Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Thoughts on LessWrong norms, the Art of Discourse, and moderator mandate, published by Ruby on May 11, 2023 on LessWrong.

A couple of weeks ago I asked Should LW have an official list of norms? and I appreciate the responses there. Here I want to say what I'm currently thinking following that post, and continue having a public conversation about it.

I think saying more on this topic actually gets into a bunch of interesting questions around LessWrong's purpose, userbase, de facto norms and culture, moderation mandate, etc. Without locking in things as "Officially How It Is Forever", I'll opine on my current thinking on this topics and how I relate to them in practice. It's possible that further public discussion will shift some things here, and after more back-and-forth, it'd make sense to "ratify" some of it more.

With all that said...

LessWrong and The Art of Discourse

LessWrong was founded to be a place for perfecting the Art of Human Rationality, i.e., generally thinking in ways which more reliably result in true beliefs, etc. Similarly, I think there's a closely related "Art of Discourse": communicating in ways that more reliably result in those conversing (and reading along) having more true beliefs. Perhaps it's a sub-art of the Art of Human Rationality.

The real rules of which communication most efficiently gets you towards truth lives in reality. You can choose your norms, but whether those norms are conducive to truth isn't up to you.

The LessWrong community, over its 10-15 year existence, has assembled a number of beliefs about the Art of Discourse. Things like communicating degrees of belief quantitatively, preference for asymmetric weapons, an interest in local validity, etc. We of course don't have the complete art and may be mistaken about pieces of it, but we feel strongly about some of the pieces we believe we possess of this art.

Different people in our community have somewhat different senses of the Art of Discourse, and these even form clusters. But there's a pretty solid common core set of norms on the site, such that if someone is not conforming to them, most people would want them to change their behavior or go elsewhere.

The core point I want to make here is: The Art of [Truth-seeking] Discourse lives in the territory, and we community members attempt to discover it and practice it.

Moderators moderate according to their own understanding of The Art

A thing you could imagine doing is the community comes together, writes down its sense of how you ought to behave, and enshrines that as The Law. The moderators (judges/police) then interpret and enforce the law. I think this sometimes gets called "Rule of Law".

I think that gets you some advantages, but requires infrastructure and investment LessWrong can't realistically have, both for enshrining the initial law and then updating it over time in cases of incompleteness and ambiguity.

(edit: "Rule of Man" as an existing phrase means something crucially different from what I wanted to described. See my comment here for clarification.

Instead LessWrong operates by a "Rule of Man" ~~"hybrid Rule of Law/Man" system where the moderators apply our own understanding of the Art of Discourse to making moderation decisions about which behaviors are okay or not, and what to do with users who behave badly according to us. This has quite a few benefits: it allows us to be flexible and adaptable to new cases, it means we ask a direct question of "does this seem good or not?" rather than "did it violate the enshrined law?", and it allows us to smoothly improve the enforced policy as our understanding of the Art of Discourse improves over time.

This approach does run the risk that moderators have bad calls (or could be corrupt or biased), which is why I favor moderation being transparent where doing so isn't too c...