Lots of new users have been joining LessWrong recently, who seem more filtered for "interest in discussing AI" than for being bought into any particular standards for rationalist discourse. I think there's been a shift in this direction over the past few years, but it's gotten much more extreme in the past few months.
So the LessWrong team is thinking through "what standards make sense for 'how people are expected to contribute on LessWrong'?" We'll likely be tightening up moderation standards, and laying out a clearer set of principles so those tightened standards make sense and feel fair.
In coming weeks we'll be thinking about those principles as we look over existing users, comments and posts and asking "are these contributions making LessWrong better?".
Hopefully within a week or two, we'll have a post that outlines our current thinking in more detail.
Generally, expect heavier moderation, especially for newer users.
Two particular changes that should be going live within the next day or so:
Users will need at least N karma in order to vote, where N is probably somewhere between 1 and 10.
Comments from new users won't display by default until they've been approved by a moderator.
Broader Context
LessWrong has always had a goal of being a well-kept garden. We have higher and more opinionated standards than most of the rest of the internet. In many cases we treat some issues as more "settled" than the rest of the internet, so that instead of endlessly rehashing the same questions we can move on to solving more difficult and interesting questions.
What this translates to in terms of moderation policy is a bit murky. We've been stepping up moderation over the past couple months and frequently run into issues like "it seems like this comment is missing some kind of 'LessWrong basics', but 'the basics' aren't well indexed and easy to reference." It's also not quite clear how to handle that from a moderation perspective.
I'm hoping to improve on "'the basics' are better indexed", but meanwhile it's just generally the case that if you participate on LessWrong, you are expected to have absorbed the set of principles in The Sequences (AKA Rationality A-Z).
In some cases you can get away without doing that while participating in local object level conversations, and pick up norms along the way. But if you're getting downvoted and you haven't read them, it's likely you're missing a lot of concepts or norms that are considered basic background reading on LessWrong. I recommend starting with the Sequences Highlights, and I'd also note that you don't need to read the Sequences in order, you can pick some random posts that seem fun and jump around based on your interest.
(Note: it's of course pretty important to be able to question all your basic assumptions. But I think doing that in a productive way requires actually understand why the current set of background assumptions are the way they are, and engaging with the object level reasoning)
There's also a straightforward question of quality. LessWrong deals with complicated questions. It's a place for making serious progress on those questions. One model I have of LessWrong is something like a university – there's a role for undergrads who are learning lots of stuff but aren't yet expected to be contributing to the cutting edge. There are grad students and professors who conduct novel research. But all of this is predicated on there being some barrier-to-entry. Not everyone gets accepted to any given university. You need some combination of intelligence, conscientiousness, etc to get accepted in the first place.
Ideas we're considering, and questions we're trying to answer:
What quality threshold does content need to hit in order to show up on the site at all? When is the right solution to approve but downvote immediately?
How do we deal with low quality criticism? There's something sketchy about rejecting criticism. There are obvious hazards of groupthink. But a lot of criticism isn't well thought out, or is rehashing ideas we've spent a ton of time discussing and doesn't feel very productive.
What are the actual rationality concepts LWers are basically required to understand to participate in most discussions? (for example: "beliefs are probabilistic, not binary, and you should update them incrementally")
What philosophical and/or empirical foundations can we take for granted for building off of (i.e. reductionism, meta-ethics)
How much familiarity with the existing discussion of AI should you be expected to have to participate in comment threads about that?
How does moderation of LessWrong intersect with moderating the Alignment Forum?
Again, hopefully in the near future we'll have a more thorough writeup about our answers to these. Meanwhile it seemed good to alert people this would be happening.
A key question when I look at a new user on LessWrong trying to help with AI is, well, are they actually likely to be able to contribute to the field of AI safety?
If they are aiming to make direct novel intellectual contributions, this is in fact fairly hard. People have argued back and forth about how much raw IQ, conscientiousness or other signs of promise a person needs to have. There has been some posts arguing that people are overly pessimistic and gatekeeping-y about AI safety.
But, I think it's just pretty importantly true that it takes a fairly significant combination of intelligence and dedication to contribute. Not everyone is cut out for doing original research. Many people pre-emptively focus on community building and governance because that feels easier and more tractable to them than original research. But those areas still require you to have a pretty understanding of the field you're trying to govern or build a community for.
If someone writes a post on AI that seems like a bad take, which isn't really informed by the real challenges, should I be encouraging that person to make improvements and try again? Or just say "idk man, not everyone is cut out for this?"
Here's my current answer.
If you've written a take on AI that didn't seem to hit the LW team's quality bar, I would recommend some combination of:
Read ~16 hours of background content, so you're not just completely missing the point. (I have some material in mind that I'll compile later, but for now highlight roughly the amount of effort involved)
Set aside ~4 hours to think seriously about the topic. Try to find one sub-question you don't know the answer to, and make progress answering that sub-question.
Write up your thoughts as a LW post.
(For each of these steps, organizing some friends to work together as a reading or thinking group can be helpful to make it more fun)
This doesn't guarantee that you'll be a good fit for AI safety work, but I think this is an amount of effort where it's possible for a LW mod to look at your work, and figure out if this is likely to be a good use of your time.
Some people may object "this is a lot of work." Yes, it is. If you're the right sort of person you may just find this work fun. But the bottom line is yes, this is work. You should not expect to contribute to the field without putting in serious work, and I'm basically happy to filter out of LessWrong people who a) seem to superficially have pretty confused takes, and b) are unwilling to put in 20 hours of research work.
Lots of new users have been joining LessWrong recently, who seem more filtered for "interest in discussing AI" than for being bought into any particular standards for rationalist discourse. I think there's been a shift in this direction over the past few years, but it's gotten much more extreme in the past few months.
So the LessWrong team is thinking through "what standards make sense for 'how people are expected to contribute on LessWrong'?" We'll likely be tightening up moderation standards, and laying out a clearer set of principles so those tightened standards make sense and feel fair.
In coming weeks we'll be thinking about those principles as we look over existing users, comments and posts and asking "are these contributions making LessWrong better?".
Hopefully within a week or two, we'll have a post that outlines our current thinking in more detail.
Generally, expect heavier moderation, especially for newer users.
Two particular changes that should be going live within the next day or so:
Broader Context
LessWrong has always had a goal of being a well-kept garden. We have higher and more opinionated standards than most of the rest of the internet. In many cases we treat some issues as more "settled" than the rest of the internet, so that instead of endlessly rehashing the same questions we can move on to solving more difficult and interesting questions.
What this translates to in terms of moderation policy is a bit murky. We've been stepping up moderation over the past couple months and frequently run into issues like "it seems like this comment is missing some kind of 'LessWrong basics', but 'the basics' aren't well indexed and easy to reference." It's also not quite clear how to handle that from a moderation perspective.
I'm hoping to improve on "'the basics' are better indexed", but meanwhile it's just generally the case that if you participate on LessWrong, you are expected to have absorbed the set of principles in The Sequences (AKA Rationality A-Z).
In some cases you can get away without doing that while participating in local object level conversations, and pick up norms along the way. But if you're getting downvoted and you haven't read them, it's likely you're missing a lot of concepts or norms that are considered basic background reading on LessWrong. I recommend starting with the Sequences Highlights, and I'd also note that you don't need to read the Sequences in order, you can pick some random posts that seem fun and jump around based on your interest.
(Note: it's of course pretty important to be able to question all your basic assumptions. But I think doing that in a productive way requires actually understand why the current set of background assumptions are the way they are, and engaging with the object level reasoning)
There's also a straightforward question of quality. LessWrong deals with complicated questions. It's a place for making serious progress on those questions. One model I have of LessWrong is something like a university – there's a role for undergrads who are learning lots of stuff but aren't yet expected to be contributing to the cutting edge. There are grad students and professors who conduct novel research. But all of this is predicated on there being some barrier-to-entry. Not everyone gets accepted to any given university. You need some combination of intelligence, conscientiousness, etc to get accepted in the first place.
See this post by habryka for some more models of moderation.
Ideas we're considering, and questions we're trying to answer:
Again, hopefully in the near future we'll have a more thorough writeup about our answers to these. Meanwhile it seemed good to alert people this would be happening.