It’s been many years since I’ve been active on LW, but while I was, Said was the source of a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site. Many other commenters leveraged serious criticisms of my writing, but only Said consistently ruined my day while doing so.
This would seem to be a highly dubious claim, at best.
I have looked through the entirety of @alkjash’s posting/commenting history and used the site search feature, and have found only the following interactions involving the two of us:
I am surprised there are so few—perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn’t directly participate in.
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).
It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.
I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you—this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.
I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy.
Some of them look positively cooperative to me, and do not look like Said thought ill of you in any way, nor that it would look bad if you replied or didn’t reply to those messages.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
That is at least how I feel when I try to simulate why I’d feel the way you claim to have felt. And I empathize with that feeling.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don’t think it’s really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them.
One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things.
1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that’s a little too cold for me.
In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror.
2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be hostile to the way I think out loud. I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate, and this mode of banter is absolutely not compatible with serious discussions of people’s long-term reputations with consequences on the level of multi-year banning. Let nobody ever give me moderator privileges beyond my personal blog. I am not using this frame at all to justify said banning. I am only using it to explain why I personally prefer it.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate
Well I would say the whole reason LW mods are banning Said is that we do, in fact, want LW to operate this way. (Or, directionally similarly to this). I do also want wrong ideas to get noticed and discarded, and I do want “good taste in generating ideas” (there are people who aren’t skilled enough at casual idea generation for me to feel excited about them generating such conversation on LW). But I think it’s an essential part of any real generative intellectual tradition.
I really appreciate your introspection on this, but suggest that status consciousness is probably still a large part of what’s going on, because if you weren’t worried about looking bad in front of an audience (i.e., looking like you didn’t have an answer to one of Said’s questions/objections), you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his “entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency”.
you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his “entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency”.
I wanna flag, your use of the word “simply” here is… like, idk, false.
I do think it’s good for people to learn the skill of not caring what other people think and being able to think out loud even when someone is being annoying. But, this is a pretty difficult skill for lots of people. I think it’s pretty common for people who are attempting to learn it to instead end up contorting their original thought process around what the anticipated social punishment.
I think it’s a coherent position to want LessWrong “price of entry” to be gaining that skill. I don’t think it’s a reasonable position to call it “simply...”. It’s asking for like 10-200 hours of pretty scary, painful work.
The way I feel about this reply is “I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer”? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at “this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying.”
Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.
sure, the prestige challenge seems to be relevant, but I feel like the problem is that said also makes dominance threats and those suck. (I feel like there’s something going on where a big enough prestige challenge spills into dominance, or something? stated in the spirit of exploratory ramblings that may or may not have an insight somewhere downstream of them)
edit: actually I don’t want to deal with this right now, bye. I resisted my urge to delete this comment’s contents
I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
Your model of my view bears very little resemblance to my actual view.
If you found the discussion fruitful in the end, why is that not the bottom line? (Especially if this fruitfulness involved “reasonable conclusions” being reached?)
(Here I am talking about “the bottom line” only with respect to your interaction with me directly, ignoring any effects like the benefit of a comment exchange to other commenters or to readers, etc.)
You say that you “had the feeling that to interact with [me] at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”. But as we can see from the linked examples, there generally was not, in fact, any “vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”.[1] So it would seem that the “feeling” you had was false-to-fact. Do you agree with this evaluation?
Indeed, in the exchange at the first link, the putative roles were reversed—you were questioning me about what I believe, etc. Of course, I have no objection to this! But it hardly serves as an example of me drawing anyone into any vortices of quibbling…
Commenter @alkjash writes:
This would seem to be a highly dubious claim, at best.
I have looked through the entirety of @alkjash’s posting/commenting history and used the site search feature, and have found only the following interactions involving the two of us:
Discussion of a “multiple agent” model, in comments on post “Internal Double Crux”
Obviously nothing day-ruining or even unpleasant here.
Brief discussion of input device effectiveness, in comments on post “Design 2”
Ditto.
A couple of interactions in comments on post “New moderation tools and moderation guidelines” (concerning UX of records/traces of moderation actions)
Not really “criticism of writing”, but rather a discussion of costs/benefits of certain aspects of site design.
Comment (just one; no discussion) on dialogue “Originality vs. Correctness”
Technically “criticism”, I guess, but more like “agreeing with part of what was said, disagreeing with another part”. Nothing unpleasant here either.
These four cases seem to be the totality of all my interactions with @alkjash, throughout the entirety of my tenure here on Less Wrong.
So where are these “unpleasant interactions” that “ruined [your] day”…?
I am surprised there are so few—perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn’t directly participate in.
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).
It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.
I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you—this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.
I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].
Some of them look positively cooperative to me, and do not look like Said thought ill of you in any way, nor that it would look bad if you replied or didn’t reply to those messages.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
That is at least how I feel when I try to simulate why I’d feel the way you claim to have felt. And I empathize with that feeling.
This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don’t think it’s really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them.
One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things.
1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that’s a little too cold for me.
In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror.
2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be hostile to the way I think out loud. I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate, and this mode of banter is absolutely not compatible with serious discussions of people’s long-term reputations with consequences on the level of multi-year banning. Let nobody ever give me moderator privileges beyond my personal blog. I am not using this frame at all to justify said banning. I am only using it to explain why I personally prefer it.
Well I would say the whole reason LW mods are banning Said is that we do, in fact, want LW to operate this way. (Or, directionally similarly to this). I do also want wrong ideas to get noticed and discarded, and I do want “good taste in generating ideas” (there are people who aren’t skilled enough at casual idea generation for me to feel excited about them generating such conversation on LW). But I think it’s an essential part of any real generative intellectual tradition.
I really appreciate your introspection on this, but suggest that status consciousness is probably still a large part of what’s going on, because if you weren’t worried about looking bad in front of an audience (i.e., looking like you didn’t have an answer to one of Said’s questions/objections), you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his “entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency”.
I wanna flag, your use of the word “simply” here is… like, idk, false.
I do think it’s good for people to learn the skill of not caring what other people think and being able to think out loud even when someone is being annoying. But, this is a pretty difficult skill for lots of people. I think it’s pretty common for people who are attempting to learn it to instead end up contorting their original thought process around what the anticipated social punishment.
I think it’s a coherent position to want LessWrong “price of entry” to be gaining that skill. I don’t think it’s a reasonable position to call it “simply...”. It’s asking for like 10-200 hours of pretty scary, painful work.
The way I feel about this reply is “I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer”? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at “this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying.”
Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.
sure, the prestige challenge seems to be relevant, but I feel like the problem is that said also makes dominance threats and those suck. (I feel like there’s something going on where a big enough prestige challenge spills into dominance, or something? stated in the spirit of exploratory ramblings that may or may not have an insight somewhere downstream of them)
edit: actually I don’t want to deal with this right now, bye. I resisted my urge to delete this comment’s contents
What in the world is this about…?
Your model of my view bears very little resemblance to my actual view.
I have two questions:
If you found the discussion fruitful in the end, why is that not the bottom line? (Especially if this fruitfulness involved “reasonable conclusions” being reached?)
(Here I am talking about “the bottom line” only with respect to your interaction with me directly, ignoring any effects like the benefit of a comment exchange to other commenters or to readers, etc.)
You say that you “had the feeling that to interact with [me] at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”. But as we can see from the linked examples, there generally was not, in fact, any “vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”.[1] So it would seem that the “feeling” you had was false-to-fact. Do you agree with this evaluation?
Indeed, in the exchange at the first link, the putative roles were reversed—you were questioning me about what I believe, etc. Of course, I have no objection to this! But it hardly serves as an example of me drawing anyone into any vortices of quibbling…
This is another comment where I do not understand the downvoting.