No, at the very least it’s Duncan? That’s literally the text of my comment (though slightly circuitously).
I didn’t say I couldn’t find any quote, I said I couldn’t find any easily extractable quote. The relevant thread contains plenty of multi-paragraph sections that make this position of his quite clear, just nothing that happened to be easy to easily removed from context.
Edit: Ok, fine, after spending 20 more minutes on reading through random old threads, here is a pretty clear and extractable comment from Duncan (it really was also otherwise very obvious from the link I provided, but due to some of the indirect nature of the discussion was hard to quote):
It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically. Like, literally that specific essay, I consciously considered where to put it, and decided not to put it here because, at the time, there was no way to prevent you from being part of the subsequent conversation.
This sure seems like an example of a top author citing you directly as the reason for not wanting to post on LW.
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?
I’ve already explained this multiple times, but sure, I’ll explain it again:
If someone says “X has happened a bunch of times”, and you say “Examples please?”, and they say “here are examples A, B, and C”; and you look at A, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at B, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at C, and it turns out to not be X; and you say “… none of those things are X, though?”; and your intelocutor continues to insist that “X has happened a bunch of times”…
… what is the correct position for you to take, at that point?
It is, honestly, quite distressing, how many times I have had to explain this, not just in this context but in many others: if someone makes a claim, and when asked for examples of that claim provides things that turn out not to actually be examples, then not only does their claim remain totally unsupported at that point, but also, the fact that this person thought that the given things were examples of their claim, when they actually were not—the fact that they made this error—should cause you to doubt their ability to recognize what is and is not an example of their claim, in general.
Alice: White ravens exist! Bob: Yeah? For real? Where, can I see? Alice (looking around and then pointing): Right… there! That one! Bob (peering at the bird in question): But… that raven is actually black? Like, it’s definitely black and not white at all.
Now not only is Bob (once again, as he was at the start) in the position of having exactly zero examples of white ravens (Alice’s one purported example having been revealed to be not an example at all), but—and perhaps even more importantly!—Bob has reason to doubt not only Alice’s possession of any examples of her claim (of white ravens existing), but her very ability to correctly perceive what color any given raven is.
Now if Alice says “Well, I’ve seen a lot of white ravens, though”, Bob might quite reasonably reply: “Have you, though? Really? Because you just said that that raven was white, and it is definitely, totally black.” What’s more, not only Bob but also Alice herself ought rightly to significantly downgrade her confidence in her belief in white ravens (by a degree commensurate with how big a role her own supposed observations of white ravens have played in forming that belief).
(The other possibility, of course, is that the claimant was simply lying, in which case you should integrate that into your assessment of them.)
What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that?
I do not keep in my head the specifics of every comment written in every conversation on LessWrong that involves me. I recalled the conversation in vague terms, but given @habryka’s track record on this subject, I expected that there was a good chance that he was misrepresenting what Duncan had said, in the same way that he misrepresented what several other authors had said. That turned out not to have been the case, of course, but the expectation was valid, given the information available at that time.
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
I mean, I literally already provided a quote quite close to what you desire for DirectedEvolution (is his wording as perfectly of an exact match as Duncan’s, no, but I think it is close enough to count). To remind you, the quote is:
Since we’re talking about it, I have also told the mods that Said is one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience.
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
I really haven’t tried to produce many quotes, because those quotes have little bearing on my overall bottom-line on this situation. I have enough inside-view model of this situation to cause me to make the same decision even if no top author had complained about you, and you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
But sure, here is another one, if you really want to go out on a limb and predict that no such quotes exist (this time from Lukas Gloor who I do consider a top author):[1]
Said’s way of asking questions, and the uncharitable assumptions he sometimes makes, is one of the most off-putting things I associate with LW. I don’t find it okay myself, but it seems like the sort of thing that’s hard to pin down with legible rules.
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out:
Here’s a bit of metadata on this: I can recall offhand 7 complaints from users with 2000+ karma who aren’t on the mod team (most of whom had significantly more than 2000 karma, and all of them had some highly upvoted comments and/or posts that are upvoted in the annual review). One of them cites you as being the reason they left LessWrong a few years ago, and ~3-4 others cite you as being a central instance of a pattern that means they participate less on LessWrong, or can’t have particularly important types of conversations here.
I also think most of the mod team (at least 4 of them? maybe more) of them have had such complaints (as users, rather than as moderators)
I think there’s probably at least 5 more people who complained about you by name who I don’t think have particularly legible credibility beyond “being some LessWrong users.”
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
(I should have disengaged earlier, but since you seem to insist the history of complaints about you is made up, I figured I would comment with some more things that aren’t private communication and I can easily share)
Update May 2024: It’s been more than a year since the above comment and in that year, I remember I liked a couple of comments by Said and I don’t remember any particular ones that I thought exhibited the above pattern.
This also roughly aligns with the period where I thought Said was behaving somewhat better (until it got worse again in the past few months, precipitating this ban). Maybe Lukas agrees, or not. The comment itself nevertheless seems clear.
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
Indeed, we certainly can argue about that. If he’s a “top author” but Gordon isn’t (as you have said), then your concept of “top author” is incoherent.
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false. Your own words, from the OP:
Why spend so much time engaging with a single commenter? Well, the answer is that I do think the specific way Said has been commenting on the site had a non-trivial chance of basically just killing the site, in the sense of good conversation and intellectual progress basically ceasing, if not pushed back on and the collateral damage limited by moderator action.
Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here, and also I personally (and the LessWrong team more broadly) would have had little interest in further investing in LessWrong if the kind of the kind of culture that Said brings had taken hold here.
So the stakes have been high
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
… surely you jest? I have nothing at all against the guy, but he’s written five posts, ever, in 13 years of being a LessWrong member. How does he qualify as a “top author”, but not Gordon?
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out
You know perfectly well how little this sort of thing is worth. Yes, it’s correlated evidence. And it’s another report of more alleged private communications. Any way to verify them? Nope. Any way to check whether some or most or all of them are being mis-remembered, mis-characterized, mis-summarized, etc.? Nope.
Of course Ray would not have to be “totally making things up”, just like you have not been “totally making things up”—that is obviously a strawman! You weren’t “totally making up” the examples of Jacob Falkovich, Scott Alexander, etc.—your reporting of the relevant facts was just severely skewed, filtered, etc. Why the same cannot be true for Ray, I really can’t see.
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
Whether I “want another piece of evidence” is immaterial to the question, which is whether the already-claimed evidence in fact exists and in fact is as described. Introducing more pieces of other evidence has no bearing on that.
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
Elizabeth is (was? I’m not sure where to even find the most up to date version of this info, actually) a LessWrong moderator. This obviously disqualifies her opinion about this from consideration.
Oh? But then I must be even more of a “top author”, yes? (I also have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”, after all; in approximately as many years of being an LW member, I’ve accumulated about five times as much karma as Lukas has!)
And what of Gordon, of whom @habryka has said that he is not a “top author”—but he, too, seems to have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”?
This standard of who is and is not a “top author” seems awfully fluid, I must say…
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forths with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
I think few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong as Said. More than 50% of the time when I would ask posters, commenters and lurkers about their models of LessWrong culture, they’d say some version of either:
Of all the places on the internet, LessWrong is a place that really forces you to get your arguments together. It’s very much a no-bullshit culture, and I think this is one of the things that makes it one of the most valuable forums on the internet.
Or
Man, posting on LessWrong seems really unrewarding. You show up, you put a ton of effort into a post, and at the end the comment section will tear apart some random thing that isn’t load bearing for your argument, isn’t something you consider particularly important, and whose discussion doesn’t illuminate what you are trying to communicate, all the while implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas.
And frequently when I dig into how they formed these impressions, a comment by Said would be at least heavily involved in that.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote
and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to lie write in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: onetwothree.)
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.
No, at the very least it’s Duncan? That’s literally the text of my comment (though slightly circuitously).
I didn’t say I couldn’t find any quote, I said I couldn’t find any easily extractable quote. The relevant thread contains plenty of multi-paragraph sections that make this position of his quite clear, just nothing that happened to be easy to easily removed from context.
Edit: Ok, fine, after spending 20 more minutes on reading through random old threads, here is a pretty clear and extractable comment from Duncan (it really was also otherwise very obvious from the link I provided, but due to some of the indirect nature of the discussion was hard to quote):
This sure seems like an example of a top author citing you directly as the reason for not wanting to post on LW.
Yep, that is definitely one example, so the count now stands at one example.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?
I’ve already explained this multiple times, but sure, I’ll explain it again:
If someone says “X has happened a bunch of times”, and you say “Examples please?”, and they say “here are examples A, B, and C”; and you look at A, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at B, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at C, and it turns out to not be X; and you say “… none of those things are X, though?”; and your intelocutor continues to insist that “X has happened a bunch of times”…
… what is the correct position for you to take, at that point?
It is, honestly, quite distressing, how many times I have had to explain this, not just in this context but in many others: if someone makes a claim, and when asked for examples of that claim provides things that turn out not to actually be examples, then not only does their claim remain totally unsupported at that point, but also, the fact that this person thought that the given things were examples of their claim, when they actually were not—the fact that they made this error—should cause you to doubt their ability to recognize what is and is not an example of their claim, in general.
As I have written before:
(The other possibility, of course, is that the claimant was simply lying, in which case you should integrate that into your assessment of them.)
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
I do not keep in my head the specifics of every comment written in every conversation on LessWrong that involves me. I recalled the conversation in vague terms, but given @habryka’s track record on this subject, I expected that there was a good chance that he was misrepresenting what Duncan had said, in the same way that he misrepresented what several other authors had said. That turned out not to have been the case, of course, but the expectation was valid, given the information available at that time.
I mean, I literally already provided a quote quite close to what you desire for DirectedEvolution (is his wording as perfectly of an exact match as Duncan’s, no, but I think it is close enough to count). To remind you, the quote is:
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
I really haven’t tried to produce many quotes, because those quotes have little bearing on my overall bottom-line on this situation. I have enough inside-view model of this situation to cause me to make the same decision even if no top author had complained about you, and you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
But sure, here is another one, if you really want to go out on a limb and predict that no such quotes exist (this time from Lukas Gloor who I do consider a top author):[1]
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out:
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
Elizabeth writes in a deletion reason for one of your comments:
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
(I should have disengaged earlier, but since you seem to insist the history of complaints about you is made up, I figured I would comment with some more things that aren’t private communication and I can easily share)
Note that he importantly also says:
This also roughly aligns with the period where I thought Said was behaving somewhat better (until it got worse again in the past few months, precipitating this ban). Maybe Lukas agrees, or not. The comment itself nevertheless seems clear.
Indeed, we certainly can argue about that. If he’s a “top author” but Gordon isn’t (as you have said), then your concept of “top author” is incoherent.
Absolutely, hilariously false. Your own words, from the OP:
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
… surely you jest? I have nothing at all against the guy, but he’s written five posts, ever, in 13 years of being a LessWrong member. How does he qualify as a “top author”, but not Gordon?
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
You know perfectly well how little this sort of thing is worth. Yes, it’s correlated evidence. And it’s another report of more alleged private communications. Any way to verify them? Nope. Any way to check whether some or most or all of them are being mis-remembered, mis-characterized, mis-summarized, etc.? Nope.
Of course Ray would not have to be “totally making things up”, just like you have not been “totally making things up”—that is obviously a strawman! You weren’t “totally making up” the examples of Jacob Falkovich, Scott Alexander, etc.—your reporting of the relevant facts was just severely skewed, filtered, etc. Why the same cannot be true for Ray, I really can’t see.
Whether I “want another piece of evidence” is immaterial to the question, which is whether the already-claimed evidence in fact exists and in fact is as described. Introducing more pieces of other evidence has no bearing on that.
Elizabeth is (was? I’m not sure where to even find the most up to date version of this info, actually) a LessWrong moderator. This obviously disqualifies her opinion about this from consideration.
Just want to note he has many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments, and I value good commenters highly as well as good posters.
Oh? But then I must be even more of a “top author”, yes? (I also have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”, after all; in approximately as many years of being an LW member, I’ve accumulated about five times as much karma as Lukas has!)
And what of Gordon, of whom @habryka has said that he is not a “top author”—but he, too, seems to have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”?
This standard of who is and is not a “top author” seems awfully fluid, I must say…
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
Then why did you cite Lukas’s comment count and karma value?
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
No, I really don’t think that there is.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
I confirm that my understanding of top author was close to what Said describes here.
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
Uh… yeah, of course the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong.
Why would you think that I “seem unable to conceive” of this? This is really a very strange reply.
The OP uses the complaints as an illustration of the supposed problem, and as evidence for said supposed problem.
If the alleged evidence is poor, then the claim that the supposed problem exists is correspondingly undermined.
Is this not obvious?
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
This, as I have already pointed out, is not true.
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
And praise! It was a setup and explanation symmetric in complaint and praise!
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to
liewrite in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: one two three.)So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
And quite surprising, too, at least to me. I really would not have expected it. Perhaps this simply speaks ill of my ability to judge character.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.