# Should LW have an official list of norms?

*To get this written and shared quickly, I haven't polished it much and the English/explanation is a little rough. Seemed like the right tradeoff though.*

Recently, a few users have written their sense of norms for rationalist discourse, i.e. [Basics of Rationalist Discourse](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1) and [Elements of Rationalist Discourse](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svuBpoSduzhYjFPrA/elements-of-rationalist-discourse). There've been a few [calls to adopt something like these](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kyDsgQGHoLkXz6vKL/lw-team-is-adjusting-moderation-policy?commentId=esFNcumtfrWzbfp6h) as site norms for LessWrong.

Doing so seems like it'd provide at least the following benefits:

*   It's a great onboarding tool for new users to help them understand the site's expectations and what sets it apart from other forums
*   It provided a recognized standard that both moderators and other users can point to and uphold, e.g. by pointing out instances where someone is failing to live up to one of the norms
*   Having it be official is a good reminder to all site users to live up to the best kind of discussion[^x8z0sol4d7g]

My current feeling is creating some lists as an onboarding tool seems good, but doing anything like declaring a list of Site Norms is fraught.

The True Norm of LessWrong is that with each motion, you should aim towards truth. I think it's actually worth quoting the entire [12th virtue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7ZqGiPHTpiDMwqMN2/twelve-virtues-of-rationality) here (emphasis added).

> Before these eleven virtues is a virtue which is nameless.
> 
> Miyamoto Musashi wrote, in *The Book of Five Rings*:
> 
> > The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.
> 
> Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
> 
> If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.
> 
> How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” **By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception.** Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think, “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
> 
> Do not ask whether it is “the Way” to do this or that. Ask whether the sky is blue or green. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it. You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory.” But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.
> 
> If for many years you practice the techniques and submit yourself to strict constraints, it may be that you will glimpse the center. **Then you will see how all techniques are one technique, and you will move correctly without feeling constrained.** Musashi wrote: “When you appreciate the power of nature, knowing the rhythm of any situation, you will be able to hit the enemy naturally and strike naturally. All this is the Way of the Void.”

If we were to declare site norms, I'd want to do in a way that made it very clear to new users and everyone else that our true underlying commitment was to truth and good decisions, not a particular list of good things to do that we'd written up.

I'd also want to have a process that caused the list to get reviewed periodically and updated as arguments and evidence came in. Though that might be challenging, and I'd worry about it getting stuck in place because the norms people operate on are the ones they think other people agree with it, and it's hard to get common knowledge after the first announcement.

Supposing though that it's clear the list is just a surface level manifestation of the underlying goal, and that you also generate a really good list. I still think there's some further way things go wrong:

I think if there's a list of Site Norms and we tell users that these are the criteria their contributions are judged on, we'll get some "Goodharting" rather than the true underlying motion towards truth. Maybe this is better than no concrete instruction? I wouldn't want to do it wrong.

Relatedly, if the Site Norms get invoked in moderation, I'd worry about people getting too fixated on that, start rules-lawyering, etc. One user accuses another of not following X, Y, Z norms, moderators have to weigh in and figure out if it that's true, etc, observers get roped into adjudication of "was that really a strawman?" or whatever.

And truth maximization probably doesn't look like norm-violation-minimization. Optimizing hard for a list of Site Norms will likely just get in the way of productive [Babble](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i42Dfoh4HtsCAfXxL/babble) and focusing on cutting the enemy. Sometimes people who say new, interesting stuff break the "rules" and say some dumb stuff too. In other words, users should be backchaining from whether discussion seems to be making progress on figuring stuff out, not on compliance. If new users show up and mods and other users start pointing to the list of norms, I think that's what new users (and older users) will start to conform to, and lose sight of what matters.

Another thought here is that while a list of written site norms would have the nice property of you can get clearer common knowledge and explicit buy-in for them, they have the disadvantage of being static and simplified/compressed relative to more organic norm enforcement.

Right now, there's a set of implicit norms enforced by the active LessWrong userbase. Each user has their own sense of what's good and bad pointed at approximately the same values, with a large degree of overlap (though not perfectly), and when you post or comment, the people who view it will respond based on their sense of it. Individuals personal sense of what's good (which hopefully is defined as approximately "conducive to truth") is probably a more complicated nuanced function than a written list of norms would be. So when multiple members of the LessWrong population view your content and judge it by their own lights, it get assessed by something more nuanced and dynamic (in that users (and the site as whole) can develop their sense of what's good over time[^yd522p0vxlr]).

If we get too anchored on a list of explicit site norms, the site's judgment gets channeled via this more compressed thing, and also via the LessWrong team's judgment in finalizing it, and their judgment yet again in enforcing it/deciding on interpretation. This seems good if I think the LessWrong team's judgment is better than the broader population in aggregate, but I currently don't think that's true, and am wary of policing the site with much more reliance on our judgment than we currently do.

Currently we do take a lot of moderation action, but almost always that's on users who've been downvoted a bunch (thus indicating the judgment on the LessWrong population) or users who we're quite confident would get downvoted if we let them post. There's not zero of our judgment in there, but signals from other people are big part of it.

Those are some arguments and considerations. I think it'd be good to have some kind of list if it's properly disclaimed. "List of things commonly considered good for truthseeking discourse" that's more of an onboarding tool than something people get called out for violating. If we can pull that off. Not sure. My top goal here is to get feedback from others on thinking about this.  
  
Feedback appreciated.

[^x8z0sol4d7g]: It was useful for me for Duncan to call out "Maintain at least hypotheses consistent with the available information", as I think historically I've failed to do that. 

[^yd522p0vxlr]: I suppose dynamic and changing is good if you think people's judgment gets better over time, and something static is better if you're worried about drift.