@Said. I’ve been thinking a bit about this comment thread, going back to read some comments of yours about moderation, and trying to pass your general ITT regarding commenting norms. Here’s my current best guess about what seems important to you in this domain:
The situation we are in is not one of slightly raising standards that are generally already pretty good, but running crisis-mitigation / triage on the horrendous state of the current internet and LessWrong. If someone writes a post that is not up to a good standard, this needs to be made apparent to them, for two reasons.
Firstly, because it damages the commons; they’re clogging up our collective intellectual space with wrong (often trivially wrong) points. If this is not made apparent in the comments, then it would be better if the post was not written at all. Immediately commenting to point out mistakes is the correct response, the person needs to learn that this is not to be tolerated. That way leads to madness, or worse, Tumblr.
Sure, they may try to reply to you, to argue their point further, you may even end up understanding them better, but it was still their fault to make the post wrong in the first place, not your fault for misunderstanding their writing or being highly critical of their basic errors.
And secondly, because criticising people’s ideas is the only way for them to improve. LessWrong is a place we actually care about being good, where people can come and practice the art of rationality. Practise means getting feedback, and coddling people with low standards will mean they will not be able to find their actually good ideas. And this is after all what’s most important - that we figure out true and important ideas.
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I take the following quotes of yours as implying this interpretation.
One:
I do not write top-level posts because my standards for ideas that are sufficiently important, valuable, novel, etc., to justify contributing to the flood of words that is the blogosphere, are fairly high. I would be most gratified to see more people follow my example.
It is good if underdeveloped ideas can be raised. It is good if they can be criticized. It is good if that criticism is not punished. It is good if the author of the underdeveloped idea responds either with a spirited defense or with “yeah, you’re right, that was a bad idea for the reasons you say—thanks, this was useful!”. This is what we should incentivize. This is how intellectual progress will take place.
Or, to put it another way: criticism of a bad idea does not constitute punishment for putting that idea forth—unless, of course, being criticized inherently causes one to lose face. But why should that be so? There’s only one real reason why, and it reflects quite poorly on a social environment if that reason obtains… Here, on Less Wrong, being criticized should be ok. Responding to criticism should be ok. Argument should be ok.
Otherwise you will get an echo chamber—and if instead of one echo chamber you have multiple ones, each with their own idiosyncratic echoes… well, I simply don’t see how that’s an improvement. Either way the site will have failed in its goal.
Without a “culture of unfettered criticism”, as you say, these very authors’ writings will go un-criticized, their claims will not be challenged, and the quality of their ideas will decline...
(This is, of course, not to mention the more obvious harms—the spread of bad ideas through our community consensus being only the most obvious of those.)
...in the absence of open and lively criticism, bad ideas proliferate, echo chambers are built, and discussion degenerates into streams of sheer nonsense.
I also think this explains my perception (more on this below) that many comments of yours ask for the author to do a lot of effort while doing very little yourself. Responses like this-
I assumed you meant what you wrote. It does not seem mysterious or confusing, just contradictory. (If you meant something other than what you wrote, well, I guess you’ll want to clarify).
-where it feels (to me) like it is on the other person to write well, not on you to expend effort to interpret them. They’re the one damaging the commons & who needs to improve.
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So, to start with, I agree with my-model-of-you about the Standards Problem. There are incredibly few places in this world I can go to where I expect everyone to keep a high standard of evidence - certainly not any online platforms that I could name, nor most scientific journals. In person I have a few friends that I trust, and sending them google docs works well, but it’s clear that we need something that can coordinate intellectual progress in fields with 10s and 100s of people, not just groups of 3 or 4.
And it’s high in my priorities to get LessWrong to have a process for actually checking ideas, to which I can contribute a high effort post (like my own post on common knowledge) - where I can get good feedback that both I and the community trusts to actually find the good counter-arguments. This involves both incentivising people to find good counter-arguments, and also incentivising people to write rigorous posts (even if they are not the generators. I would love for someone to attempt to submit a technical explanation of the core ideas in Zvi’s Slack and the Sabbath sequence, for example. I think Eliezer managed to do something similar with his post “Moloch’s Toolbox”, adding rigour to Scott Alexander’s initial poetic post, and it’s sad that there’s no trusted process in the world for checking that and making it common knowledge in a larger community like this one).
But we’re not there yet, and (I think) I disagree with you about how to get to there. I think that the correct move at the minute is not for further negative incentive, but for a stronger positive incentive for good writing. I think the dream of “Keeping everything the same but removing all of the bad ideas” is likely a fiction. People need to be able to honestly put forward new and unrigorous ideas without expecting the Spanish Inquisition[1], to be able to find the one or two gems that can be elevated and canonised.
Right now my approach is to encourage people to try, and encourage them more when they get something very right. Respectively, upvotes and curation. In time, we’ll add more steps to the process, and clear places for evaluation and criticism. That's why we've been working on the AI Alignment Forum and EA Forum 2.0 (two other basic platforms to later build upon), as well as thinking a lot about peer review and what additional infrastructure on the site will set up these pipelines for ideas to go through.
Oliver has previously said that the approach you’ve been taking was the approach that lead to a number of our top authors feeling unwelcome to post on the old LessWrong:
Eliezer, Scott G., Nate and a lot of the other top writers we’ve talked to (or who commented about the LessWrong culture somewhere publicly) have reported that LessWrong is a place that feels too hostile to post to, because of attitudes like the one you describe in this comment. Almost every major author we've interviewed has explicitly asked for some way to create content on LessWrong that is lower stakes and that allows for an explorative discussion instead of everyone just focusing on tearing apart their ideas. There has to be a place and a stage for exposing your idea to intense scrutiny, but we also need a place for explorative discussion and I am not happy about you trying to enforce a frame of intense scrutiny on every single post.
Your commenting style still has many of the properties that it did then. Let me be specific about that pattern that I’m talking about. In this thread with Benquo, this is what it felt like from my perspective:
You: These quotes from your post make no sense when juxtaposed.
Benquo: Can you do a bit of interpretive labour toward me?
You: No. It’s obvious that your quotes make no sense.
Benquo: Let me rephrase what I meant.
You: Still wrong. You’re not getting it? Notice this problem between these two quotes?
Benquo: I’m still not getting your point.
You: <Long and fairly interesting comment of your perspective on both the object level (making bread) and the meta level (what qualifies as a good explanation)>
Benquo: I want to push back on three assumptions you’ve made.
You: Another substantial comment. Also an extended snarky comment.
Benquo: It seems like you're trying to misunderstand here, and being sarcastic about it, and I'm not going to engage further.
The long, substantive point was quite interesting. But the opening three comments really didn’t help Benquo, they felt to me snarky/unnecessarily aggressive, and it seemed to me you were asking Benquo to do a lot work that you weren’t willing to do (until after you'd written the three comments implying Benquo was obviously getting something wrong). I believe comments like these make many writers feel like LessWrong is a crueller place - like the LessWrong that they previously fled.
So from here on out, I, along with the rest of the mod team, do plan to treat all the comments of yours that put in low interpretive effort on your part - ones that feel like you’re requesting a large amount of effort from someone else, whilst doing no signalling that you intend to reciprocate - as bad for the health of the culture on LessWrong, and strong-downvote them accordingly, with no exceptions.
(This is a minority of your comments; I don’t expect this to significantly stem your ability to comment on the site, as the majority of your comments are much more substantive - there’s at least one in this very thread that I strongly-upvoted.)
I do want to be transparent Said, that if almost anyone else was writing comments that I felt were this damaging to the culture, I would've come down hard on them long ago (with suspensions and eventually a ban). I don't intend to ban you any time soon, because I really value your place in this community - you're one of the few people to build useful community infrastructure like ReadTheSeqeunces.com and the UI of GreaterWrong.com, and that's been one of the most salient facts to me throughout all of my thinking on this matter. But after spending a great deal of time and effort worrying about the effects of your comments on the culture, I don't intend to put in as much time and effort if this comes up again in the future (be it 2 months or 12), and will just use the moderation tools as seems appropriate to me.
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[1] I just want to flag this point about what good environments for exploring ideas are like, as I think my model of you strongly disagrees with it (and thus all the points that follow from it). I'd be happy to discuss it further if so - though I do commit to spending no more than 2 hours thinking about responses on this comment thread including reading time (-and I will time myself).
There is a kind of explanation that I think ought to be a cornerstone of good pedagogy, and I don't have a good word for it. My first impulse is to call it a historical explanation, after the original, investigative sense of the term "history." But in the interests of avoiding nomenclature collision, I'm inclined to call it "zetetic explanation," after the Greek word for seeking, an explanation that embeds in itself an inquiry into the thing.
Often in "explaining" a thing, we simply tell people what words they ought to say about it, or how they ought to interface with it right now, or give them technical language for it without any connection to the ordinary means by which they navigate their lives. We can call these sorts of explanations nominal, functional, and formal.
In my high school chemistry courses, for instance, there was lots of "add X to Y and get Z" plus some formulas, and I learned how to manipulate the symbols in the formulas, but this bore no relation whatsoever to the sorts of skills used in time-travel or Robinson Crusoe stories. Overall I got the sense that chemicals were a sort of magical thing produced by a mysterious Scientific-Industrial priesthood in special temples called laboratories or factories, not things one might find outdoors.
It's only in the last year that I properly learned how one might get something as simple as copper or iron, reading David W. Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language and Vaclav Smil's Still the Iron Age, both of which contain clear and concrete summaries of the process. Richard Feynman's explanation of triboluminescence is a short example of a zetetic explanation in chemistry, and Paul Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament bears strong similarities in the field of pure mathematics.
I'm going to work through a different example here, and then discuss this class of explanation more generally.
What is yeast? A worked example
Recently my mother noted that when, in science class, her teacher had explained how bread was made, it had been a revelation to her. I pointed out that while this explanation removed bread from the category of a pure product, to be purchased and consumed, it still placed it in the category of an industrial product requiring specialized, standardized inputs such as yeast. My mother observed that she didn't really know what yeast was, and I found myself explaining.
Seeds, energy storage, and coevolution
Many plants store energy in chemicals such as proteins and carbohydrates around their seeds, to help them start growing once they're in wet ground. Some animals seek out the seeds with the most extra energy, and poop the occasional seed elsewhere. Sometimes this helps the plant reproduce more than it otherwise would have; in such cases, the plant may coevolve with the animals that eat it, often investing much larger amounts of energy in or around the seed, since the most calorific seeds get eaten most eagerly.
Humans coevolved with a sort of grass. If you've seen wild grass, you may have observed stalks with seed pods on them, that look sort of like tiny heads of wheat. Grain is basically massively a grass that coevolved with us to produce plump, overnourished seeds.
Energy extraction
Of course, there's only so much we can do to select for digestibility. Often even plants that store a lot of surplus energy need further treatment before they're easy to digest. Some species evolved to specialize in digesting a certain sort of plant matter efficiently; for instance, ruminants such as cattle and sheep have multiple stomachs to break down the free energy in plant matter. Humans, with unspecialized omnivorous guts, learned other ways to extract energy from plants.
One such way is cooking. If you heat up the starches inside a kernel of wheat, they'll often transform into something easier to digest. But bread made this way can still be difficult to digest, as many eaters of matzah or hardtack have learned. Soaking or sprouting seeds also helps. And a third way to make grains more digestible is fermentation.
Cultured food
Where there's dense storage of energy, there's often leakage. Sometimes a seed gets split open for some reason, and there's a bit of digestible carbohydrate exposed on the surface. Where there's free energy like this, microbes evolve to eat it.
Some of these microbes, especially fungal ones, produce byproducts that are toxic to us. But others, such as some bacteria and yeasts, break down hard-to-digest parts of wheat into substances that are easier for us to digest. Presumably at some point, people noticed that if they wet some flour and left it out for a day or two before cooking it, the resulting porridge or cracker was both tastier and more digestible. (Other fermented products such as sauerkraut may have been discovered in a similar way.)
Of course, while grain-eating microbes will often tend to be found on grain, allowing for such accidental discoveries, there is no guarantee that they'll be the kind we like. Since they mostly just eat accidental discharges of energy, there also just aren't very many of them, compared to the amount of energy available to them once the flour is ground up and mixed with water. It takes a while for them to eat and reproduce enough to process the whole batch.
Eventually, people realized that if they took part of a good batch of dough or porridge and didn't cook it, but instead added it to the next batch, this would yield an edible product both more reliably (because the microbes in the starter would have a head start relative to any potentially harmful microbes) and more quickly (again, because they'd be starting with more microbes relative to the amount of grain they needed to process). This is what we call a sourdough "culture" or "starter".
(You can make a sourdough starter at home by mixing some flour, preferably wholemeal, with water, covering it, and adding some more flour and water each day until it gets bubbly. Supposedly, a regularly fed starter can stay active for generations.)
Breads are particularly convenient foods for a few reasons. First, grains have a very high maximum caloric yield per acre, allowing for high population density. Second, dry grains or flour can be stored for a long time without going bad; as a result, stockpiles can tide people over in lean seasons or years, and be traded over large distances. Third, a loaf of bread itself has some amount of more local portability and durability, relative to a porridge.
Yeast-specific products
One of the microbes found in a sourdough culture, yeast, has a particularly simple metabolism with two main byproducts. It pisses alcohol, and farts carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a gas that can leaven or puff up dough, which makes it nicer to eat. Alcohol is a psychoactive drug, and some people likes how it makes them feel. Many food cultures ended up paying special attention to grain products that used one or the other of these traits: beer and leavened bread.
In the 19th century CE, people figured out how to isolate the yeast from the rest of the sourdough culture, which allowed for industrial, standardized production of beer and bread. If you know exactly how much yeast you're adding to the dough, you can standardize dough rising times and temperatures, allowing for mass production on a schedule, reducing potentially costly surprises.
The price of this innovation is twofold. First, when using standardized yeast to bake bread, we forgo the digestive and taste benefits of the other microbes you would find in a sourdough starter. Second, we become alienated from a crucial part of the production of bread, to the point where many people only relate to it as a recipe composed of products you can buy at a store, rather than something made of components you might find out in the wild or grow self-sufficiently.
Additional thoughts on explanation
I'm having some difficulty articulating exactly what seems distinct about this sort of explanation, but here's a preliminary attempt.
Zetetic explanations will tend to be interdisciplinary, as they will often cover a mixture of social and natural factors leading up to the isolation of the thing being explained. This naturally makes it harder to be an expert in everything one is talking about, and requires some minimal amount of courage on the part of the explainer, who may have to risk being wrong. But they're not merely interdisciplinary. You could separately talk about the use of yeast as a literary motif, the chemistry of the yeast cell, and the industrial use in bread, and still come nowhere close to giving people any real sense of why yeast came into the world or how we found it.
Zetetic explanations are empowering. First, the integration of concrete and model-based thinking is checkable on multiple levels - you can look up confirming or disconfirming facts, and you can also validate it against your personal experience or sense of plausibility, and validate the coherence and simplicity of the models used. Second, they affirm the basic competence of humans to explore our world. By centering the process of discovery rather than a finished product, such explanations invite the audience to participate in this process, and perhaps to surprise us with new discoveries.
Of course, it can be hard to know where to stop in such explanations, and it can also be hard to know where to start. This post could easily have been twice as long. Ideally, an explainer would attend to the reactions of their audience, and try to touch base with points of shared understanding. Such explanations also require patience on both sides. Another difficulty this approach raises is that plain-language explanations rooted in everyday concepts may not match the way things are referred to in technical or scientific literature, although this problem should not be hard to solve.
In some cases, one might want to forwards-chain from an interesting puzzle or other thing to play with, rather than backwards-chaining from a product. Lockhart seems to favor exploration over explanation for mathematics, and of course there's no particular reason why one can't use both. In particular, the explanation paradigm seems useful for deciding which explorations to propose.
Related: The Steampunk Aesthetic, Truly Part Of You