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Dec 02, 2023
66I am not sure how to proceed with my alignment work in the absence of a quorum of people willing to upvote the most valuable and important parts of my research agenda.
I think the answer is: don't.
Going by the feedback, your research agenda seems valuable and important to you, but not to the LessWrong community. So there is no reason why LessWrong should host your Sequence. (I would tell you to put it on Substack instead, but you already did.)
1I think this shouldn't be disallowed (is it?). Hiding content because of its Karma (for readers who permit that in Settings) or giving it low priority in lookup results is different from constraints on how content is created.
For search pricing reasons we don't show downvoted content in search results, though the intent is definitely not to make this kind of thing impossible. It's just a result of me trying to come up with some ways to reduce the number of things in our search engine so we get charged less money for that (we now moved to a different search provider which also makes this less relevant, but it would require some code changes to make them visible, and I would still want to make sure downvoted content only shows as a last resort)
2I don't think this was about pricing, but about keeping occasional bits of literal spam out of the site search. The fact that we use the same search for both users looking for content, and authors adding stuff to Sequences, is a historical accident which makes for a few unfortunate edge cases.
Nah, it was definitely part of the set of constraints I made to reduce pricing like 5 years ago. I remember doing a bunch of things to drive the number of indexed documents down because there was a threshold where the price would double that I was trying to avoid. I did choose this filter because it seemed like it wouldn't have a negative effect on search results.
I couldn't figure out how to do it in the interface. It seems that negative karma things are never returned in the lookup results. I could be wrong about this, or simply insufficiently skillful or patient in my use of the interface.
Can we add posts with negative karma to a Sequence? I'm working on a Sequence for my alignment research agenda, and the most valuable content in the sequence is all currently underwater. I get that LessWrong wants the community to have veto authority over people creating Sequences and adding controversial posts to them, but I am not sure how to proceed with my alignment work in the absence of a quorum of people willing to upvote the most valuable and important parts of my research agenda.