As I have said before, on the object-level topic of Said Achmiz, I have written all I care about here, and I shall not pollute this thread further by digressing into that again. My thoughts on this topic are well-documented at those links, if anyone is interested.
It’s an understatement to say I think this is the wrong decision by the moderators. I disagree with it completely and I think it represents a critical step backwards for this site, not just in isolation but also more broadly because of what it illustrates about how moderators on this site view their powers and responsibilities and what proper norms of user behavior are. This isn’t the first time I have disagreed with moderators (in particular, Habryka) about matters I view as essential to this site’s continued epistemic success,[1] but it will be the last.
I have written words about why I view Said and Said-like contributions as critical. But words are wind, in this case. Perhaps actions speak louder. I will be deactivating my account[2] and permanently quitting this site, in protest of this decision.
It doesn’t make me happy to do so, as I’ve had some great interactions on here that have helped me learn and grow my understanding of a lot of important topics. And I… hope I’ve managed to give some back too, and that at least some users here have benefitted from reading my contributions. But sometimes nice things come to an end.
For ease of navigation if anyone wants to view my profile in the future, I probably will not actually employ the “deactivate account” feature, but I will clearly note my departure there regardless
This seems like not a useful move. Your contributions, in my view, consistently avoid the thing that makes Said’s a problem. Your criticisms will be missed.
Seconded, I consistently find your comments both much more valuable and ~zero sneer. I would be dismayed by moderation actions towards you, while supporting those against Said. You might not have a sense of how his are different, but you automatically avoid the costly things he brings.
I think you shouldn’t leave, and Habryka shouldn’t have so prominently talked about leaving LW as something one should consider doing in response to this post. LW is the best place by far to discuss certain topics, and nowhere else provides comparable utility if one was interested in these topics. It’s technically true but misleading to say “There are many other places on the internet to read interesting ideas, to discuss with others, to participate in a community.” This underplays not only the immense value that LW provides to its members but also the value that a member could provide to LW and potentially to the world by influencing its discourse.
For your part, I think “quitting in protest” is unlikely to accomplish anything positive, and I’d much rather have your voice around than the (seemingly tiny) chance that your leaving causes Habryka to change his mind.
I definitely didn’t intend to communicate that it should be considered cheap to leave LessWrong (that’s why the next sentence says “I think LessWrong is worth a lot to a lot of people”).
I just meant to communicate that in terms of something like “basic needs” that a person might experience, LessWrong is very rarely a necessary component of getting those filled (which is an important threshold as there exist threats that people face that do threaten your basic needs more, and which hence make sense to be engaged with differently).
Sorry, I mean, my next sentence is literally saying “I think LessWrong is worth a lot to a lot of people”, which seems sufficient to pre-empt that misunderstanding.
I think that section as written is communicating the thing I want to communicate. Of course I could do a general editing pass to make it clearer, but I am not like, seeing anything particularly wrong with what I have written.
My first reaction is that this is bad decision theory.
It makes sense to actualize on strikes when the party it’s against would not otherwise be aware of or willing to act on the preferences of people whose product they’re utilizing. It can also make sense if you believe the other party is vulnerable to coercion and you want to extort them. If you do want fair trade and credibly believe the other party is knowing and willing, the meta strategy is to simply threaten your quorum, and never actually have to strike.
We don’t seem to be in the case where an early strike makes sense. The major reaction to this post is not of an unheard or silenced opposition, but various flavours of support. In order for the moderators to cede to your demand, they have to explicitly overrule a greater weight of other people’s preferences on the basis that those people will be less mean about it. But we’re on LessWrong, people here are not broadly open to coercion.
Additively, we also don’t seem to be in a world where your preferences have been marginalized beyond the degree that they’re the minority preference. The moderators clearly spent a huge personal cost and took a huge time delay precisely because preferences of your kind are being weighed heavily.
Given the moderators are presumably not going to act on this, and would seemingly be wrong to do so, this comment reads as someone hurting themselves and others to make moderation incentives worse. Harming people to encourage bad outcomes is not something LessWrong should endorse.
I respect the integrity and strength of person needed to take a personal cost to defend someone against a harm, or a moral position. I think it’s honourable to credibly threaten to act in self-sacrificial ways. Yet, there are right and wrong ways to do this. This one strikes me as wrong.
Let me join the chorus: please do not leave in protest; your comments here do some of the same positive things that Said’s comments do, and your leaving would have a bunch of the negative consequences of Said’s banning without the positive ones (because, at least so it seems to me, you are much less annoying than Said).
(For the avoidance of doubt, I find you a net-positive commenter here for reasons other than that you do some of the useful things Said has done, but that particular aspect seems the most relevant on this occasion.)
Before you quit, maybe we can create a wiki page of people who left, with contact information, to open the door for a refugee forum at some point in the future?
While I did not wish for you to leave, I am strangely satisfied that you have left, as my recollection is that you have threatened it before, and I would feel gaslit if those had been empty threats.
As I recall, after the last time you were involved in a thread about Said you deactivated your account, and then eventually came back. My colleague has pointed out to me that, according to the database, you have activated the ‘deactivate my account’ feature on 12 occasions, each time coming back. I hope for your own dignity that you indeed do leave and do not backtrack on this for at least 2 years.
(I too hope that, but also think it is kind of important to understand that sunwillrise has deactivated their account really a lot of times before, more than any other user I can think of, and has said they were leaving before, IIRC. I do think they are a good commenter and would be sad to see them leave.)
(Whether someone deactivates their account is public info, you could just go through the internet archive of any page where sunwillrise commented and count how many times their username display changed)
(I don’t understand this comment. It would be like 10 minutes of effort to figure this out, so maybe there is some misunderstanding about how one would go about this. Also in-general, if anyone wants any kind of information that can be figured out from public information like this, feel free to ping the admins and we will tell you)
I think people don’t usually even try to figure something like that out, or are even aware of the option. So if you publicly announce that a user has deactivated their account X times, then this is information that almost no one would otherwise ever receive.
I also have the sense that it’s better to not do that, even though I have a hard time explaining in words why that is.
Please just ask us if you want publicly available but annoying to get information about LW posts! (for example, if you want a past revision of a post that was public at some point)
I’ve answered requests like that many times over the years and will continue to do that (of course barring some exceptional circumstances like doxxing or people accidentally leaking actually sensitive private data)
As I have said before, on the object-level topic of Said Achmiz, I have written all I care about here, and I shall not pollute this thread further by digressing into that again. My thoughts on this topic are well-documented at those links, if anyone is interested.
It’s an understatement to say I think this is the wrong decision by the moderators. I disagree with it completely and I think it represents a critical step backwards for this site, not just in isolation but also more broadly because of what it illustrates about how moderators on this site view their powers and responsibilities and what proper norms of user behavior are. This isn’t the first time I have disagreed with moderators (in particular, Habryka) about matters I view as essential to this site’s continued epistemic success,[1] but it will be the last.
I have written words about why I view Said and Said-like contributions as critical. But words are wind, in this case. Perhaps actions speak louder. I will be deactivating my account[2] and permanently quitting this site, in protest of this decision.
It doesn’t make me happy to do so, as I’ve had some great interactions on here that have helped me learn and grow my understanding of a lot of important topics. And I… hope I’ve managed to give some back too, and that at least some users here have benefitted from reading my contributions. But sometimes nice things come to an end.
In so far as that’s still a primary goal, see here
For ease of navigation if anyone wants to view my profile in the future, I probably will not actually employ the “deactivate account” feature, but I will clearly note my departure there regardless
This seems like not a useful move. Your contributions, in my view, consistently avoid the thing that makes Said’s a problem. Your criticisms will be missed.
Seconded, I consistently find your comments both much more valuable and ~zero sneer. I would be dismayed by moderation actions towards you, while supporting those against Said. You might not have a sense of how his are different, but you automatically avoid the costly things he brings.
I think you shouldn’t leave, and Habryka shouldn’t have so prominently talked about leaving LW as something one should consider doing in response to this post. LW is the best place by far to discuss certain topics, and nowhere else provides comparable utility if one was interested in these topics. It’s technically true but misleading to say “There are many other places on the internet to read interesting ideas, to discuss with others, to participate in a community.” This underplays not only the immense value that LW provides to its members but also the value that a member could provide to LW and potentially to the world by influencing its discourse.
For your part, I think “quitting in protest” is unlikely to accomplish anything positive, and I’d much rather have your voice around than the (seemingly tiny) chance that your leaving causes Habryka to change his mind.
I definitely didn’t intend to communicate that it should be considered cheap to leave LessWrong (that’s why the next sentence says “I think LessWrong is worth a lot to a lot of people”).
I just meant to communicate that in terms of something like “basic needs” that a person might experience, LessWrong is very rarely a necessary component of getting those filled (which is an important threshold as there exist threats that people face that do threaten your basic needs more, and which hence make sense to be engaged with differently).
Then edit it
Sorry, I mean, my next sentence is literally saying “I think LessWrong is worth a lot to a lot of people”, which seems sufficient to pre-empt that misunderstanding.
I think that section as written is communicating the thing I want to communicate. Of course I could do a general editing pass to make it clearer, but I am not like, seeing anything particularly wrong with what I have written.
My first reaction is that this is bad decision theory.
It makes sense to actualize on strikes when the party it’s against would not otherwise be aware of or willing to act on the preferences of people whose product they’re utilizing. It can also make sense if you believe the other party is vulnerable to coercion and you want to extort them. If you do want fair trade and credibly believe the other party is knowing and willing, the meta strategy is to simply threaten your quorum, and never actually have to strike.
We don’t seem to be in the case where an early strike makes sense. The major reaction to this post is not of an unheard or silenced opposition, but various flavours of support. In order for the moderators to cede to your demand, they have to explicitly overrule a greater weight of other people’s preferences on the basis that those people will be less mean about it. But we’re on LessWrong, people here are not broadly open to coercion.
Additively, we also don’t seem to be in a world where your preferences have been marginalized beyond the degree that they’re the minority preference. The moderators clearly spent a huge personal cost and took a huge time delay precisely because preferences of your kind are being weighed heavily.
Given the moderators are presumably not going to act on this, and would seemingly be wrong to do so, this comment reads as someone hurting themselves and others to make moderation incentives worse. Harming people to encourage bad outcomes is not something LessWrong should endorse.
I respect the integrity and strength of person needed to take a personal cost to defend someone against a harm, or a moral position. I think it’s honourable to credibly threaten to act in self-sacrificial ways. Yet, there are right and wrong ways to do this. This one strikes me as wrong.
Let me join the chorus: please do not leave in protest; your comments here do some of the same positive things that Said’s comments do, and your leaving would have a bunch of the negative consequences of Said’s banning without the positive ones (because, at least so it seems to me, you are much less annoying than Said).
(For the avoidance of doubt, I find you a net-positive commenter here for reasons other than that you do some of the useful things Said has done, but that particular aspect seems the most relevant on this occasion.)
I join the choir of people pronouncing they are sad to see you go.
Will you be writing elsewhere? I’ve benefited a lot from some of your comments, and would be bummed to see you leave.
I will be sad to see you go.
Before you quit, maybe we can create a wiki page of people who left, with contact information, to open the door for a refugee forum at some point in the future?
While I did not wish for you to leave, I am strangely satisfied that you have left, as my recollection is that you have threatened it before, and I would feel gaslit if those had been empty threats.
As I recall, after the last time you were involved in a thread about Said you deactivated your account, and then eventually came back. My colleague has pointed out to me that, according to the database, you have activated the ‘deactivate my account’ feature on 12 occasions, each time coming back. I hope for your own dignity that you indeed do leave and do not backtrack on this for at least 2 years.
On the contrary, I’m hopeful sunwillrise sees the reaction to their leaving and updates on that. I think your comment here is unreasonable and petty.
(I too hope that, but also think it is kind of important to understand that sunwillrise has deactivated their account really a lot of times before, more than any other user I can think of, and has said they were leaving before, IIRC. I do think they are a good commenter and would be sad to see them leave.)
I am surprised that user data is analyzed that way, and then also that it is published here when someone has left or declared intention to do so.
(Whether someone deactivates their account is public info, you could just go through the internet archive of any page where sunwillrise commented and count how many times their username display changed)
I do not think that such a theoretically possible effort is comparable to site moderators summarizing and publishing the information in an argument.
(I don’t understand this comment. It would be like 10 minutes of effort to figure this out, so maybe there is some misunderstanding about how one would go about this. Also in-general, if anyone wants any kind of information that can be figured out from public information like this, feel free to ping the admins and we will tell you)
I think people don’t usually even try to figure something like that out, or are even aware of the option. So if you publicly announce that a user has deactivated their account X times, then this is information that almost no one would otherwise ever receive.
I also have the sense that it’s better to not do that, even though I have a hard time explaining in words why that is.
Please just ask us if you want publicly available but annoying to get information about LW posts! (for example, if you want a past revision of a post that was public at some point)
I’ve answered requests like that many times over the years and will continue to do that (of course barring some exceptional circumstances like doxxing or people accidentally leaking actually sensitive private data)