I am, of course, ambivalent about harshly criticizing a post which is so laudatory toward me.[1] Nevertheless, I must say that, judging by the standards according to which LessWrong posts are (or, at any rate, ought to be) judged, this post is not a very good one.
The post is very long. The length may be justified by the subject matter; unfortunately, it also helps to hide the post’s shortcomings, as there is a tendency among readers to skim, and while skimming to assume that the skimmed-over parts say basically what they seem to, argue coherently for what they promise to argue for, do not commit any egregious offenses against good epistemics, etc. Regrettably, those assumptions fail to hold for many parts of the post, which contains a great deal of sloppy argumentation, tendentious characterizations, attempts to sneak in connotations via word choice and phrasing, and many other improprieties.
The problems begin in the very first paragraph:
For roughly [7 years] have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.
This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (and which I do not understand), and something which I should wish to “learn” (and which I have failed, or have not tried, to learn). This, of course, begs the question. The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
Of course, phrasing it in this neutral way, although it would be unimpeachably accurate, would not afford @habryka the chance to take the moral high ground. In a disagreement, after all, one side may be right, or the other; or both could be wrong. One must argue for one’s own side.
But by describing the situation as one in which he has some (presumptively correct) understanding, which remains only for him to impart to me, and some (presumptively useful) skill, which remains only for me to learn, @habryka attempts to sidestep the need to make his case.
Please note that this is not a demand that said case be made in this post itself (nor even that it be summarized, if previously made… although a hyperlink would not be amiss here—if indeed there’s anything to link to!). I am simply saying that an honest account would only say: “I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness”. It would not try to sneak in the presumption that there’s some failure to understand on my part, and only on my part.
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
I think few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong as Said.
Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100? Less than 1,000? Still, intuitively it seems like an outlandish claim. If you ask a hundred people, randomly selected out of all those who are familiar with LessWrong, to name those people who have been important to the site’s culture, how many of them will even recall my name at all, to say nothing of naming me in answer to the question? If the number exceeded the single digits, I would be flattered… but it seems unlikely.
Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here
This claim has been made before. When investigated, it has turned out to be dubious, at best. (The linked comment describes two cases where some “top author” is described by @habryka as having this sort of view, and the reality turns out to be… not really that. I would add the case of @Benquo as well, where failing to mention this comment—which was written after the discussions cited later in this post—constitutes severe dishonesty.)
We have, to my knowledge, had zero examples of this sort of claim (“top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW”) turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
This is important on its own, but it’s also important for the purposes of evaluating any other claims, made by @habryka, that are based on purported information which is available to him (e.g. in his capacity as LW administrator), but which are not readily verifiable. For example:
And frequently when I dig into how they formed these impressions, a comment by Said would be at least heavily involved in that.
I expect that whatever impression is formed in a typical reader’s mind upon reading this line, the reality is something far less impressive, where my comment(s) turn out to play a far less significant role. (Again, this supposition is not a vague denial, but rather is based on @habryka’s aforementioned record w.r.t. describing other people’s views about me.)
And I do think Said moves LessWrong substantially towards that path [toward the “Sneer Attractor”]. When Said is at his worst, he writes comments like this:
…
This, to be clear, is still better than the SneerClub comment visible above. For example when asked to clarify, Said obliges:
…
But the overall effect on the culture is still there, and the thread still results in Benquo eventually disengaging in frustration intending to switch his moderation guidelines to “Reign of terror” and deleting any future similar comment threads, as Said (as far as I can tell) refuses to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread until Benquo runs out of energy.
It seems remiss not to note that the ensuing discussion thread contained over a dozen more comments from me, which together come to almost 6,000 words, and in which I explain my reasoning at length (and several of which are highly upvoted). (This is counting only comments on the object level, i.e. elaborating on my top-level comment; I am not counting the comments in the “meta” subthread started by Ben Pace.) To say that I “refuse[d] to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread” is, quite frankly, implausible.
(Were I more inclined to play fast and loose with connotations, I could say that I was trying to get my interlocutors to understand my position, but failed…)
With non-trivial probability your post or comment ends up hosting a 100+ comment thread with detailed discussion of Said’s behavior and moderation norms and whether it’s ever OK to ban anyone
The passive voice is inappropriate here. Those 100+ comment threads are, invariably, started and kept going largely by the LW moderators. (If you doubt this, I invite you to check.)
That said, most of the time, when I was in those environments, I could tell what was going on, and I mostly knew that other people could tell as well. If someone repeatedly asked questions in a way that did clearly indicate an understanding of a flaw in the provided proofs or arguments, but kept insisting on only getting there via Socratic questioning, they would lose points over time. And if they kept asking probing questions in each seminar that were easily answered, with each question taking up space and bandwidth, then they would quickly lose lots of points and asked to please interrupt less.
(Emphasis mine.)
That’s the key, isn’t it? In your math-department scenario, the bad critic is asking questions that are easily answered. But is this the case for questions that I ask on Less Wrong?
Here’s an exercise: look up all of my comments that are some version of “Examples?”, and count how many of them were “easily answered” (i.e., by the post/comment author, or someone else, readily rattling off a list of examples of whatever it is).
Before trying this, what would you predict the percentage will be? 100%? 50%? 10%?
If it turns out that I’m not asking questions that are “easily answered”, then the analogy fails to hold, and the argument has no force.
As far as I can tell, the linked comment does not, in fact, ask me to do or not do anything. Most of the comment lays out various bits of reasoning about discussion norms and such. Then there’s this bit:
So from here on out, I, along with the rest of the mod team, do plan to treat all the comments of yours that put in low interpretive effort on your part—ones that feel like you’re requesting a large amount of effort from someone else, whilst doing no signalling that you intend to reciprocate—as bad for the health of the culture on LessWrong, and strong-downvote them accordingly, with no exceptions.
That’s really the only concrete part of the comment. As you can see, it asks nothing of me—certainly nothing to do with “stop implying obligations to authors”.
How could I have refused the mod team’s request, when no request was made? (And if I did “reject… [something] as a thing [I] was doing or a coherent ask”, why not link to the comment or comments where this rejection was expressed?)
This is quite a tendentious characterization of a comment thread where I only express and argue for my views, without at any point calling for anyone to do anything, encouraging anyone to do anything, etc. If I called for “authors to face censure”, the obvious questions are—what censure? In what form, from whom, how? But if one tries to find the answers to these questions (by clicking on the link, perhaps), it turns out to be impossible, because… the alleged calls for “authors to face censure” never took place.
So ultimately, what other option do we have but a ban?
What option, indeed? Well, except for options like implementing a robust ignore system for LessWrong (the UX design of which I would be happy to help with); or creating “subreddits” with various degrees of expected rigor (akin to the “Main” vs. “Discussion” distinction on the old LessWrong—perhaps by expanding the role of the Shortform feature, and adding some UX affordances?); or making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments; or any number of other possibilities…[2]
There is, of course, a sense in which this entire comment is an exercise in pointlessness. After all, I hardly expect that @habryka might read my commentary, think “you know, he’s right; my arguments are bad”, and reverse his decision. (Given his position as LessWrong’s admin, it is not as if he needs to justify his banning decisions in the first place!)
Still, there was, presumably, some purpose to writing this post—some goal ostensibly served by it. Whatever that goal might be, to the extent that it is well-served by a post as deeply flawed as this one, I oppose it. And if the goal is a worthy one, then the inaccuracies, misleading statements, tendentious characterizations, and other epistemic and rhetorical misdeeds with which the post is rife, can only be detrimental to it.
I leave off such obviously outlandish and improbable suggestions as “encouraging authors to reply to questions and criticisms of their posts by answering the questions and addressing the criticisms”.
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
FWIW, this seems to me like a totally fine sentence. The “by my lights” at the end is indeed communicating the exact thing you are asking for here, trying to distinguish between a claim of obvious correctness, and a personal judgement.
Feel free to summarize things like this in the future, I would not object.
Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100?
It of course depends on how active someone on LessWrong is (you are not as widely known as Eliezer or Scott, of course). My modal guess would be that you would be around place 20 in how people would bring up your name. I think this would be an underestimate of your effect on the culture. If someone else thinks this is implausible, I would be happy to operationalize, find someone to arbitrate, and then bet on it.
I mean, I have a whole section of this post where I am making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments. That’s what the precedent section is about. Of course, you are likely to disagree that those qualify as appropriate rules, or good rules, but that’s what got us to this point.
We have, to my knowledge, had zero examples of this sort of claim (“top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW”) turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
Quickly responding to this: The OP directly links to 2 authors who have made statements to this effect on LessWrong itself, and one author who while saying it wasn’t a major reason for leaving, still was obviously pretty upset (Benquo)[1]. I wouldn’t consider Gordon a “top author” but would consider Duncan and Benquo to be ones. There are more, though I have fewer links handy.
I wasn’t able to find an easily extractable quote from Duncan, though I am sure he would be happy to provide affirmation of his position on this when he reads this, and readers can form their own judgement reading this thread.
Since we’re talking about it, I have also told the mods that Said is one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience.
I also don’t have a public quote by EVN handy, though I am sure she would also be happy to attest to something close to this.
I don’t have as many receipts as I would like to be able to share here, but saying there are “zero examples” is just really straightforwardly false. You were even involved in a big moderation dispute with one of them!
While you link to a comment where he says some more positive things about you 7 years ago, I quote from his most recent overall summary in the OP, where to be clear, he was not overall in favor of banning you, though really did not have a positive impression.
But you just said that you don’t consider Gordon a “top author”, and you can’t find a quote from Duncan saying anything like this?
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
If you get people to post new things, then this may change. But what I wrote seems to me to be entirely correct.
No, at the very least it’s Duncan? That’s literally the text of my comment (though slightly circuitously).
I didn’t say I couldn’t find any quote, I said I couldn’t find any easily extractable quote. The relevant thread contains plenty of multi-paragraph sections that make this position of his quite clear, just nothing that happened to be easy to easily removed from context.
Edit: Ok, fine, after spending 20 more minutes on reading through random old threads, here is a pretty clear and extractable comment from Duncan (it really was also otherwise very obvious from the link I provided, but due to some of the indirect nature of the discussion was hard to quote):
It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically. Like, literally that specific essay, I consciously considered where to put it, and decided not to put it here because, at the time, there was no way to prevent you from being part of the subsequent conversation.
This sure seems like an example of a top author citing you directly as the reason for not wanting to post on LW.
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?
I’ve already explained this multiple times, but sure, I’ll explain it again:
If someone says “X has happened a bunch of times”, and you say “Examples please?”, and they say “here are examples A, B, and C”; and you look at A, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at B, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at C, and it turns out to not be X; and you say “… none of those things are X, though?”; and your intelocutor continues to insist that “X has happened a bunch of times”…
… what is the correct position for you to take, at that point?
It is, honestly, quite distressing, how many times I have had to explain this, not just in this context but in many others: if someone makes a claim, and when asked for examples of that claim provides things that turn out not to actually be examples, then not only does their claim remain totally unsupported at that point, but also, the fact that this person thought that the given things were examples of their claim, when they actually were not—the fact that they made this error—should cause you to doubt their ability to recognize what is and is not an example of their claim, in general.
Alice: White ravens exist! Bob: Yeah? For real? Where, can I see? Alice (looking around and then pointing): Right… there! That one! Bob (peering at the bird in question): But… that raven is actually black? Like, it’s definitely black and not white at all.
Now not only is Bob (once again, as he was at the start) in the position of having exactly zero examples of white ravens (Alice’s one purported example having been revealed to be not an example at all), but—and perhaps even more importantly!—Bob has reason to doubt not only Alice’s possession of any examples of her claim (of white ravens existing), but her very ability to correctly perceive what color any given raven is.
Now if Alice says “Well, I’ve seen a lot of white ravens, though”, Bob might quite reasonably reply: “Have you, though? Really? Because you just said that that raven was white, and it is definitely, totally black.” What’s more, not only Bob but also Alice herself ought rightly to significantly downgrade her confidence in her belief in white ravens (by a degree commensurate with how big a role her own supposed observations of white ravens have played in forming that belief).
(The other possibility, of course, is that the claimant was simply lying, in which case you should integrate that into your assessment of them.)
What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that?
I do not keep in my head the specifics of every comment written in every conversation on LessWrong that involves me. I recalled the conversation in vague terms, but given @habryka’s track record on this subject, I expected that there was a good chance that he was misrepresenting what Duncan had said, in the same way that he misrepresented what several other authors had said. That turned out not to have been the case, of course, but the expectation was valid, given the information available at that time.
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
I mean, I literally already provided a quote quite close to what you desire for DirectedEvolution (is his wording as perfectly of an exact match as Duncan’s, no, but I think it is close enough to count). To remind you, the quote is:
Since we’re talking about it, I have also told the mods that Said is one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience.
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
I really haven’t tried to produce many quotes, because those quotes have little bearing on my overall bottom-line on this situation. I have enough inside-view model of this situation to cause me to make the same decision even if no top author had complained about you, and you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
But sure, here is another one, if you really want to go out on a limb and predict that no such quotes exist (this time from Lukas Gloor who I do consider a top author):[1]
Said’s way of asking questions, and the uncharitable assumptions he sometimes makes, is one of the most off-putting things I associate with LW. I don’t find it okay myself, but it seems like the sort of thing that’s hard to pin down with legible rules.
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out:
Here’s a bit of metadata on this: I can recall offhand 7 complaints from users with 2000+ karma who aren’t on the mod team (most of whom had significantly more than 2000 karma, and all of them had some highly upvoted comments and/or posts that are upvoted in the annual review). One of them cites you as being the reason they left LessWrong a few years ago, and ~3-4 others cite you as being a central instance of a pattern that means they participate less on LessWrong, or can’t have particularly important types of conversations here.
I also think most of the mod team (at least 4 of them? maybe more) of them have had such complaints (as users, rather than as moderators)
I think there’s probably at least 5 more people who complained about you by name who I don’t think have particularly legible credibility beyond “being some LessWrong users.”
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
(I should have disengaged earlier, but since you seem to insist the history of complaints about you is made up, I figured I would comment with some more things that aren’t private communication and I can easily share)
Update May 2024: It’s been more than a year since the above comment and in that year, I remember I liked a couple of comments by Said and I don’t remember any particular ones that I thought exhibited the above pattern.
This also roughly aligns with the period where I thought Said was behaving somewhat better (until it got worse again in the past few months, precipitating this ban). Maybe Lukas agrees, or not. The comment itself nevertheless seems clear.
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
Indeed, we certainly can argue about that. If he’s a “top author” but Gordon isn’t (as you have said), then your concept of “top author” is incoherent.
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false. Your own words, from the OP:
Why spend so much time engaging with a single commenter? Well, the answer is that I do think the specific way Said has been commenting on the site had a non-trivial chance of basically just killing the site, in the sense of good conversation and intellectual progress basically ceasing, if not pushed back on and the collateral damage limited by moderator action.
Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here, and also I personally (and the LessWrong team more broadly) would have had little interest in further investing in LessWrong if the kind of the kind of culture that Said brings had taken hold here.
So the stakes have been high
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
… surely you jest? I have nothing at all against the guy, but he’s written five posts, ever, in 13 years of being a LessWrong member. How does he qualify as a “top author”, but not Gordon?
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out
You know perfectly well how little this sort of thing is worth. Yes, it’s correlated evidence. And it’s another report of more alleged private communications. Any way to verify them? Nope. Any way to check whether some or most or all of them are being mis-remembered, mis-characterized, mis-summarized, etc.? Nope.
Of course Ray would not have to be “totally making things up”, just like you have not been “totally making things up”—that is obviously a strawman! You weren’t “totally making up” the examples of Jacob Falkovich, Scott Alexander, etc.—your reporting of the relevant facts was just severely skewed, filtered, etc. Why the same cannot be true for Ray, I really can’t see.
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
Whether I “want another piece of evidence” is immaterial to the question, which is whether the already-claimed evidence in fact exists and in fact is as described. Introducing more pieces of other evidence has no bearing on that.
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
Elizabeth is (was? I’m not sure where to even find the most up to date version of this info, actually) a LessWrong moderator. This obviously disqualifies her opinion about this from consideration.
Oh? But then I must be even more of a “top author”, yes? (I also have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”, after all; in approximately as many years of being an LW member, I’ve accumulated about five times as much karma as Lukas has!)
And what of Gordon, of whom @habryka has said that he is not a “top author”—but he, too, seems to have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”?
This standard of who is and is not a “top author” seems awfully fluid, I must say…
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forths with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
I think few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong as Said. More than 50% of the time when I would ask posters, commenters and lurkers about their models of LessWrong culture, they’d say some version of either:
Of all the places on the internet, LessWrong is a place that really forces you to get your arguments together. It’s very much a no-bullshit culture, and I think this is one of the things that makes it one of the most valuable forums on the internet.
Or
Man, posting on LessWrong seems really unrewarding. You show up, you put a ton of effort into a post, and at the end the comment section will tear apart some random thing that isn’t load bearing for your argument, isn’t something you consider particularly important, and whose discussion doesn’t illuminate what you are trying to communicate, all the while implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas.
And frequently when I dig into how they formed these impressions, a comment by Said would be at least heavily involved in that.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote
and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to lie write in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: onetwothree.)
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.
He did not say that they made such claims on LessWrong, where he would be able to publicly cite them. (I have seen/heard those claims in other contexts.)
If someone (supposedly) says something to you in private, and you report this (alleged) conversation in public, then as far as public knowledge is concerned, is not correct to say that it has “turned out to be straightforwardly true” that that (alleged) conversation took place. Nothing has “turned out” in any way; there’s just a claim that’s been made—that is all.
The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
This is also my sense of things.
And rightly so…
To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. (Elsewhere, I claimed that I had no personal problem with Said’s comments and someone privately replied to me “shouldn’t you, if you believe he’s burning the commons?”. I’m still considering it, but I suspect “keep your identity small” reasons will end up dominating.)
What’s the virtue or consequence that you’re focused on, here?
To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. …
What’s the virtue or consequence that you’re focused on, here?
A longer quote, for context and easier readability:
For roughly [7 years] have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.
This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (and which I do not understand), and something which I should wish to “learn” (and which I have failed, or have not tried, to learn). This, of course, begs the question. The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
…
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
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.
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
is a strong argument for objecting to the median and modal Said comment.
If you see me doing any such things, you should definitely object to them.
As I do not in fact make a habit of doing such things, I have no fear of my median and/or modal comments falling afoul of such objections.
EDIT: Well. I guess I should amend this reply somewhat. In the counterfactual scenario where I were not banned from LessWrong, I would say the above. In actuality, it would obviously be unfair for you to object to any of my comments (by means of replying to them, say), as I would not be able to respond (and, as far as I know, there is no UI indicator along the lines of “user A has been banned, and thus cannot reply to this reply by user B to his comment”).
However, I welcome objections, criticisms, etc., in any public venue where I can respond, such as on Data Secrets Lox.
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 am, of course, ambivalent about harshly criticizing a post which is so laudatory toward me.[1] Nevertheless, I must say that, judging by the standards according to which LessWrong posts are (or, at any rate, ought to be) judged, this post is not a very good one.
The post is very long. The length may be justified by the subject matter; unfortunately, it also helps to hide the post’s shortcomings, as there is a tendency among readers to skim, and while skimming to assume that the skimmed-over parts say basically what they seem to, argue coherently for what they promise to argue for, do not commit any egregious offenses against good epistemics, etc. Regrettably, those assumptions fail to hold for many parts of the post, which contains a great deal of sloppy argumentation, tendentious characterizations, attempts to sneak in connotations via word choice and phrasing, and many other improprieties.
The problems begin in the very first paragraph:
This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (and which I do not understand), and something which I should wish to “learn” (and which I have failed, or have not tried, to learn). This, of course, begs the question. The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
Of course, phrasing it in this neutral way, although it would be unimpeachably accurate, would not afford @habryka the chance to take the moral high ground. In a disagreement, after all, one side may be right, or the other; or both could be wrong. One must argue for one’s own side.
But by describing the situation as one in which he has some (presumptively correct) understanding, which remains only for him to impart to me, and some (presumptively useful) skill, which remains only for me to learn, @habryka attempts to sidestep the need to make his case.
Please note that this is not a demand that said case be made in this post itself (nor even that it be summarized, if previously made… although a hyperlink would not be amiss here—if indeed there’s anything to link to!). I am simply saying that an honest account would only say: “I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness”. It would not try to sneak in the presumption that there’s some failure to understand on my part, and only on my part.
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100? Less than 1,000? Still, intuitively it seems like an outlandish claim. If you ask a hundred people, randomly selected out of all those who are familiar with LessWrong, to name those people who have been important to the site’s culture, how many of them will even recall my name at all, to say nothing of naming me in answer to the question? If the number exceeded the single digits, I would be flattered… but it seems unlikely.
This claim has been made before. When investigated, it has turned out to be dubious, at best. (The linked comment describes two cases where some “top author” is described by @habryka as having this sort of view, and the reality turns out to be… not really that. I would add the case of @Benquo as well, where failing to mention this comment—which was written after the discussions cited later in this post—constitutes severe dishonesty.)
We have, to my knowledge, had zero examples of this sort of claim (“top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW”) turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
This is important on its own, but it’s also important for the purposes of evaluating any other claims, made by @habryka, that are based on purported information which is available to him (e.g. in his capacity as LW administrator), but which are not readily verifiable. For example:
I expect that whatever impression is formed in a typical reader’s mind upon reading this line, the reality is something far less impressive, where my comment(s) turn out to play a far less significant role. (Again, this supposition is not a vague denial, but rather is based on @habryka’s aforementioned record w.r.t. describing other people’s views about me.)
It seems remiss not to note that the ensuing discussion thread contained over a dozen more comments from me, which together come to almost 6,000 words, and in which I explain my reasoning at length (and several of which are highly upvoted). (This is counting only comments on the object level, i.e. elaborating on my top-level comment; I am not counting the comments in the “meta” subthread started by Ben Pace.) To say that I “refuse[d] to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread” is, quite frankly, implausible.
(Were I more inclined to play fast and loose with connotations, I could say that I was trying to get my interlocutors to understand my position, but failed…)
The passive voice is inappropriate here. Those 100+ comment threads are, invariably, started and kept going largely by the LW moderators. (If you doubt this, I invite you to check.)
(Emphasis mine.)
That’s the key, isn’t it? In your math-department scenario, the bad critic is asking questions that are easily answered. But is this the case for questions that I ask on Less Wrong?
Here’s an exercise: look up all of my comments that are some version of “Examples?”, and count how many of them were “easily answered” (i.e., by the post/comment author, or someone else, readily rattling off a list of examples of whatever it is).
Before trying this, what would you predict the percentage will be? 100%? 50%? 10%?
If it turns out that I’m not asking questions that are “easily answered”, then the analogy fails to hold, and the argument has no force.
You link this comment in a footnote, but that is not enough; the fact is that your characterization of my view here is deeply misleading. (Indeed, I have argued in favor of an ignore system for LessWrong—an argument to which you were entirely un-receptive!)
As far as I can tell, the linked comment does not, in fact, ask me to do or not do anything. Most of the comment lays out various bits of reasoning about discussion norms and such. Then there’s this bit:
That’s really the only concrete part of the comment. As you can see, it asks nothing of me—certainly nothing to do with “stop implying obligations to authors”.
How could I have refused the mod team’s request, when no request was made? (And if I did “reject… [something] as a thing [I] was doing or a coherent ask”, why not link to the comment or comments where this rejection was expressed?)
This is quite a tendentious characterization of a comment thread where I only express and argue for my views, without at any point calling for anyone to do anything, encouraging anyone to do anything, etc. If I called for “authors to face censure”, the obvious questions are—what censure? In what form, from whom, how? But if one tries to find the answers to these questions (by clicking on the link, perhaps), it turns out to be impossible, because… the alleged calls for “authors to face censure” never took place.
What option, indeed? Well, except for options like implementing a robust ignore system for LessWrong (the UX design of which I would be happy to help with); or creating “subreddits” with various degrees of expected rigor (akin to the “Main” vs. “Discussion” distinction on the old LessWrong—perhaps by expanding the role of the Shortform feature, and adding some UX affordances?); or making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments; or any number of other possibilities…[2]
There is, of course, a sense in which this entire comment is an exercise in pointlessness. After all, I hardly expect that @habryka might read my commentary, think “you know, he’s right; my arguments are bad”, and reverse his decision. (Given his position as LessWrong’s admin, it is not as if he needs to justify his banning decisions in the first place!)
Still, there was, presumably, some purpose to writing this post—some goal ostensibly served by it. Whatever that goal might be, to the extent that it is well-served by a post as deeply flawed as this one, I oppose it. And if the goal is a worthy one, then the inaccuracies, misleading statements, tendentious characterizations, and other epistemic and rhetorical misdeeds with which the post is rife, can only be detrimental to it.
Although I must note that I cannot, in good conscience, accept all of the praise which the post heaps on me. (More on that later.)
I leave off such obviously outlandish and improbable suggestions as “encouraging authors to reply to questions and criticisms of their posts by answering the questions and addressing the criticisms”.
FWIW, this seems to me like a totally fine sentence. The “by my lights” at the end is indeed communicating the exact thing you are asking for here, trying to distinguish between a claim of obvious correctness, and a personal judgement.
Feel free to summarize things like this in the future, I would not object.
It of course depends on how active someone on LessWrong is (you are not as widely known as Eliezer or Scott, of course). My modal guess would be that you would be around place 20 in how people would bring up your name. I think this would be an underestimate of your effect on the culture. If someone else thinks this is implausible, I would be happy to operationalize, find someone to arbitrate, and then bet on it.
You are here responding to a sentence from a previous draft of the post. My guess is you want to edit.
I mean, I have a whole section of this post where I am making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments. That’s what the precedent section is about. Of course, you are likely to disagree that those qualify as appropriate rules, or good rules, but that’s what got us to this point.
Already edited by the time you posted the comment.
Quickly responding to this: The OP directly links to 2 authors who have made statements to this effect on LessWrong itself, and one author who while saying it wasn’t a major reason for leaving, still was obviously pretty upset (Benquo)[1]. I wouldn’t consider Gordon a “top author” but would consider Duncan and Benquo to be ones. There are more, though I have fewer links handy.
I wasn’t able to find an easily extractable quote from Duncan, though I am sure he would be happy to provide affirmation of his position on this when he reads this, and readers can form their own judgement reading this thread.
We also have someone like DirectedEvolution saying this:
I also don’t have a public quote by EVN handy, though I am sure she would also be happy to attest to something close to this.
I don’t have as many receipts as I would like to be able to share here, but saying there are “zero examples” is just really straightforwardly false. You were even involved in a big moderation dispute with one of them!
While you link to a comment where he says some more positive things about you 7 years ago, I quote from his most recent overall summary in the OP, where to be clear, he was not overall in favor of banning you, though really did not have a positive impression.
Who is “EVN”…?
Elizabeth (Van Nostrand).
I… actually can’t figure out what you’re referring to, here. Could you quote the part of the OP which you have in mind?
Duncan and Gordon.
…?
But you just said that you don’t consider Gordon a “top author”, and you can’t find a quote from Duncan saying anything like this?
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
If you get people to post new things, then this may change. But what I wrote seems to me to be entirely correct.
No, at the very least it’s Duncan? That’s literally the text of my comment (though slightly circuitously).
I didn’t say I couldn’t find any quote, I said I couldn’t find any easily extractable quote. The relevant thread contains plenty of multi-paragraph sections that make this position of his quite clear, just nothing that happened to be easy to easily removed from context.
Edit: Ok, fine, after spending 20 more minutes on reading through random old threads, here is a pretty clear and extractable comment from Duncan (it really was also otherwise very obvious from the link I provided, but due to some of the indirect nature of the discussion was hard to quote):
This sure seems like an example of a top author citing you directly as the reason for not wanting to post on LW.
Yep, that is definitely one example, so the count now stands at one example.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?
I’ve already explained this multiple times, but sure, I’ll explain it again:
If someone says “X has happened a bunch of times”, and you say “Examples please?”, and they say “here are examples A, B, and C”; and you look at A, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at B, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at C, and it turns out to not be X; and you say “… none of those things are X, though?”; and your intelocutor continues to insist that “X has happened a bunch of times”…
… what is the correct position for you to take, at that point?
It is, honestly, quite distressing, how many times I have had to explain this, not just in this context but in many others: if someone makes a claim, and when asked for examples of that claim provides things that turn out not to actually be examples, then not only does their claim remain totally unsupported at that point, but also, the fact that this person thought that the given things were examples of their claim, when they actually were not—the fact that they made this error—should cause you to doubt their ability to recognize what is and is not an example of their claim, in general.
As I have written before:
(The other possibility, of course, is that the claimant was simply lying, in which case you should integrate that into your assessment of them.)
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
I do not keep in my head the specifics of every comment written in every conversation on LessWrong that involves me. I recalled the conversation in vague terms, but given @habryka’s track record on this subject, I expected that there was a good chance that he was misrepresenting what Duncan had said, in the same way that he misrepresented what several other authors had said. That turned out not to have been the case, of course, but the expectation was valid, given the information available at that time.
I mean, I literally already provided a quote quite close to what you desire for DirectedEvolution (is his wording as perfectly of an exact match as Duncan’s, no, but I think it is close enough to count). To remind you, the quote is:
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
I really haven’t tried to produce many quotes, because those quotes have little bearing on my overall bottom-line on this situation. I have enough inside-view model of this situation to cause me to make the same decision even if no top author had complained about you, and you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
But sure, here is another one, if you really want to go out on a limb and predict that no such quotes exist (this time from Lukas Gloor who I do consider a top author):[1]
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out:
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
Elizabeth writes in a deletion reason for one of your comments:
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
(I should have disengaged earlier, but since you seem to insist the history of complaints about you is made up, I figured I would comment with some more things that aren’t private communication and I can easily share)
Note that he importantly also says:
This also roughly aligns with the period where I thought Said was behaving somewhat better (until it got worse again in the past few months, precipitating this ban). Maybe Lukas agrees, or not. The comment itself nevertheless seems clear.
Indeed, we certainly can argue about that. If he’s a “top author” but Gordon isn’t (as you have said), then your concept of “top author” is incoherent.
Absolutely, hilariously false. Your own words, from the OP:
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
… surely you jest? I have nothing at all against the guy, but he’s written five posts, ever, in 13 years of being a LessWrong member. How does he qualify as a “top author”, but not Gordon?
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
You know perfectly well how little this sort of thing is worth. Yes, it’s correlated evidence. And it’s another report of more alleged private communications. Any way to verify them? Nope. Any way to check whether some or most or all of them are being mis-remembered, mis-characterized, mis-summarized, etc.? Nope.
Of course Ray would not have to be “totally making things up”, just like you have not been “totally making things up”—that is obviously a strawman! You weren’t “totally making up” the examples of Jacob Falkovich, Scott Alexander, etc.—your reporting of the relevant facts was just severely skewed, filtered, etc. Why the same cannot be true for Ray, I really can’t see.
Whether I “want another piece of evidence” is immaterial to the question, which is whether the already-claimed evidence in fact exists and in fact is as described. Introducing more pieces of other evidence has no bearing on that.
Elizabeth is (was? I’m not sure where to even find the most up to date version of this info, actually) a LessWrong moderator. This obviously disqualifies her opinion about this from consideration.
Just want to note he has many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments, and I value good commenters highly as well as good posters.
Oh? But then I must be even more of a “top author”, yes? (I also have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”, after all; in approximately as many years of being an LW member, I’ve accumulated about five times as much karma as Lukas has!)
And what of Gordon, of whom @habryka has said that he is not a “top author”—but he, too, seems to have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”?
This standard of who is and is not a “top author” seems awfully fluid, I must say…
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
Then why did you cite Lukas’s comment count and karma value?
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
No, I really don’t think that there is.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
I confirm that my understanding of top author was close to what Said describes here.
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
Uh… yeah, of course the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong.
Why would you think that I “seem unable to conceive” of this? This is really a very strange reply.
The OP uses the complaints as an illustration of the supposed problem, and as evidence for said supposed problem.
If the alleged evidence is poor, then the claim that the supposed problem exists is correspondingly undermined.
Is this not obvious?
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
This, as I have already pointed out, is not true.
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
And praise! It was a setup and explanation symmetric in complaint and praise!
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to
liewrite in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: one two three.)So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
And quite surprising, too, at least to me. I really would not have expected it. Perhaps this simply speaks ill of my ability to judge character.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.
He did not say that they made such claims on LessWrong, where he would be able to publicly cite them. (I have seen/heard those claims in other contexts.)
If someone (supposedly) says something to you in private, and you report this (alleged) conversation in public, then as far as public knowledge is concerned, is not correct to say that it has “turned out to be straightforwardly true” that that (alleged) conversation took place. Nothing has “turned out” in any way; there’s just a claim that’s been made—that is all.
This is also my sense of things.
To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. (Elsewhere, I claimed that I had no personal problem with Said’s comments and someone privately replied to me “shouldn’t you, if you believe he’s burning the commons?”. I’m still considering it, but I suspect “keep your identity small” reasons will end up dominating.)
What’s the virtue or consequence that you’re focused on, here?
A longer quote, for context and easier readability:
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.
Just noting that
is a strong argument for objecting to the median and modal Said comment.
If you see me doing any such things, you should definitely object to them.
As I do not in fact make a habit of doing such things, I have no fear of my median and/or modal comments falling afoul of such objections.
EDIT: Well. I guess I should amend this reply somewhat. In the counterfactual scenario where I were not banned from LessWrong, I would say the above. In actuality, it would obviously be unfair for you to object to any of my comments (by means of replying to them, say), as I would not be able to respond (and, as far as I know, there is no UI indicator along the lines of “user A has been banned, and thus cannot reply to this reply by user B to his comment”).
However, I welcome objections, criticisms, etc., in any public venue where I can respond, such as on Data Secrets Lox.
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.