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This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
More in neat/scary things Ray noticed about himself.
I set aside this week to learn about Machine Learning, because it seemed like an important thing to understand. One thing I knew, going in, is that I had a self-image as a "non technical person." (Or at least, non-technical relative to rationality-folk). I'm the community/ritual guy, who happens to have specialized in web development as my day job but that's something I did out of necessity rather than a deep love.
So part of the point of this week was to "get over myself, and start being the sort of person who can learn technical things in domains I'm not already familiar with."
And that went pretty fine.
As it turned out, after talking to some folk I ended up deciding that re-learning Calculus was the right thing to do this week. I'd learned in college, but not in a way that connected to anything and gave me a sense of it's usefulness.
And it turned out I had a separate image of myself as a "person who doesn't know Calculus", in addition to "not a technical person". This was fairly easy to overcome since I had already given myself a bunch of space to explore and change this week, and I'd spent the past few months transitioning into being ready for it. But if this had been at an earlier stage of my life and if I hadn't carved out a week for it, it would have been harder to overcome.
If Ray's talking about me as the newly onboarded member, I can say I didn't examine any individual votes outside of due process. (I recall one such case of due process where multiple users were reporting losing karma on multiple posts and comments - we traced it back to a specific cause.)
I do a lot of the analytics, so when I first joined I was delving into the data, but mostly at the aggregate metrics level. Since I was creating new ways to query the data, Ray correctly initiated a conversation to determine our data handling norms. I believe this was last... (read more)
My intent was "I'd be interested in knowing what the reasoning was, but also it's important for downvoters to not feel obligation to share their reasoning if they don't feel like it." That's a bit of a handful to type out every single time I experience it.
I updated the FAQ. But an important note about how I think about all of this is it's *not* actually possible or tractable for everyone to have read everything there is to know about the LW moderation team, nor is it possible/tractable for the LW team to keep everyone on the site fully informed about all of our philosophical and ethical positions.
We've been trying recently to publicly post our most important positions, promises, deliberate-not-promises, etc. But we can't cover everything.
11Raemon
Quite fair. I had read Zvi as speaking to typical LessWrong readership. Also, the standard you seem to be describing here is much higher than the standard Zvi was describing.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.