I really wish you’d keep posting your work on LessWrong. It’s much harder to figure out what’s worth reading when good work on rationalism is scattered across multiple blogs. And having an active community to discuss important posts really adds to their use. Sure, there will be a few gadflies, but just not responding to trollish comments works just fine in most cases.
This is great, and several of your other pieces I’ve seen are similarly insightful and well communicated, on important topics. But I’m not likely to regularly check your blog. We’re busy, and LessWrong has enough good rationalist content to fill the available time. I really wish your excellent content would remain part of this community.
I do not like this comment. The rest of my response below will be somewhat triggered.
EDIT: to be clear, I did not vote in any way on the above comment because it seems bad to do so from a state of triggeredness.
“Um,” Harry said. “You… don’t think very much of Dumbledore, I take it?”
“I thought...” said the old witch. “Well. Albus Dumbledore was a better wizard than I, a better person than I, in more ways than I can easily count. But the man had his faults.”
“Because, um. I mean. Dumbledore knew everything you just said. About my being young and how the Line works. You’re acting like you think Dumbledore was unaware of those facts, or just ignoring them, when he made his decision. It’s true that sometimes stupid people, like me, make decisions that crazy. But not Dumbledore. He was not mad.”
The framing of this comment sort of presupposes that I either don’t know about, or am inaccurately weighting:
The value of having work concentrated in one findable place
The value of having an active community to discuss important posts
...and dismissively implies that the problem is just “a few gadflies” and that I should “just not respond to trollish comments” and that’ll work fine and solve the problem.
It not only fails to pass my ITT, it doesn’t even seem to think there is an ITT that needs to be passed. The comment sees me doing something that seems drastic and bad, and rather than even considering “huh, maybe it’s worse than I thought/worse than I can see, from my perspective?” just leaps straight to brushing past and minimizing my concerns and implying that I’m making a silly mistake.
I am not.
I’m willing to concede that I might be, like, 15% catastrophizing (because it’s hard to assess such things accurately, from the inside), but I am not off by a factor of two. LessWrong is actually not a safe place for me.
I have tried extremely hard to make it work, multiple times, in multiple epochs of the site’s existence. I wrote an essay every day for thirty days during the 2.0 revival so there would always be fresh content for newcomers. I put out the entire CFAR handbook after rewriting it twice. I have done everything I could to nudge discourse and norms in a positive direction, even as other users actively and explicitly work to undermine them.
But this gets me, basically, nothing. LessWrong will frequently host overt and explicit libel of me, and it will be highly upvoted, and mods will do nothing for days on end. People will drag me through the mud and call for my suicide, and mods will do nothing. Highly upvoted unanswered and unaddressed stuff leaks from LessWrong out onto the broader internet, and it does substantial damage to my professional and personal relationships.
I beg for other people to step in, and they don’t. When Said was violating his own agreements with the LessWrong team, and doing more of the same bullshit he’d previously been told to stop, the mods did nothing, and did nothing, and did nothing, and finally I tried to push back myself, and they got equally angry with me. LessWrong is a place where victims get punished as much as, if not more than, their tormenters, when their patience finally breaks.
Most recently, I offered mild pushback, not even against the bullying I was receiving, but just against the plausibility of the bully’s claim that they could have failed to know how their words would be interpreted, and for that extremely mild pushback, a mod (who had not felt called to lift a finger in my defense against the bully) privately sent me over 500 words saying how even though I had complied with all their requests they were still grumpy at me for defending myself.
In the same week, when I made a comment that explicitly acknowledged itself as being posted in a fit of despair, another mod (who had also never been bothered to lift a finger in my defense) wrote 1100 words being mad at me and my complaint.
In the same week, a mod privately stated that all of my contributions to this site over the past nine years barely-if-at-all broke even. That everything I’ve contributed is basically canceled out by the headache of dealing with me. None of the other mods present in that conversation disagreed. LessWrong is explicitly ungrateful for any of the work I’ve put forward on the site’s behalf over the years.
(That hurt. I wept.)
So no: I don’t think I’m unaware of the costs to LW and its readership of me-not-being-here, and I don’t think I’m doing this lightly or cavalierly, and I don’t think that it’s just a few trollish comments that you should just ignore. All of that sounds, to me, like “let them eat cake.”
I’ve tried desperately, for years, to fix this and find a stable and sustainable equilibrium. Hearing, on my way out the door, when I’m exhausted beyond all measure and feeling deeply alienated and betrayed, “man, you should really consider sticking around” is upsetting.
If LessWrongers want me to stick around, they need to make that clear to the team, which has its own sense of the tradeoffs and has decided to balance those tradeoffs in a way that isn’t compatible with people like me being here.
Hearing, on my way out the door, when I’m exhausted beyond all measure and feeling deeply alienated and betrayed, “man, you should really consider sticking around” is upsetting.
This is not how I read Seth Herd’s comment; I read him as saying “aw, I’ll miss you, but not enough to follow you to Substack.” This is simultaneously support for you staying on LW and for the mods to reach an accommodation with you, intended as information for you to do what you will with it.
I think the rest of this—being upset about what you think is the frame of that comment—feels like it’s the conflict in miniature? I’m not sure I have much helpful to say, there.
I hadn’t followed all of the drama. I’m sorry to minimize it. My impression is that LessWrong is among the very best places on the internet, but your interactions with the mods makes it clearly not the best place for you.
I’m sorry the mods felt your contributions were only break-even. I’m surprised, and I disagree.
I do think you’re making a tactical error in engaging that deeply with critics. That doesn’t make the mess your fault.
I was just saying I wish you’d stick around. But not if it’s going to be at great personal cost to you.
Interpersonal conflict sucks.
If you don’t want to be involved in LW comment threads, how do you feel about others cross-posting your writings here? If you prefer we not, I certainly won’t.
I haven’t made up my mind about whether to ask that people not cross-post. Until such time as I explicitly do (it would be a visible and hard-to-miss request, such as an author’s note in several consecutive essays), please consider cross-posting fine.
Tagging @Ben Pace , @habryka , @Vaniver , @Raemon. Not as a request for input (I kind of don’t actually want any; I have little room left for being told how wrong and bad I am) but more because it feels like not-tagging is a little bit talking behind backs, or something. They can speak to their own perspective as they choose, or not, as they choose. I’m going to try to turn my attention away from this thread.
Sorry if I missed your preference stated somewhere, but what would be your position on linking some of your new articles from Less Wrong in the future?
I think your posts have been among the very best I have seen on LessWrong or elsewhere. Thank you for your contribution. I understand, dimly from the position of an outsider but still, I understand your decision, and am looking forward to reading your posts on your substack.
I really wish you’d keep posting your work on LessWrong. It’s much harder to figure out what’s worth reading when good work on rationalism is scattered across multiple blogs. And having an active community to discuss important posts really adds to their use. Sure, there will be a few gadflies, but just not responding to trollish comments works just fine in most cases.
This is great, and several of your other pieces I’ve seen are similarly insightful and well communicated, on important topics. But I’m not likely to regularly check your blog. We’re busy, and LessWrong has enough good rationalist content to fill the available time. I really wish your excellent content would remain part of this community.
I do not like this comment. The rest of my response below will be somewhat triggered.
EDIT: to be clear, I did not vote in any way on the above comment because it seems bad to do so from a state of triggeredness.
The framing of this comment sort of presupposes that I either don’t know about, or am inaccurately weighting:
The value of having work concentrated in one findable place
The value of having an active community to discuss important posts
...and dismissively implies that the problem is just “a few gadflies” and that I should “just not respond to trollish comments” and that’ll work fine and solve the problem.
It not only fails to pass my ITT, it doesn’t even seem to think there is an ITT that needs to be passed. The comment sees me doing something that seems drastic and bad, and rather than even considering “huh, maybe it’s worse than I thought/worse than I can see, from my perspective?” just leaps straight to brushing past and minimizing my concerns and implying that I’m making a silly mistake.
I am not.
I’m willing to concede that I might be, like, 15% catastrophizing (because it’s hard to assess such things accurately, from the inside), but I am not off by a factor of two. LessWrong is actually not a safe place for me.
I have tried extremely hard to make it work, multiple times, in multiple epochs of the site’s existence. I wrote an essay every day for thirty days during the 2.0 revival so there would always be fresh content for newcomers. I put out the entire CFAR handbook after rewriting it twice. I have done everything I could to nudge discourse and norms in a positive direction, even as other users actively and explicitly work to undermine them.
But this gets me, basically, nothing. LessWrong will frequently host overt and explicit libel of me, and it will be highly upvoted, and mods will do nothing for days on end. People will drag me through the mud and call for my suicide, and mods will do nothing. Highly upvoted unanswered and unaddressed stuff leaks from LessWrong out onto the broader internet, and it does substantial damage to my professional and personal relationships.
I beg for other people to step in, and they don’t. When Said was violating his own agreements with the LessWrong team, and doing more of the same bullshit he’d previously been told to stop, the mods did nothing, and did nothing, and did nothing, and finally I tried to push back myself, and they got equally angry with me. LessWrong is a place where victims get punished as much as, if not more than, their tormenters, when their patience finally breaks.
Most recently, I offered mild pushback, not even against the bullying I was receiving, but just against the plausibility of the bully’s claim that they could have failed to know how their words would be interpreted, and for that extremely mild pushback, a mod (who had not felt called to lift a finger in my defense against the bully) privately sent me over 500 words saying how even though I had complied with all their requests they were still grumpy at me for defending myself.
In the same week, when I made a comment that explicitly acknowledged itself as being posted in a fit of despair, another mod (who had also never been bothered to lift a finger in my defense) wrote 1100 words being mad at me and my complaint.
In the same week, a mod privately stated that all of my contributions to this site over the past nine years barely-if-at-all broke even. That everything I’ve contributed is basically canceled out by the headache of dealing with me. None of the other mods present in that conversation disagreed. LessWrong is explicitly ungrateful for any of the work I’ve put forward on the site’s behalf over the years.
(That hurt. I wept.)
So no: I don’t think I’m unaware of the costs to LW and its readership of me-not-being-here, and I don’t think I’m doing this lightly or cavalierly, and I don’t think that it’s just a few trollish comments that you should just ignore. All of that sounds, to me, like “let them eat cake.”
I’ve tried desperately, for years, to fix this and find a stable and sustainable equilibrium. Hearing, on my way out the door, when I’m exhausted beyond all measure and feeling deeply alienated and betrayed, “man, you should really consider sticking around” is upsetting.
If LessWrongers want me to stick around, they need to make that clear to the team, which has its own sense of the tradeoffs and has decided to balance those tradeoffs in a way that isn’t compatible with people like me being here.
This is not how I read Seth Herd’s comment; I read him as saying “aw, I’ll miss you, but not enough to follow you to Substack.” This is simultaneously support for you staying on LW and for the mods to reach an accommodation with you, intended as information for you to do what you will with it.
I think the rest of this—being upset about what you think is the frame of that comment—feels like it’s the conflict in miniature? I’m not sure I have much helpful to say, there.
I hadn’t followed all of the drama. I’m sorry to minimize it. My impression is that LessWrong is among the very best places on the internet, but your interactions with the mods makes it clearly not the best place for you.
I’m sorry the mods felt your contributions were only break-even. I’m surprised, and I disagree.
I do think you’re making a tactical error in engaging that deeply with critics. That doesn’t make the mess your fault.
I was just saying I wish you’d stick around. But not if it’s going to be at great personal cost to you.
Interpersonal conflict sucks.
If you don’t want to be involved in LW comment threads, how do you feel about others cross-posting your writings here? If you prefer we not, I certainly won’t.
I haven’t made up my mind about whether to ask that people not cross-post. Until such time as I explicitly do (it would be a visible and hard-to-miss request, such as an author’s note in several consecutive essays), please consider cross-posting fine.
Tagging @Ben Pace , @habryka , @Vaniver , @Raemon. Not as a request for input (I kind of don’t actually want any; I have little room left for being told how wrong and bad I am) but more because it feels like not-tagging is a little bit talking behind backs, or something. They can speak to their own perspective as they choose, or not, as they choose. I’m going to try to turn my attention away from this thread.
Sorry if I missed your preference stated somewhere, but what would be your position on linking some of your new articles from Less Wrong in the future?
I’m for it.
I think your posts have been among the very best I have seen on LessWrong or elsewhere. Thank you for your contribution. I understand, dimly from the position of an outsider but still, I understand your decision, and am looking forward to reading your posts on your substack.
Just noting in case you (or others reading) are not familiar that Substack provides an RSS feed for every blog.