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"authors will get hurt by people not appreciating their work" is something we just have to accept, even if it's very harsh

I don't really agree with this. Sure, some people are going to write stuff that's not very good, but that doesn't mean that we have to go overboard on negative feedback, or be stingy with positive feedback.

Humans are animals which learn by reinforcement learning, and the lesson they learn when punished is often "stay away from the thing / person / group that gave the punishment", much more strongly than "don't do the thing that made that person / thing / group punish me".

Wheras when they are rewarded, the lesson is "seek out the circumstances / context that let me be rewarded (and also do the thing that will make it reward me)". Nobody is born writing amazingly, they have to learn it over time, and it comes more naturally to some, less to others.

I don't want bad writers (who are otherwise intelligent and intellectually engaged, which describes almost everybody who posts on LW) to learn the lesson "stay away from LW". I want them to receive encouragement (mostly in forms other than karma, e.g. encouraging comments, or inclusion in the community, etc.), leading them to be more motivated to figure out the norms of LW and the art of writing, and try again, with new learning and experience behind them.

I think the threshold of 0 is largely arbitrary

It's not all that arbitrary. Besides the fact that it's one of the simplest numbers, which makes for an easy to remember / communicate heuristic (a great reason that isn't arbitrary), I actually think it's quite defensible as a threshold. If I write a post that has a +6 starting karma, and I see it drop down to 1 or 2 (or, yeah, -1), my thought is "that kinda sucked, but whatever, I'll learn from my mistake and do better next time".

But if I see it drop down to, say, -5 or -6, my thought starts to become "why am I even posting on this stupid website that's so full of anti-social jerks?". And then I have to talk myself down from deleting my account and removing LW and the associated community from my life.

(Not that I think LW is actually so full of jerks. There's a lot of lovable people here who talk about interesting things, and I believe in LW's raison d'etre, which is why I keep forcing myself to come back)

I would like to make a meta-comment, not directly related to this post.

When I came upon this post, it had a negative karma score. I don't think it's good form to have posts receiving negative net karma (except in extreme cases), so I upvoted to provide this with a positive net karma.

It is unpleasant for an author when they receive a negative karma score on a post which they spent time and effort to make (even when that effort was relatively small), much more so than receiving no karma beyond the starting score. This makes the author less likely to post again in the future, which prevents communication of ideas, and keeps the author from getting better at writing. In particular this creates a risk of LessWrong becoming more like a bubble chamber (which I don't think is desirable), and makes the community less likely to hear valuable ideas that go against the grain of the local culture.

A writer who is encouraged to write more will become more clear in their communication, as well as in their thoughts. And they will also get more used to the particular expectations of the culture of LessWrong- norms that have good reason to exist, but which also go against some people's intuitions or what has worked well for them in other, more "normie" contexts.

Karma serves as a valuable signal to authors about the extent to which they are doing a good job of writing clearly about interesting topics in a way that provides value to members of the community, but the range of positive integers provides enough signal. There isn't much lost in excluding the negative range (except in extreme cases).

Let's be nice to people who are still figuring writing out, I encourage you to refrain from downvoting them into negative karma.

That statement of fact is indeed true. Would you mind saying more about your thoughts regarding it? There seems to be an unstated implication that this is bad. There is a part of me that agrees with that implication, but there are also parts of me that want to say "so what? that's irrelevant". (I feel ⌞explaining what the second set of shards is pointing to, would take more time and energy to write up than I am prepared to take right now⌝)

On the other side, there's the cost of ~10min of boredom, for every passenger, on every flight. Instead of playing games, watching movies, or reading, people would mostly be talking, looking out the window, or staring off into space.

Tangent: I'm not completely sure that this is actually a cost and not an unintended benefit

Sharing my impression of the comic:

Insofar as it supports sides, I'd say the first part of the meme is criticism of Eliezer

The comic does not parse (to my eyes and probably most people's) as the author intending to criticize Eliezer at any point

Insofar as it supports sides, I'd say [...] the last part is criticism of those who reject His message

Only in the most strawman way. It basically feels equivalent to me to "They disagree with the guy I like, therefore they're dumb / unsympathetic". There's basically no meat on the bones of the criticism

This subjectively seems to me to be the case.

The board's statement doesn't mention them having made such a request to Altman which was denied, that's a strong signal against things having played out that way.

In the case of the lawyers, this is actually not an example of non-niceness being good for society. The defense attorney who defends a guilty party, their job is not to be a jerk to the prosecutor or to the judge. It is to, as you say, provide the judge with information (including counter-arguments to the other side's arguments). While his job involves working in an opposite direction from his counterpart, it does not involve being non-nice to his counterpart (and it is indeed most pro-society if the two sides treat eachother well / nicely outside of their equal-and-opposite professional duties), and it does not involve being non-nice to the judge, whose job the attorney (as you point is) is actually assisting with. Again, society expects maximum niceness from both attorneys towards the judge outside of ⌞their professional duty to imperfectly represent the truth⌝.

Society expects niceness to be provided from each of these parties to each of the others: {the judge, the defense attorney, the prosecution attorney}

This is important news. I personally desire to be kept updated on this, and LW is a convenient (and appropriate) place to get this information. And I expect other users feel similarly.

What's different between this and e.g. the developments with Nonlinear, is that the developments here will have a big impact on how the AI field (and by one layer of indirection, the fate of the world) develops.

I am curious to hear people's opinions, for my reference:

Is epistemic rationality or instrumental rationality more important?

Do you believe epistemic rationality is a requirement for instrumental rationality?

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