I think this reply is rotated from the thing that I’m interested in—describing vice instead of virtue, and describing the rule that is being broken instead of the value from rule-following. As an analogy, consider Alice complaining about ‘lateness’ and Bob asking why Alice cares; Alice could describe the benefits of punctuality in enabling better coordination. If Alice instead just says “well it’s disrespectful to be late”, this is more like justifying the rule by the fact that it is a rule than it is explaining why the rule exists.
But my guess at what you would say, in the format I’m interested in, is something like “when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions.” Instead of tussling about whether the framing unfairly favors one side, we can focus on the object level. (I was tempted to write “irrelevant controversies”, but part of the issue here is that the controversies are about relevant features. If we accept the framing that habryka knows something that you don’t, that’s relevant to which side the audience should take in a disagreement about principles.)
That said, let us replace the symbol with the substance. Habryka could have written:
For roughly 7 years, I have spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to reach agreement with Said on proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one. Today I am declaring defeat on that goal and giving him a 3 year ban.
In my culture, I think the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar. The question of whether he or you is right about propriety for LessWrong is stored in the other words in the post, in the other discussion elsewhere, and in the legitimacy structures that have made habryka an admin of LW and how they react to this decision. I think very little of it is stored in the framing of whether this is an intractable disagreement or a failure of education.
I also don’t find the charge that it is “tendentious” all that compelling because of the phrase “by my lights”. Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
In your culture, are the two highly different? What is the framework I could use to immediately spot the difference between the paragraphs?
I also don’t find the charge that it is “tendentious” all that compelling because of the phrase “by my lights”. Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
Disagree. Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be? It’s his standards, which he believes are the correct ones. That phrase adds nothing. It’s contentless boilerplate.
(This is a frequent feature of the sort of writing which, as I have said many times, is bad. If you say “X is true”, you are claiming to believe that X is true. There is no need to add a disclaimer that you believe that X is true. We know that you believe this, because you’re claiming it.)
(Now, sometimes one might say such a thing as a rhetorical flourish, or to highlight a certain aspect of the discussion, or for other such reasons. But the idea that it’s necessary to add such a disclaimer, or that such a disclaimer saves you from some charge, or whatever, because the disclaimer communicates some important difference between just claiming that X is true and claiming that you believe that X is true, is foolishness.)
But my guess at what you would say, in the format I’m interested in, is something like “when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions.”
FWIW, this guess is so far removed from being right that I have trouble even imagining how you could have generated it. (Yet another in a very long series of examples of why “interpretive labor” is bad, and trying to guess what one’s interlocutor thinks when you already know that you don’t understand their view is pointless.)
Habryka could have written:
For roughly 7 years, I have spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to reach agreement with Said on proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one. Today I am declaring defeat on that goal and giving him a 3 year ban.
He could have written that, yes. But it would have been a strange, unnatural, and misleading thing to write, given the circumstances. The formulation you offer connotes a scenario where two parties enter into discussions and/or negotiations as equals, without presupposing that their own view is necessarily correct or that no compromises will need to be made, etc. But of course nothing remotely like that was the case. (The power relation in this case has always been massively asymmetric, for one thing.)
And, as I said, it’s also a strange thing to write. An admin is banning a member of a forum, because they can’t agree on proper rules/norms/practices…? Why should they need to agree? Doesn’t the admin just make rules, and if someone breaks the rules enough, ban them…? What’s all this business about “trying to reach agreement”? Why is that a goal? And why declare defeat on it now? And what does it have to do with banning?
So, in a certain sense, “the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar”, in that they would both be disingenuous, though in different ways (one weirder than the other).
What is the framework I could use to immediately spot the difference between the paragraphs?
One I like to use is “how would the other guy describe this?”. Another good one is “how would a reasonable, intelligent, but skeptical third party, who has no particular reason to trust or believe me, and is in fact mildly (but only mildly) suspicious of me and/or my motives and/or my ideas, read this?”.
FWIW, this guess is so far removed from being right that I have trouble even imagining how you could have generated it. (Yet another in a very long series of examples of why “interpretive labor” is bad, and trying to guess what one’s interlocutor thinks when you already know that you don’t understand their view is pointless.)
What do you think, then? Why are those things bad and why is objecting to them good?
If you can’t answer those questions, then I’m not sure what arguments about propriety we could have. If we are to design functional site norms, we should be guided by goals, not merely following traditions.
(The point of interpretive labor, according to me, is to help defeat the Illusion of Transparency. If I read your perfectly clear sentence and returned back a gross misunderstanding—well, then a communication breakdown happened somewhere. By looking at what landed for me, we have a stacktrace of sorts for working backwards and figuring out what should have been said to transmit understanding.)
The virtue is simply that one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view. These things are bad, and objecting to them is good.
And you want me to explain why these things are bad?
Well, the “sneaking in connotations” bit is a link to a Sequence post (titled, oddly enough, “Sneaking in Connotations”). I don’t think that I can explain the problem there any better than Eliezer did.
The other stuff really seems like it’s either self-explanatory or can be answered with a dictionary lookup (e.g., “begging the question”).
It’s not like we disagree that these things are bad, right? You’re doing, like, a Socratic thing; like, “why is murder bad?”—yeah, we all agree that murdering people is bad, but we should be able to explain why it’s bad, in order to write good laws. Yes?
If so, then—sure, I don’t in principle object to such exercises—on the contrary, I often find them to be useful—but why do this here, now, about these specific things? Why ask me, in particular? If we want to interrogate our beliefs about discussion norms in this sort of way, surely doing it systematically, and in a context other than a post like this, would make more sense…
On the other hand, if what you’re saying is that you disagree that the aforementioned things are bad, then… I guess I’m not sure how to respond to that, or what the point would even be…
And you want me to explain why these things are bad?
Yes. Part of this is because my long experience is that sometimes our sense of communication or our preferences for norms have flipped signs. If you think something is bad, that’s moderate but not strong evidence that I think it’s bad, and we might be able to jump straight to our disagreement by trying to ground out in principles. I think in several previous threads I wish I had focused less on the leaves and more on the roots, and here was trying to focus on roots.
If so, then—sure, I don’t in principle object to such exercises—on the contrary, I often find them to be useful—but why do this here, now, about these specific things? Why ask me, in particular?
...
On the other hand, if what you’re saying is that you disagree that the aforementioned things are bad, then… I guess I’m not sure how to respond to that, or what the point would even be…
I mean, I am genuinely uncertain about several parts of this! I think that the audience might also be uncertain, and stating things clearly might help settle them (one way or the other). I think there is value in clear statements of differences of opinion (like that you have a low opinion of interpretative labor and I have a high opinion of it), and sometimes we can ground those opinions (like by following many conversations and tracking outcomes).
Like, I understand ‘tendentious’ to be a pejorative word, but I think the underlying facts of the word are actually appropriate for this situation. That doesn’t mean it’s generically good, just that criticizing it here seems inappropriate to me. Should we not invite controversy on ban announcements? Should we not explain the point of view that leads us to make the moderation decisions we make?
But perhaps you mean something narrower. If the charge is more “this is problem only a few users have, but unfortunately one of them is an admin, and thus it is the site rule”—well, we can figure out whether or not that’s the case, but I don’t actually think that’s a problem with the first paragraph, and I think it can be pointed at more cleanly.
Well, the “sneaking in connotations” bit is a link to a Sequence post (titled, oddly enough, “Sneaking in Connotations”). I don’t think that I can explain the problem there any better than Eliezer did.
As it happens, I reread that post thru your link. I thought that it didn’t quite apply to this situation; I didn’t see how habryka was implying things about you thru an argument via definition, rather than directly stating his view (and then attempting to back it up later in the post). I thought Frame Control would’ve been a better link for your complaint here (and reread our discussion of it to see whether or not I thought anything had changed since then).
The other stuff really seems like it’s either self-explanatory or can be answered with a dictionary lookup (e.g., “begging the question”).
I also didn’t quite buy that “begging the question” applied to the first paragraph. (For the audience, this is an argument that smuggles in its conclusion as a premise.) I understood that paragraph to be the conclusion of habryka’s argument, not the premise.
Overall, my impression was—desperation, or scrambling for anything that might stick? Like, I think it fits as a criticism of any post that states its conclusion and then steps thru the argument for that conclusion, instead of essaying out from a solid premise and discovering where it takes you. I think both styles have their virtues, and think the conclusion-first style is fine for posts about bans (I’ve used it for that before), and so I don’t find that criticism persuasive. (Like, it’s bad to write your bottom line and then construct the argument, but it’s not bad to construct an argument and then edit your introduction to include your conclusion!)
But maybe I missed the thing you’re trying to convey, since we often infer different things from the same text and attend to different parts of a situation. I tried to jump us to the inferences and the salient features, and quite possibly that’s not the best path to mutual understanding.
Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be?
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
I think a frequent source of conflict has been differing judgments on what is usual and what is unusual, or what is normal and what is abnormal.
The formulation you offer connotes a scenario where two parties enter into discussions and/or negotiations as equals, without presupposing that their own view is necessarily correct or that no compromises will need to be made, etc. But of course nothing remotely like that was the case. (The power relation in this case has always been massively asymmetric, for one thing.)
I understood us not to be discussing power relations (was anyone ever confused about who was the admin of LessWrong?) but something more like legitimacy relations (what should be the rules of LessWrong?). You’ve been here longer; you might know the Sequences better; you might have more insight into the true spirit of rationality than habryka. In order to adjudicate that, we consult arguments and reasons and experience, not the database.
Using the lens of power relations, your previous complaint (“This phrasing assumes”) seems nonsensical to me; of course the mod would talk about educating the problem user, of whether they understand and learn the models and behaviors as handed down from on high.
Here I would like to take a step outward and complain about what I perceive as a misstep in the conversational dance. Having criticized habryka’s paragraph, you describe its flaws and went so far as to propose a replacement:
I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness.
My replacement differs from yours. But I claim this criticism of my replacement (that it connotes a discussion of equals) applies just as readily to yours, if not more readily because my version includes the ban. (A more fair comparison probably ends at ‘on that goal’ and drops the last phrase.) If not, it is for minor variations of style and I suspect any operationalization we come up with for measuring the difference (polling Turkers or LLMs or whatever) will identify differences between their connotations as minor (say, a split more even than 66-34 on which connotes more even power relations).
Here my thoughts turn to the story in The Crackpot Offer, and the lesson of looking for counterarguments to your own counterarguments.
Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be?
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
Here is a demonstration that adding those sorts of disclaimers and caveats does absolutely nothing to prevent the LW moderators from judging my comments to be unacceptable, as though no such disclaimers were present.
Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” says:
sharing a negative opinion is not in and of itself anti-social.
But as several people have pointed out, this opinion was shared in a way that generated a lot of unnecessary friction. A simple “I think that...” or ”...for me” would have done a great deal to resolve this problem.
This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!
I’ve said before that I don’t take such suggestions (to add the disclaimers) at all seriously; and here we have an unambiguous demonstration that I am right to take that stance.
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
You wrote:
Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
But of course his standards can’t be controversial, because he’s the admin. If someone disagrees with his standards—irrelevant; he doesn’t have to care. There is no practical difference between his standards and “the correct” standards, because he does not have any need to distinguish between those things. Therefore the “by my lights” clause is noise.
I understood us not to be discussing power relations (was anyone ever confused about who was the admin of LessWrong?) but something more like legitimacy relations (what should be the rules of LessWrong?).
I understood us to be discussing a thing that Habryka wrote in the post. If the thing he wrote involves power relations, or connotations about power relations, then how can we not be discussing power relations…?
Using the lens of power relations, your previous complaint (“This phrasing assumes”) seems nonsensical to me; of course the mod would talk about educating the problem user, of whether they understand and learn the models and behaviors as handed down from on high.
A moderator talking about “educating the problem user” is extremely suspect.
Here I would like to take a step outward and complain about what I perceive as a misstep in the conversational dance. … I claim this criticism of my replacement (that it connotes a discussion of equals) applies just as readily to yours, if not more readily because my version includes the ban.
I… disagree, mostly. But also…
At this point… I am also confused about what it is we’re even talking about. What’s the purpose of this line of inquiry? With each of your comments in this thread, I have ended up with less and less of an idea of what you’re trying to ask, or say, or argue, or… anything.
There are several. The overarching goal is that I want LessWrong’s contribution to global cognition to be beneficial. As a subgoal to that, I want LessWrong’s mod team to behave with integrity and skill. As subgoals to that, I’m trying to figure out whether there were different ways of presenting these ideas that would have either worked better in this post, or worked better in our discussions over the years at grounding out our disagreement; I’m also interested in figuring out if you’re right and we’re wrong!
Related to the last subgoal, I think your typology of selective/corrective/structural is useful to think about. I view us as applying all three—we screen new users (a much more demanding task now that LLMs are directing people to post on LessWrong), we give warnings and feedback and invest some in rationality training projects, and we think about the karma system and UI changes and various programs and projects that can cause more of what we want to see in the world. I don’t think behaving as a corrective authority is weird and bad; I think the polite and detailed version of “read the sequences” is good.
But more narrowly—looking at this conversational chain—you made a criticism of habryka’s post, and I tried to take it seriously. Does it matter that the post expresses or promotes a particular point of view? Does it matter that it’s controversial? What would it look like to fix the problems in the first paragraph? I left comments on an earlier draft of this post, and I tried to apply a framework like “how would the other guy describe this?”, and I missed those problems in the first paragraph. Tsuyoku Naritai.
[I think that you deserve me giving this a real try, and that the other mods deserve me attempting to get to ground on something with you where we start off with a real disagreement, or where I don’t understand your position.]
I understood us to be discussing a thing that Habryka wrote in the post. If the thing he wrote involves power relations, or connotations about power relations, then how can we not be discussing power relations…?
Reductionism—the idea that things are made out of parts. We can focus on different parts of it at different times. To me this also relates to the idea of True Rejections. If what you are objecting to is that habryka is banning you and that he’s the mod and you aren’t, then—I feel sympathy for you, but there’s really not much to discuss. I think there is a lot to discuss about whether or not it’s right for LW to ban you, because I am pretty invested in pushing LW to do the right thing. And that one is not a power relations question, and seems like one that we can discuss without power relations.
Yes, even if we construct airtight arguments, habryka might still ignore them and go through with the ban anyway. Yes, some people will reflexively support the mods because they like the website existing and want to subsidize working on it. But some people are watching and thinking and deciding how to relate to LW moving forward based on how these arguments shake out. That is...
But of course his standards can’t be controversial, because he’s the admin. If someone disagrees with his standards—irrelevant; he doesn’t have to care.
I think there are meaningful stakeholders whose disapproval would sink habryka’s ability to run LessWrong, and I think attempting to run LessWrong in an unethical or sloppy way would lead to the potential benefits of the site turning to ash.
(I also think this is a nonstandard usage of ‘controversial’. It just means ‘giving rise to public disagreement’, which moderation decisions and proposed norms and standards often do. Like, you’re controverting it right now!)
Returning to true rejections—suppose a fundamental issue here is that you have one vision for LW, where there’s no corrective authority, and we have a different vision for LW, where there is corrective authority. Then I think either we find out why we want those things and identify cruxes and try to learn more about the science of communication and moderation so that we can better achieve our shared goals, or we decide that our goals are sufficiently in conflict that we should pursue them separately. And, like, the value I see in habryka’s offer to edit in your text to the post is that you can make your pitch for your vision, and maybe people who prefer that vision will follow you to Data Secrets Lox, and the more clarity we can reach the more informative that pitch can be.
I’m also interested in figuring out if you’re right and we’re wrong!
Ok, fair enough.
I don’t think behaving as a corrective authority is weird and bad; I think the polite and detailed version of “read the sequences” is good.
I also think this… I think? I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by “the polite and detailed version”.
But, uh, I must protest that I definitely have read the sequences. I have read them several times. If these attempts, by the mods, at “correction”, are intended to be any version (polite or otherwise) of “read the sequences”, then clearly someone here is very confused, and I don’t think that it’s me. (Indeed, it usually seems to me as though the people I am arguing with, e.g. Habryka, are the ones who need to be told to read the Sequences!)
To me this also relates to the idea of True Rejections. If what you are objecting to is that habryka is banning you and that he’s the mod and you aren’t, then—I feel sympathy for you, but there’s really not much to discuss. I think there is a lot to discuss about whether or not it’s right for LW to ban you, because I am pretty invested in pushing LW to do the right thing. And that one is not a power relations question, and seems like one that we can discuss without power relations.
Well, for one thing, I don’t actually think that the concept of “true rejections” is as useful as it’s been made out to be. I think that in practice, in many or maybe even most cases when someone opposes or rejects or dislikes something, there just is not any such thing as some single “true rejection”.
That aside—well, sure, obviously I object to being banned, that goes without saying; but no, that wasn’t at all the point that I was making in that comment.
As for whether it’s right for LW to ban me—again I think it’s pretty obvious what my position on that question is. But that, too, was not my point.
Yes, even if we construct airtight arguments, habryka might still ignore them and go through with the ban anyway.
Eh?? What do you mean, “might”?! As far as I am aware, there is no “might” here, but only a decision already made!
Is this not the case? If so, then I think this should really be made clear. Otherwise, I must say that I do not at all appreciate you talking as if the decision isn’t final, when in fact it is.
Like, you’re controverting it right now!
Sure, in a very circumscribed way (I’m not even allowed to upvote or downvote comments outside of this top-level thread—Habryka made sure to send me a message about that!), and only until the ban proper takes effect.
But some people are watching and thinking and deciding how to relate to LW moving forward based on how these arguments shake out. … I think there are meaningful stakeholders whose disapproval would sink habryka’s ability to run LessWrong
Well, I’d certainly like to believe so. I find these vague references to “stakeholders” to be suspect at the best of times, though.
Returning to true rejections—suppose a fundamental issue here is that you have one vision for LW, where there’s no corrective authority, and we have a different vision for LW, where there is corrective authority. Then I think either we find out why we want those things and identify cruxes and try to learn more about the science of communication and moderation so that we can better achieve our shared goals, or we decide that our goals are sufficiently in conflict that we should pursue them separately. And, like, the value I see in habryka’s offer to edit in your text to the post is that you can make your pitch for your vision, and maybe people who prefer that vision will follow you to Data Secrets Lox, and the more clarity we can reach the more informative that pitch can be.
Everything else aside, let me address the Data Secrets Lox point first. While I would of course be delighted if people who have found my writing here on LW useful joined DSL, and of course everyone here who wants to join is welcome to do so, I must note that DSL is not really “LessWrong, done the way that Said thinks it should be done”; it wasn’t intended to be such a thing. I would call DSL a “rationalist-adjacent”, general-interest discussion forum. It’s not really aiming at anything like the same goals as LW is.
Anyhow, yes, sure, this is all fine, finding out why we want things, all of that is good. It seems rather “too little, too late”, though. I’ve been making my “pitch” for years; I’ve been explaining why I want things, what I think is the right way to run a forum like this and why I think those things, etc. The amount of uptake of those ideas, from the LW mods’ side, has been approximately zero. (Even when I have offered to provide free design and development work in the service of making those ideas happen—an offer which, as I expect you know, is not an idle one, when coming from me!—still, nothing.) Well, alright, obviously you have no obligation to find my views compelling and my arguments convincing, but my point is that this thing you propose has already been tried. At some length.
So… I am somewhat less than enthusiastic.
But! Despite all that, let’s give it a shot anyway. To the object level:
But more narrowly—looking at this conversational chain—you made a criticism of habryka’s post, and I tried to take it seriously. Does it matter that the post expresses or promotes a particular point of view? Does it matter that it’s controversial? What would it look like to fix the problems in the first paragraph? I left comments on an earlier draft of this post, and I tried to apply a framework like “how would the other guy describe this?”, and I missed those problems in the first paragraph. Tsuyoku Naritai.
As I wrote earlier, an honest version of that paragraph would say:
“I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness.”
Obviously that’s an incomplete replacement, so let’s try to write the full one. It might look like this (we’ll leave the first sentence as it is):
“For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year discussing, debating, and arguing with Said about norms, rules, and practices of forum moderation. These discussions and arguments have often taken place in the context of moderation actions taken, or considered, against Said (whose comments, and interactions with other site members, I have often found to be problematic; although Said, of course, disagrees, for what he believes to be principled reasons). Despite those discussions and arguments, our disagreements remain; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness. Today I am declaring defeat on the goal of convincing Said that I am right and he is wrong (and to alter his behavior accordingly). I am thus giving him a 3 year ban.”
I wouldn’t call this perfect, exactly, but it would be a great improvement.
Note that the above passage is basically honest (though a bit oblique) in making explicit the relevant power relations. It is also honest about the relative “consensus value” of the opposing views (namely, that they’re equal in both being “I think this and he thinks that”, no more and no less, with no very strong reason to assume that one side is right). The formulation also prompts, from the reader, the obvious question (“well, maybe you aren’t right, eh? maybe the other guy’s right and you’re wrong?”), which is exactly as it should be.
Note, by the way, that—unlike with the text of the actual first paragraph as it stands in the post—an alert reader will come away from the passage above with a vague sense that the decision that’s been reached is a rather odd one, reached for rather odd reasons. This, too, is exactly as it should be. The text of the post does attempt to address the sorts of questions that such a vague sense might rightly be operationalized as (such as “eh, if this guy broke your rules, why didn’t you just ban him a long time ago? … he did break your rules, right? otherwise why would you ban him”), but it’s important that the reader should notice the problem—otherwise, they will not be able to effectively evaluate the attempt to resolve it.
I also think this… I think? I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by “the polite and detailed version”.
Then perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by “corrective authority”? It seems to me like “read the Sequences” is an example of “apply such measures as will make the people in your system alter their behavior, to conform to relevant optimality criteria”. But then I find it difficult to square with:
attempting to behave as a “corrective authority”, in the context of a forum like this, is weird and bad.
Perhaps the difference is between “read the sequences” and “if you keep posting low-quality comments, we will ban you, and this part of the sequences explains the particular mistake you made here”? Or perhaps the difference is between the centralized moderator decision-making (“this comment is bad because Alice says so and her comments have a fancy border”) and decentralized opinion-aggregation and norm enforcement (“this comment is bad because its net karma is negative”)?
There is a different way to make things coherent, of course, which is that as part of the transition to LW 2.0 the mod team attempted to shift the culture, which involved shifting the optimality criteria, and the objection to us being corrective authorities in this way is not an objection to corrective authority as a method but instead an objection to our target. Which, that’s fair and not a surprise, but also it seems like the correct response to that sort of difference is for us to shake hands and have different websites with different target audiences (who are drawn to different targets). Otherwise we’ll just be locked in conflict forever (as happens when two control systems are trying to set the same variable to different reference values) and this doesn’t seem like a productive conflict to me. (I do think we’ve written about culture and Zack has written about culture downstream of this disagreement in a way that feels more productive than the moderation discussions about specific cases, but this feels way worse than, say, artists jockeying for status by creating new pieces of art.)
there just is not any such thing as some single “true rejection”.
I think this is correct, in that many decisions are made by aggregating many factors, and it’s only rarely going to be the case that a single factor (rather than a combination of factors) will be decisive.
(I do note this is a situation where both of us ‘disagree with the Sequences’ by having a better, more nuanced view, while presumably retaining the insight that sometimes decisive factors are unspeakable, and so discussions that purport to be about relevant information exchange sometimes aren’t.)
Otherwise, I must say that I do not at all appreciate you talking as if the decision isn’t final, when in fact it is.
Fair. I think it is challenging to express the position of “New information could persuade me, but I don’t expect to come across new information of sufficient strength to persuade me.”
(On the related stakeholders point: I agree that it is often vague, but in this specific case I’m on the board that can decide to fire habryka, and one of the people who is consulted about decisions like this before they’re made. I suspect that in the counterfactual where I left the mod team at the start of 2.0, you would have been banned several years earlier. This is, like, a weird paragraph to write without the context of the previous paragraph; I was in fact convinced this time around, and it is correspondingly challenging to convince me back the other direction, and it seems cruel to create false hope, and difficult to quantitatively express how much real hope there is.)
an offer which, as I expect you know, is not an idle one, when coming from me!
Indeed; I have appreciated a lot of the work that you’ve done over the years and am grateful for it.
It is also honest about the relative “consensus value” of the opposing views
Something about the “consensus value” phrasing feels off to me, but I can’t immediately propose a superior replacement. That is, it would be one thing if just Oli disagreed with you about moderation and another different thing if “the whole mod team disagrees with Said about moderation”. The mods don’t all agree with each other—and it took us years to reach sufficient agreement on this—but I do think this is less like “two people disagree” and more like “two cultures are clashing”.
That said, I do think I see the thing that I could have noticed if I were more alert, which is that I already had the view that we were optimizing for different targets, and making that the headline has more shared-reality nature to it. Like, I think the following framing is different from yours but hopefully still seems valid to you:
Since the beginning of LW 2.0, and the mod team’s attempts to move LessWrong’s culture in a direction that we thought would be more productive for our broader goals, we have been disagreeing with Said about which cultural elements are features and which are bugs. We think this is downstream of differences of preference, principle, and experience. Because of Said’s many positive qualities and many beneficial contributions to the site, the mod team has spent quite a bit of effort on attempting to persuade him to move in our direction, and I personally have spent about a hundred hours a year on moderating Said and his influence on LW’s culture. Today I am declaring defeat on the goal of getting Said to not shape LessWrong’s culture in directions I think are bad for our goals, and am giving him a 3 year ban.
I do think this is less like “two people disagree” and more like “two cultures are clashing”
Sure; my point was just that it’s more like either “two people disagree” or “two cultures are clashing” than it is like “physicists are explaining Newtonian mechanics to the Time Cube guy”.
I think the following framing is different from yours but hopefully still seems valid to you
(By a mod, obviously. Who else has a strength-10 vote and is following this discussion so closely?)
Indeed, I notice that the mods (yes, obviously it’s the mods) have been strong-downvoting pretty much all of my comments in this discussion with you.
So, before I continue engaging, I really do have to ask: this project of yours, where you are engaging in this apparently good-faith discussion with me, trying to hash out disagreement, etc.—what do the other mods think of it?
Is this just you on your own quixotic sidequest, with no buy-in from anyone else who matters?
If that’s the case, then that seems to make the whole thing rather farcical and pointless.
(Really, strong-downvoting a reply, to a moderator, written on that moderator’s request! If we want to talk about problems with voting behaviors, I’d suggest that the mods start by looking in the mirror.)
I asked in the sunshines channel on the LW slack and people there said that they were voting comments based on quality as a comment, and while one is downvoting many of your comments on the page overall, was not downvoting the majority of the comments in this thread.
There are more 10-strength users than just the mods; it may be the case that enough of them are downvoting comments that are at positive karma but leaving the −8 comments alone, which results in no one person downvoting more than a few comments in the thread, but the comments being underwater as a whole. But if there is a single mod who is trying to make this thread not happen, they’re not telling me (which seems worth doing because it would affect my behavior more than the downvoting would). [Edit: the person who did the database query clarified, and I now think that the votes are primarily coming from mods.]
I made the classic mistake of ‘asking two questions together’ and so primarily got responses on voting behavior and not what they think of the project, but I would (from their other writing) guess they are mostly out of hope about it.
I’m not sure if it was a mod, but the existence of high-strength votes and people willing to use them liberally seems like a problem to me. I also have a 10-strength vote but almost never use it because I don’t trust my own judgment enough to want to strongly influence the discourse in an unaccountable way. But others apparently do trust themselves this way, and I think it’s bad that LW gives such people disproportionate influence.
FWIW, my guess is the site would be in a better place if you voted more, and used your high vote-strength more. My guess is you would overall add a bunch of positive signal, much more than an average commenter, which is why it IMO makes sense for your votes to have a lot more weight.
I do think voting around the zero point tends to be more whack and have a bunch of more complicated consequences, and often a swing of 10 points feels disproportionate to what is going on when a comment is between 1 and 10 karma. I’ve considered making various changes to the vote system to reduce the effects of this, but haven’t found something worth the tradeoff in complexity.
I think this reply is rotated from the thing that I’m interested in—describing vice instead of virtue, and describing the rule that is being broken instead of the value from rule-following. As an analogy, consider Alice complaining about ‘lateness’ and Bob asking why Alice cares; Alice could describe the benefits of punctuality in enabling better coordination. If Alice instead just says “well it’s disrespectful to be late”, this is more like justifying the rule by the fact that it is a rule than it is explaining why the rule exists.
But my guess at what you would say, in the format I’m interested in, is something like “when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions.” Instead of tussling about whether the framing unfairly favors one side, we can focus on the object level. (I was tempted to write “irrelevant controversies”, but part of the issue here is that the controversies are about relevant features. If we accept the framing that habryka knows something that you don’t, that’s relevant to which side the audience should take in a disagreement about principles.)
That said, let us replace the symbol with the substance. Habryka could have written:
In my culture, I think the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar. The question of whether he or you is right about propriety for LessWrong is stored in the other words in the post, in the other discussion elsewhere, and in the legitimacy structures that have made habryka an admin of LW and how they react to this decision. I think very little of it is stored in the framing of whether this is an intractable disagreement or a failure of education.
I also don’t find the charge that it is “tendentious” all that compelling because of the phrase “by my lights”. Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
In your culture, are the two highly different? What is the framework I could use to immediately spot the difference between the paragraphs?
Disagree. Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be? It’s his standards, which he believes are the correct ones. That phrase adds nothing. It’s contentless boilerplate.
(This is a frequent feature of the sort of writing which, as I have said many times, is bad. If you say “X is true”, you are claiming to believe that X is true. There is no need to add a disclaimer that you believe that X is true. We know that you believe this, because you’re claiming it.)
(Now, sometimes one might say such a thing as a rhetorical flourish, or to highlight a certain aspect of the discussion, or for other such reasons. But the idea that it’s necessary to add such a disclaimer, or that such a disclaimer saves you from some charge, or whatever, because the disclaimer communicates some important difference between just claiming that X is true and claiming that you believe that X is true, is foolishness.)
FWIW, this guess is so far removed from being right that I have trouble even imagining how you could have generated it. (Yet another in a very long series of examples of why “interpretive labor” is bad, and trying to guess what one’s interlocutor thinks when you already know that you don’t understand their view is pointless.)
He could have written that, yes. But it would have been a strange, unnatural, and misleading thing to write, given the circumstances. The formulation you offer connotes a scenario where two parties enter into discussions and/or negotiations as equals, without presupposing that their own view is necessarily correct or that no compromises will need to be made, etc. But of course nothing remotely like that was the case. (The power relation in this case has always been massively asymmetric, for one thing.)
And, as I said, it’s also a strange thing to write. An admin is banning a member of a forum, because they can’t agree on proper rules/norms/practices…? Why should they need to agree? Doesn’t the admin just make rules, and if someone breaks the rules enough, ban them…? What’s all this business about “trying to reach agreement”? Why is that a goal? And why declare defeat on it now? And what does it have to do with banning?
So, in a certain sense, “the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar”, in that they would both be disingenuous, though in different ways (one weirder than the other).
One I like to use is “how would the other guy describe this?”. Another good one is “how would a reasonable, intelligent, but skeptical third party, who has no particular reason to trust or believe me, and is in fact mildly (but only mildly) suspicious of me and/or my motives and/or my ideas, read this?”.
What do you think, then? Why are those things bad and why is objecting to them good?
If you can’t answer those questions, then I’m not sure what arguments about propriety we could have. If we are to design functional site norms, we should be guided by goals, not merely following traditions.
(The point of interpretive labor, according to me, is to help defeat the Illusion of Transparency. If I read your perfectly clear sentence and returned back a gross misunderstanding—well, then a communication breakdown happened somewhere. By looking at what landed for me, we have a stacktrace of sorts for working backwards and figuring out what should have been said to transmit understanding.)
To be clear, we’re talking about:
And you want me to explain why these things are bad?
Well, the “sneaking in connotations” bit is a link to a Sequence post (titled, oddly enough, “Sneaking in Connotations”). I don’t think that I can explain the problem there any better than Eliezer did.
The other stuff really seems like it’s either self-explanatory or can be answered with a dictionary lookup (e.g., “begging the question”).
It’s not like we disagree that these things are bad, right? You’re doing, like, a Socratic thing; like, “why is murder bad?”—yeah, we all agree that murdering people is bad, but we should be able to explain why it’s bad, in order to write good laws. Yes?
If so, then—sure, I don’t in principle object to such exercises—on the contrary, I often find them to be useful—but why do this here, now, about these specific things? Why ask me, in particular? If we want to interrogate our beliefs about discussion norms in this sort of way, surely doing it systematically, and in a context other than a post like this, would make more sense…
On the other hand, if what you’re saying is that you disagree that the aforementioned things are bad, then… I guess I’m not sure how to respond to that, or what the point would even be…
Yes. Part of this is because my long experience is that sometimes our sense of communication or our preferences for norms have flipped signs. If you think something is bad, that’s moderate but not strong evidence that I think it’s bad, and we might be able to jump straight to our disagreement by trying to ground out in principles. I think in several previous threads I wish I had focused less on the leaves and more on the roots, and here was trying to focus on roots.
I mean, I am genuinely uncertain about several parts of this! I think that the audience might also be uncertain, and stating things clearly might help settle them (one way or the other). I think there is value in clear statements of differences of opinion (like that you have a low opinion of interpretative labor and I have a high opinion of it), and sometimes we can ground those opinions (like by following many conversations and tracking outcomes).
Like, I understand ‘tendentious’ to be a pejorative word, but I think the underlying facts of the word are actually appropriate for this situation. That doesn’t mean it’s generically good, just that criticizing it here seems inappropriate to me. Should we not invite controversy on ban announcements? Should we not explain the point of view that leads us to make the moderation decisions we make?
But perhaps you mean something narrower. If the charge is more “this is problem only a few users have, but unfortunately one of them is an admin, and thus it is the site rule”—well, we can figure out whether or not that’s the case, but I don’t actually think that’s a problem with the first paragraph, and I think it can be pointed at more cleanly.
As it happens, I reread that post thru your link. I thought that it didn’t quite apply to this situation; I didn’t see how habryka was implying things about you thru an argument via definition, rather than directly stating his view (and then attempting to back it up later in the post). I thought Frame Control would’ve been a better link for your complaint here (and reread our discussion of it to see whether or not I thought anything had changed since then).
I also didn’t quite buy that “begging the question” applied to the first paragraph. (For the audience, this is an argument that smuggles in its conclusion as a premise.) I understood that paragraph to be the conclusion of habryka’s argument, not the premise.
Overall, my impression was—desperation, or scrambling for anything that might stick? Like, I think it fits as a criticism of any post that states its conclusion and then steps thru the argument for that conclusion, instead of essaying out from a solid premise and discovering where it takes you. I think both styles have their virtues, and think the conclusion-first style is fine for posts about bans (I’ve used it for that before), and so I don’t find that criticism persuasive. (Like, it’s bad to write your bottom line and then construct the argument, but it’s not bad to construct an argument and then edit your introduction to include your conclusion!)
But maybe I missed the thing you’re trying to convey, since we often infer different things from the same text and attend to different parts of a situation. I tried to jump us to the inferences and the salient features, and quite possibly that’s not the best path to mutual understanding.
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
I think a frequent source of conflict has been differing judgments on what is usual and what is unusual, or what is normal and what is abnormal.
I understood us not to be discussing power relations (was anyone ever confused about who was the admin of LessWrong?) but something more like legitimacy relations (what should be the rules of LessWrong?). You’ve been here longer; you might know the Sequences better; you might have more insight into the true spirit of rationality than habryka. In order to adjudicate that, we consult arguments and reasons and experience, not the database.
Using the lens of power relations, your previous complaint (“This phrasing assumes”) seems nonsensical to me; of course the mod would talk about educating the problem user, of whether they understand and learn the models and behaviors as handed down from on high.
Here I would like to take a step outward and complain about what I perceive as a misstep in the conversational dance. Having criticized habryka’s paragraph, you describe its flaws and went so far as to propose a replacement:
My replacement differs from yours. But I claim this criticism of my replacement (that it connotes a discussion of equals) applies just as readily to yours, if not more readily because my version includes the ban. (A more fair comparison probably ends at ‘on that goal’ and drops the last phrase.) If not, it is for minor variations of style and I suspect any operationalization we come up with for measuring the difference (polling Turkers or LLMs or whatever) will identify differences between their connotations as minor (say, a split more even than 66-34 on which connotes more even power relations).
Here my thoughts turn to the story in The Crackpot Offer, and the lesson of looking for counterarguments to your own counterarguments.
Here is a demonstration that adding those sorts of disclaimers and caveats does absolutely nothing to prevent the LW moderators from judging my comments to be unacceptable, as though no such disclaimers were present.
Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” says:
This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!
I’ve said before that I don’t take such suggestions (to add the disclaimers) at all seriously; and here we have an unambiguous demonstration that I am right to take that stance.
You wrote:
But of course his standards can’t be controversial, because he’s the admin. If someone disagrees with his standards—irrelevant; he doesn’t have to care. There is no practical difference between his standards and “the correct” standards, because he does not have any need to distinguish between those things. Therefore the “by my lights” clause is noise.
I understood us to be discussing a thing that Habryka wrote in the post. If the thing he wrote involves power relations, or connotations about power relations, then how can we not be discussing power relations…?
Why “of course”? I completely disagree with this.
I have had this disagreement with the LW mods before. It’s what motivated me to write “Selective, Corrective, Structural”. And my view on this remains the same as it was in 2018: that attempting to behave as a “corrective authority”, in the context of a forum like this, is weird and bad.
A moderator talking about “educating the problem user” is extremely suspect.
I… disagree, mostly. But also…
At this point… I am also confused about what it is we’re even talking about. What’s the purpose of this line of inquiry? With each of your comments in this thread, I have ended up with less and less of an idea of what you’re trying to ask, or say, or argue, or… anything.
Perhaps you could summarize/rephrase/something?
There are several. The overarching goal is that I want LessWrong’s contribution to global cognition to be beneficial. As a subgoal to that, I want LessWrong’s mod team to behave with integrity and skill. As subgoals to that, I’m trying to figure out whether there were different ways of presenting these ideas that would have either worked better in this post, or worked better in our discussions over the years at grounding out our disagreement; I’m also interested in figuring out if you’re right and we’re wrong!
Related to the last subgoal, I think your typology of selective/corrective/structural is useful to think about. I view us as applying all three—we screen new users (a much more demanding task now that LLMs are directing people to post on LessWrong), we give warnings and feedback and invest some in rationality training projects, and we think about the karma system and UI changes and various programs and projects that can cause more of what we want to see in the world. I don’t think behaving as a corrective authority is weird and bad; I think the polite and detailed version of “read the sequences” is good.
But more narrowly—looking at this conversational chain—you made a criticism of habryka’s post, and I tried to take it seriously. Does it matter that the post expresses or promotes a particular point of view? Does it matter that it’s controversial? What would it look like to fix the problems in the first paragraph? I left comments on an earlier draft of this post, and I tried to apply a framework like “how would the other guy describe this?”, and I missed those problems in the first paragraph. Tsuyoku Naritai.
[I think that you deserve me giving this a real try, and that the other mods deserve me attempting to get to ground on something with you where we start off with a real disagreement, or where I don’t understand your position.]
Reductionism—the idea that things are made out of parts. We can focus on different parts of it at different times. To me this also relates to the idea of True Rejections. If what you are objecting to is that habryka is banning you and that he’s the mod and you aren’t, then—I feel sympathy for you, but there’s really not much to discuss. I think there is a lot to discuss about whether or not it’s right for LW to ban you, because I am pretty invested in pushing LW to do the right thing. And that one is not a power relations question, and seems like one that we can discuss without power relations.
Yes, even if we construct airtight arguments, habryka might still ignore them and go through with the ban anyway. Yes, some people will reflexively support the mods because they like the website existing and want to subsidize working on it. But some people are watching and thinking and deciding how to relate to LW moving forward based on how these arguments shake out. That is...
I think there are meaningful stakeholders whose disapproval would sink habryka’s ability to run LessWrong, and I think attempting to run LessWrong in an unethical or sloppy way would lead to the potential benefits of the site turning to ash.
(I also think this is a nonstandard usage of ‘controversial’. It just means ‘giving rise to public disagreement’, which moderation decisions and proposed norms and standards often do. Like, you’re controverting it right now!)
Returning to true rejections—suppose a fundamental issue here is that you have one vision for LW, where there’s no corrective authority, and we have a different vision for LW, where there is corrective authority. Then I think either we find out why we want those things and identify cruxes and try to learn more about the science of communication and moderation so that we can better achieve our shared goals, or we decide that our goals are sufficiently in conflict that we should pursue them separately. And, like, the value I see in habryka’s offer to edit in your text to the post is that you can make your pitch for your vision, and maybe people who prefer that vision will follow you to Data Secrets Lox, and the more clarity we can reach the more informative that pitch can be.
Ok, fair enough.
I also think this… I think? I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by “the polite and detailed version”.
But, uh, I must protest that I definitely have read the sequences. I have read them several times. If these attempts, by the mods, at “correction”, are intended to be any version (polite or otherwise) of “read the sequences”, then clearly someone here is very confused, and I don’t think that it’s me. (Indeed, it usually seems to me as though the people I am arguing with, e.g. Habryka, are the ones who need to be told to read the Sequences!)
Well, for one thing, I don’t actually think that the concept of “true rejections” is as useful as it’s been made out to be. I think that in practice, in many or maybe even most cases when someone opposes or rejects or dislikes something, there just is not any such thing as some single “true rejection”.
That aside—well, sure, obviously I object to being banned, that goes without saying; but no, that wasn’t at all the point that I was making in that comment.
As for whether it’s right for LW to ban me—again I think it’s pretty obvious what my position on that question is. But that, too, was not my point.
Eh?? What do you mean, “might”?! As far as I am aware, there is no “might” here, but only a decision already made!
Is this not the case? If so, then I think this should really be made clear. Otherwise, I must say that I do not at all appreciate you talking as if the decision isn’t final, when in fact it is.
Sure, in a very circumscribed way (I’m not even allowed to upvote or downvote comments outside of this top-level thread—Habryka made sure to send me a message about that!), and only until the ban proper takes effect.
Well, I’d certainly like to believe so. I find these vague references to “stakeholders” to be suspect at the best of times, though.
Everything else aside, let me address the Data Secrets Lox point first. While I would of course be delighted if people who have found my writing here on LW useful joined DSL, and of course everyone here who wants to join is welcome to do so, I must note that DSL is not really “LessWrong, done the way that Said thinks it should be done”; it wasn’t intended to be such a thing. I would call DSL a “rationalist-adjacent”, general-interest discussion forum. It’s not really aiming at anything like the same goals as LW is.
Anyhow, yes, sure, this is all fine, finding out why we want things, all of that is good. It seems rather “too little, too late”, though. I’ve been making my “pitch” for years; I’ve been explaining why I want things, what I think is the right way to run a forum like this and why I think those things, etc. The amount of uptake of those ideas, from the LW mods’ side, has been approximately zero. (Even when I have offered to provide free design and development work in the service of making those ideas happen—an offer which, as I expect you know, is not an idle one, when coming from me!—still, nothing.) Well, alright, obviously you have no obligation to find my views compelling and my arguments convincing, but my point is that this thing you propose has already been tried. At some length.
So… I am somewhat less than enthusiastic.
But! Despite all that, let’s give it a shot anyway. To the object level:
As I wrote earlier, an honest version of that paragraph would say:
“I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness.”
Obviously that’s an incomplete replacement, so let’s try to write the full one. It might look like this (we’ll leave the first sentence as it is):
“For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year discussing, debating, and arguing with Said about norms, rules, and practices of forum moderation. These discussions and arguments have often taken place in the context of moderation actions taken, or considered, against Said (whose comments, and interactions with other site members, I have often found to be problematic; although Said, of course, disagrees, for what he believes to be principled reasons). Despite those discussions and arguments, our disagreements remain; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness. Today I am declaring defeat on the goal of convincing Said that I am right and he is wrong (and to alter his behavior accordingly). I am thus giving him a 3 year ban.”
I wouldn’t call this perfect, exactly, but it would be a great improvement.
Note that the above passage is basically honest (though a bit oblique) in making explicit the relevant power relations. It is also honest about the relative “consensus value” of the opposing views (namely, that they’re equal in both being “I think this and he thinks that”, no more and no less, with no very strong reason to assume that one side is right). The formulation also prompts, from the reader, the obvious question (“well, maybe you aren’t right, eh? maybe the other guy’s right and you’re wrong?”), which is exactly as it should be.
Note, by the way, that—unlike with the text of the actual first paragraph as it stands in the post—an alert reader will come away from the passage above with a vague sense that the decision that’s been reached is a rather odd one, reached for rather odd reasons. This, too, is exactly as it should be. The text of the post does attempt to address the sorts of questions that such a vague sense might rightly be operationalized as (such as “eh, if this guy broke your rules, why didn’t you just ban him a long time ago? … he did break your rules, right? otherwise why would you ban him”), but it’s important that the reader should notice the problem—otherwise, they will not be able to effectively evaluate the attempt to resolve it.
Then perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by “corrective authority”? It seems to me like “read the Sequences” is an example of “apply such measures as will make the people in your system alter their behavior, to conform to relevant optimality criteria”. But then I find it difficult to square with:
Perhaps the difference is between “read the sequences” and “if you keep posting low-quality comments, we will ban you, and this part of the sequences explains the particular mistake you made here”? Or perhaps the difference is between the centralized moderator decision-making (“this comment is bad because Alice says so and her comments have a fancy border”) and decentralized opinion-aggregation and norm enforcement (“this comment is bad because its net karma is negative”)?
There is a different way to make things coherent, of course, which is that as part of the transition to LW 2.0 the mod team attempted to shift the culture, which involved shifting the optimality criteria, and the objection to us being corrective authorities in this way is not an objection to corrective authority as a method but instead an objection to our target. Which, that’s fair and not a surprise, but also it seems like the correct response to that sort of difference is for us to shake hands and have different websites with different target audiences (who are drawn to different targets). Otherwise we’ll just be locked in conflict forever (as happens when two control systems are trying to set the same variable to different reference values) and this doesn’t seem like a productive conflict to me. (I do think we’ve written about culture and Zack has written about culture downstream of this disagreement in a way that feels more productive than the moderation discussions about specific cases, but this feels way worse than, say, artists jockeying for status by creating new pieces of art.)
I think this is correct, in that many decisions are made by aggregating many factors, and it’s only rarely going to be the case that a single factor (rather than a combination of factors) will be decisive.
(I do note this is a situation where both of us ‘disagree with the Sequences’ by having a better, more nuanced view, while presumably retaining the insight that sometimes decisive factors are unspeakable, and so discussions that purport to be about relevant information exchange sometimes aren’t.)
Fair. I think it is challenging to express the position of “New information could persuade me, but I don’t expect to come across new information of sufficient strength to persuade me.”
(On the related stakeholders point: I agree that it is often vague, but in this specific case I’m on the board that can decide to fire habryka, and one of the people who is consulted about decisions like this before they’re made. I suspect that in the counterfactual where I left the mod team at the start of 2.0, you would have been banned several years earlier. This is, like, a weird paragraph to write without the context of the previous paragraph; I was in fact convinced this time around, and it is correspondingly challenging to convince me back the other direction, and it seems cruel to create false hope, and difficult to quantitatively express how much real hope there is.)
Indeed; I have appreciated a lot of the work that you’ve done over the years and am grateful for it.
Something about the “consensus value” phrasing feels off to me, but I can’t immediately propose a superior replacement. That is, it would be one thing if just Oli disagreed with you about moderation and another different thing if “the whole mod team disagrees with Said about moderation”. The mods don’t all agree with each other—and it took us years to reach sufficient agreement on this—but I do think this is less like “two people disagree” and more like “two cultures are clashing”.
That said, I do think I see the thing that I could have noticed if I were more alert, which is that I already had the view that we were optimizing for different targets, and making that the headline has more shared-reality nature to it. Like, I think the following framing is different from yours but hopefully still seems valid to you:
Sure; my point was just that it’s more like either “two people disagree” or “two cultures are clashing” than it is like “physicists are explaining Newtonian mechanics to the Time Cube guy”.
Yes, that would also be basically fine.
I started writing a reply to your other comment, when I noticed that my last comment in reply to you had been strong-downvoted.
(By a mod, obviously. Who else has a strength-10 vote and is following this discussion so closely?)
Indeed, I notice that the mods (yes, obviously it’s the mods) have been strong-downvoting pretty much all of my comments in this discussion with you.
So, before I continue engaging, I really do have to ask: this project of yours, where you are engaging in this apparently good-faith discussion with me, trying to hash out disagreement, etc.—what do the other mods think of it?
Is this just you on your own quixotic sidequest, with no buy-in from anyone else who matters?
If that’s the case, then that seems to make the whole thing rather farcical and pointless.
(Really, strong-downvoting a reply, to a moderator, written on that moderator’s request! If we want to talk about problems with voting behaviors, I’d suggest that the mods start by looking in the mirror.)
I asked in the sunshines channel on the LW slack and people there said that they were voting comments based on quality as a comment, and while one is downvoting many of your comments on the page overall, was not downvoting the majority of the comments in this thread.
There are more 10-strength users than just the mods; it may be the case that enough of them are downvoting comments that are at positive karma but leaving the −8 comments alone, which results in no one person downvoting more than a few comments in the thread, but the comments being underwater as a whole. But if there is a single mod who is trying to make this thread not happen, they’re not telling me (which seems worth doing because it would affect my behavior more than the downvoting would). [Edit: the person who did the database query clarified, and I now think that the votes are primarily coming from mods.]
I made the classic mistake of ‘asking two questions together’ and so primarily got responses on voting behavior and not what they think of the project, but I would (from their other writing) guess they are mostly out of hope about it.
I’m not sure if it was a mod, but the existence of high-strength votes and people willing to use them liberally seems like a problem to me. I also have a 10-strength vote but almost never use it because I don’t trust my own judgment enough to want to strongly influence the discourse in an unaccountable way. But others apparently do trust themselves this way, and I think it’s bad that LW gives such people disproportionate influence.
FWIW, my guess is the site would be in a better place if you voted more, and used your high vote-strength more. My guess is you would overall add a bunch of positive signal, much more than an average commenter, which is why it IMO makes sense for your votes to have a lot more weight.
I do think voting around the zero point tends to be more whack and have a bunch of more complicated consequences, and often a swing of 10 points feels disproportionate to what is going on when a comment is between 1 and 10 karma. I’ve considered making various changes to the vote system to reduce the effects of this, but haven’t found something worth the tradeoff in complexity.