the commentary)?
(What is the correct answer?)
How many of their answers would even match one another?
re: the table of contents, it’s hidden by default but becomes visible if you hover your mouse over the left column on post pages.
It doesn’t do that for me (might be a browser issue). In any case, is there a way to have it be visible by default? I’d really prefer that.
Thank you very much for bringing that up. That does look like a clearer warning, somehow I didn't remember it very well.
I don't post on LessWrong much but I would much rather be explicitly rate-limited than shadow-banned, if content I was posting needed to be moderated.
Shadow-banned means that your comments are invisible to others and you aren't told about that fact.
I admit that even if users are told that their comments are invisible, some users might fail to notice. But it can be made very clear, maybe they have to click a warning before they see the commenting text-area.
1Eh, I think unclear rules and high standards are fine for some purposes. Take a fiction magazine. Good ones have a high standard for what they publish, and (apart from some formatting and wordcount rules) the main rule is it has to fit the editor's taste. The same is true for scientific publications.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.
I mildly disagree with this. The New Users Guide says
LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that's uncommon for web forums[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we're about.
My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn't the place for you, this guide will help you have a good "visit" or simply seek other pastures.
On the margin, is there room for improvement? Seems likely, but doesn't seem bad. If I was in charge I'd be tempted to open the New Users Guide with like, four bullet points that said 'This place is for aspiring rationalists, don't say false things, don't be a jerk, for examples of what we mean by that read on.' That's somewhat stylistic though.
There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn't sufficient
Wait, now I'm confused. Most forums I'm aware of don't have much of a Good Faith defense. I looked up the rules for the first one I thought of, Giant In The Playground, and while it's leaning a bit more Comprehensive and Clear I don't see a place where it says if you break a rule in good faith you're fine.
In general, someone trying to contribute to a thing who but doing so badly doesn't get that much of a pass? Like, I've been politely ejected from a singing group before because I was badly off-key. Nobody doubted I was trying to sing well! It doesn't change the fact that the group wanted to have everyone singing the right notes.
I suggest that instead of making rate-limited users (who used up their rate) unable to comment at all, their additional comments should be invisible, but still visible to other rate-limited users (and users who choose to see them).
Meh. The internet is big. If the kind of thing that got someone rate-limited on LessWrong got them rate-limited or banned everywhere else, I'd be supportive of having somewhere they were allowed to post. Reddit's right over there, you know?
I think giving special emphasis to rate-limited users for rate-limited users is straightforwardly a bad idea. If someone got rate-limited, in general I assume it's because they were writing in ways the mods and/or other users thought they shouldn't do. If someone is going to stick around, I want their attention on people doing well, not doing badly. Imagine a basketball practice; if I'm a lousy shot, the coach might tell me to sit out the drill and watch a couple of the good players for few minutes. If I'm really bad, I get cut from the team. No coach is going to say, "hey, you're a lousy shot, so pay special attention to these other players who are just as bad as you."
A big component of this is I tend to think of LessWrong as a place I go to get better at a kind of mental skill, hence analogies to choir or basketball practice. You may have other goals here.
I guess other forums don't literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they're told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I guess they have more bad moderators who ban people for personal/ideological reasons, and I'm actually impressed by LessWrong's moderators being less wrong in this regard.
I still think that being rate-limited and told that, "I don't have a great model of how you can improve at that" is slightly specific to LessWrong.
Many other forums will say things very similar in spirit to
LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that's uncommon for web forums[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we're about.
My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn't the place for you, this guide will help you have a good "visit" or simply seek other pastures.
But these forums still implicitly only ban people who have bad faith while advising people with good faith. LessWrong's warning isn't strong enough to distinguish it from those forums.
My idea shouldn't hurt
If you don't want to see the invisible comments, then don't see them. In my opinion the only cost is software and bandwidth.
In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.
Even long term users like Roko have complained about rate-limiting (automatic rate-limiting in his case).[1]
- ^
Speaking of Roko, the reputational costs inflicted on the rational community by trying to censor his Basilisk idea was probably 3 orders of magnitude higher than the actual harm from his idea. But that's off topic.
1I guess other forums don't literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they're told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I feel like I have encountered fora that had genuinely more active moderation norms. There's a lot of personal discord servers I can think of with the same rough approach as a dinner party. There are reddit threads
Also, uh, I notice the juxtaposition of "I've been banned from other places, hence this attitude" and "in practice [other forums] mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they're told about, or personally insult others repeatedly" implies you either refuse to follow rules/advice or that you insult others repeatedly. Obviously you said most cases, not all cases.
In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.
Well, yes, and I've never heard of a coach saying someone wasn't allowed to play basketball anywhere. At least where I live, there's a public court about a ten minute bike ride away and basketballs are cheap. If, say, I'm a student on a college basketball team whose coach asked me to stop doing layups during his practices, I can even use the exact same court later when the team isn't practicing. The equivalent for LessWrong is, I believe, saying you're welcome to continue communicating on the internet but that it will happen on some other forum.
Your average basketball coach doesn't only remove people with bad faith, they also bench people or cut them from the team for not being good at basketball. That's quite common.
1Let's just think about the pros and cons of picking another forum, vs. continuing to comment on LessWrong, but only being visible by others who choose to see you.
Picking another forum:
- They fit better in other forums than LessWrong. For most rate-limited users, this is true, but they can go to other forums on their own without being forced.
- Less need for LessWrong to write code and increase bandwidth to accommodate them.
- Less chance they say really bad things (neoreactionary content) which worsens the reputation of LessWrong? This doesn't apply to most rate-limited users.
Continuing to comment but only visible to those interested:
- They get to discuss the posts and topics they find engaging to talk about.
- They don't feel upset at LessWrong and the rationalist community.
I think whether it's worth it depends on how hard it is to write the code for them.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.
The New User Guide, which gets DMd to every user I feel like does get it across pretty well that we have high and particular standards:
LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that's uncommon for web forums[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we're about.
My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn't the place for you, this guide will help you have a good "visit" or simply seek other pastures.
Note: I don't know if everyone is disagreeing with my idea or disagreeing with my opinion on LessWrong.
Maybe click "agree" on this sub-comment if you agree with my idea (independently of whether you agree with my LessWrong opinion), and vice versa for disagree.
I don't like the idea. Here's an alternative I'd like to propose:
AI mentoring
After a user gets a post or comment rejected, have them be given the opportunity to rewrite and resubmit it with the help of an AI mentor. The AI mentor should be able to give reasonably accurate feedback, and won't accept the revision until it is clearly above a quality line.
I don't think this is currently easy to make (well), because I think it would be too hard to get current LLMs to be sufficiently accurate in LessWrong specific quality judgement and advice. If, at some point in the future, this became easy for the devs to add, I think it would be a good feature. Also, if an AI with this level of discernment were available, it could help the mods quite a bit in identifying edge cases and auto-resolving clear-cut cases.
I like it, it is worth a try because it could be very helpful if it works!
A possible objection is that "you can't mentor others on something you suck yourself," and this would require AGI capable of making valuable LessWrong comments themselves, which may be similarly hard to automating AI research (considering the math/programming advantages of LLMs).
This objection doesn't doom your idea, because even if the AI is bad at writing valuable comments, and bad at judging valuable comments written by itself, it may be good at judging the failure modes where a human writes a bad comments. It could still work and is worth a try!
1I'll add one more gear here: I think you can improve on how much you're satisfying all three tradeoffs at once – writing succinctly and clearly and distilling complex things into simpler ones are skills. But, those things take time (both to get better at the skill, and to apply the skill).
LessWrong certainly could do better than we currently have, but we've spent 100s of hours on things like
- make the new user guide, and link new users to it
- make the rate limits link people to pages that explain more about why you're rate limited
- explain why the moderation norms are what they are
etc. We could put more even more effort into it, but, well, there's also a lot of other stuff to do.
1As someone who wrote pages of pedantic rules for minecraft doors, I relate to this post a lot. Rules are just hard to write and to enforce consistently
There once was a post on LessWrong asking what's with all the bans? The OP of that post complained of, among other things, being punished despite not having broken any rules that they knew about before taking the action they got punished for. I started to write a comment, which then ballooned out of scope. The following is based on my own experiences trying to write rules.
I.
I claim the ideal rules are concise, comprehensive, and clear[1]. In practice, I think that we usually have to pick two.
Concise: Ideal rules are short. You can read or refer to them easily.
Comprehensive: Ideal rules include everything relevant. There aren't gaps.
Clear: Ideal rules have one interpretation. There's no ambiguity.
If you're running LessWrong, then "Don't be a jerk, talk about things related to rationality" is a concise and fairly comprehensive set of rules. It's just not a very clear set of rules. There will be myriad places where people disagree with what counts as being a jerk or what relates to rationality. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a famous concise and comprehensive rule with a lot of interpretations. If you aren't under a lot of heated or adversarial pressure though, concise and comprehensive rules are great! When they fail, it's because people don't agree on how to interpret the rules.
There's a subtype of concise and comprehensive that goes like this: "The moderators shall do whatever they want." This is very unclear! It is impressively comprehensive however, since your mods can do whatever they think is reasonable whenever an issue is brought to their attention. (Even easier if they don't need to be bound by precedent.) It doesn't scale especially well, since it's hard to automate mod judgement. Eventually your mods might disagree with each other, a problem which can be solved by the second rule "the moderators shall do whatever they want, unless overruled by the administrator."
The official rules for Magic: The Gathering are comprehensive and clear. Magic is played competitively by an often pedantic fanbase, the more competitive games are overseen by trained judges, and its rules are programmed into a computer which accepts no on-the-fly rulings. The comprehensive rules are also (at the time of this writing) two hundred and ninety three pages long and include blocks of text like the following:
The majority of Magic players have never read the Comprehensive rules, because those rules are long and have a tendency to induce acute narcolepsy in everyone except modrons, rabbis, and NixOS developers. If you have to reference rules 603.7d-f, your ruleset no longer fits in the average person's head. Nevertheless, these rules can withstand a lot of pressure. When they fail, it's usually because not enough people are actually reading the rules. You also wind up with people standing just barely in or out of the line the rules, to the irritation of those around them. Consider U.S. tax law; most people need a trained helper or specialist software to figure it out. Even when the rules are followed exactly, you wind up with people angry at how much other people are or aren't paying.
Forum software which bans two or three slurs is clear and concise. If you type any of a specified list into the message box and hit submit, the banned word (or depending on the settings, the entire message) will fail to appear. This was a common setup on the internet bulletin boards of my youth, and caught a lot of very low effort spam or flaming.
As most of my peers experienced with internet bulletin boards are no doubt aware, circumventing a banned word list is laughably easy. If the mods just censor the word "idiot" then you can usually type "idi0t" or "id iot" or switch to synonyms like "moron" or "dumbo." I have played whack-a-mole with the creativity of the internet before, and while a banned word list might catch the very low effort posters it doesn't take much effort to get around it. When clear and concise rules fail, it often looks like someone exasperatedly following a diarrhetic dog around with a scooper. "No, you can't do that. Or that. Or that either. Why would you think this fourth thing was allowed? No, my shoes aren't better than the carpet." This process might gradually result in comprehensive rules, but by the time they get there the rules are no longer concise.
Clear and concise rules also tend to have really silly looking false positives. "Can I get some assistance?" contains the substring "ass" and therefore will get flagged by the simplest kinds of profanity filters. Quoth Patrick McKenzie, "I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it" is a falsehood many programmers believe.
II.
Step one is to have sympathy for the moderators and authors of such rules. The job is harder than it looks.
Step two is to notice the tradeoffs, and what situation you're in.
If the moderators are trying to handle a large population or a broad set of circumstances, the rules basically have to be comprehensive. That means you need to trade off being clear (allowing ambiguity and judgement call) and being concise (allowing the written rules to grow large and complex.)
If the judges are trying to let people make significant, long term investments based on the rules, then the rules basically have to be clear. Signing a mortgage agreement or life insurance payment on a quick conversation (concise) and broad statement (comprehensive) is inviting heated argument later. Citation: many angry divorce settlements.
If the setup relies on everyone understanding what's expected, the rules basically have to be concise. When I was getting my driver's license, I recall being given the rules of the road in a pamphlet. There weren't many pages in the pamphlet, because people who fail ninth grade English classes drive cars. People tried for years to write software that could drive a car (good software is by necessity comprehensive and clear) and failed; what seems to have worked is giant Machine Learning models which are not even a tiny bit concise.
Step three is to cry.
III.
This essay is an answer to people who are frustrated with where the rules are falling short.
When I was studying for my driver's license, I noticed that the pamphlet obviously didn't include all the rules of the road. I wanted to read the actual rules behind driving, and since I was on the cusp of adulthood I figured I'd read the laws of the country I lived under while I was at it. I was prepared for it to be hard, but I was a fast reader and precocious; it wasn't uncommon for me to read a textbook or a small stack of novels over a weekend. So I went to the library and asked for a copy of the laws of the United States of America please, yes, all of them.
This was when I found out that there are a lot of laws in the USA, and your local library or town hall didn't actually have a copy of the full text lying around available for high schoolers. I think I eventually talked my way into a college's law school library, where I found that even the people teaching lawyers and judges didn't have a copy organized for reading from start to finish. This made me pretty angry. If I was expected to live under the U.S. legal code, and would be punished if I broke the laws, then it seemed extremely unfair not to be given a list of the laws so I could know what it was I was supposed to obey. I didn't quite get all the way to radical anarchist rebellion, but I thought about it, and it's the seed of my empathy for anarchists these days. (I want to give a major round of applause to the age of the internet and whoever put together the Massachusetts General Laws web page. That's the kind of thing I was looking for as a teenager.)
If you are frustrated with where the rules are falling short, please take a moment, and ask yourself:
There's an attempted synthesis, where comprehensive and clear rules have good summaries. I don't know all the legal definitions of theft are, but "thou shalt not steal" has worked pretty well for me my entire life so far. It's a good system! But it's a nontrivial abstraction, and sometime it leaks. All of these approaches leak, and when they do one of the three corners gets sacrificed.
Sorry. This is where we're at.
IV.
While I'm on the subject there's one more thing I'd like to note.
Some people behave as though nobody should be mad at their behavior as long as they're following the rules. This is not so. You can be deeply aggravating and follow the rules scrupulously. Consider the child who chants "I'm not touching you" in the backseat of a car, their finger held an inch away from their frustrated sibling. They might be obeying the rule "stop hitting each other" but we don't expect the sibling to feel happy about it.
"I followed all the rules [2] so why am I being punished by the arbiter?" is a fair question.
"I followed all the rules, so why are people mad at me?" is a mistake.
The arbiter is a person.
To pick a few examples: intentionally fouling the other players then accepting the penalty timeout won't make the people you fouled happy, constantly using the most offensive language that doesn't get you censored will lead some people to spend less time with you, saying things that are technically true but deeply misleading will still lead to some people trusting the meaning of your words less, and if you only play blue control decks I'm going to play Magic: The Gathering with somebody else.
(I have a Magic deck I built as a teaching tool. It contains nothing but counterspells, zero power creatures that blocked well, and hand attack spells. Its win condition was to mulligan to six, then wait for the other player to deck themselves via normal draws. Nobody liked playing against this deck, even though it was obviously legal and didn't even involve any weird obscure card interactions.)
Depending on the goals and priorities, sheltering people who are infuriating but not breaking any rules may be the right move. Twitter and Facebook are big spaces, and as long as there's useful blocking and feed filtering tools I'm inclined to defend infuriating people being able to use the platform. The local subway system is an important piece of civic infrastructure. As obnoxious as I find it when someone steps on board smelling of weed or wearing a shirt with foul language on it, I still think they should be allowed to use the subway like that.
For other goals, sheltering people who are infuriating but not breaking particular rules may be the wrong move. If you are sufficiently persistent about whatever it is you're doing that is not against the rules but is making people mad, people will either stop hanging out in the space you're in (including the person running the space stopping from doing that,) bend the existing rules such that it kind of covers what you're doing if we squint, or will make new rules that bans the thing you're doing. This is not unusual evidence of them being tyrannical or capricious. This is them encountering something they wish was different (your behavior) and trying to figure out how to get what they want.
I believe the best, most virtuous thing they can do in this circumstance is to say explicitly something like 'yep, we don't don't seem to be able to write the rules in a consistent way, but what you're doing is a problem. Stop it or leave.'
V.
I currently think LessWrong is trying to be concise and comprehensive, which means it relies on judgement calls by the administration and moderation team.
I think the higher the stakes are, the more we should aspire to be clear. If the government wants to put someone to death for breaking the rules, that rule should be damn specific.
I think that it's underappreciated the extent to which 'fixing' a rules system by pushing for one of these three risks sacrificing one of the others.
Finally, arbiters are in short supply. I appreciate them. All three virtues impose different costs on the arbiters.
This is an assertion. Read the rest of the essay to see if you agree with how I'm using those words.
Even the fuzzy ones or the ones from outside of the scope of this ruleset or the ones that aren't in the top five that everyone knows