Thank you Habryka (and the rest of the mod team) for the effort and thoughtfulness you put into making LessWrong good.
I personally have had few problems with Said, but this seems like an extremely reasonable decision. I’m leaving this comment in part to help make you feel empowered to make similar decisions in the future when you think it necessary (and ideally, at a much lower cost of your time).
When you say that it seems like an extremely reasonable decision, do you mean that you personally vouch for the soundness of the reasoning in the announcement, or are you deferring to Habryka’s apparent effort and thoughtfulness? (When you say “I personally have had few problems with Said, but”, that makes it sound like you’re deferring, rather than enthusiastically supporting the ban on the merits independently of your loyalty to Habryka.)
The distinction is critical when you’re calling for similar future decisions to be made with less effort! If you’re confident that that the decision is extremely reasonable because you personally checked, then it makes sense to recommend spending less effort next time, but if you’re deferring, I think you should be much more worried that you were mistaken to defer!
As it happens, I don’t think this was a reasonable decision at all, as I explain in detail in a new commentary post. If you’re vouching for the ban reasoning, that implies that you disagree with me quite a lot, and I’d be grateful if you could spare the time to tell me what I’m getting wrong in the comments. On the other hand, if you’re deferring, I wonder whether my objection holds enough weight to give you any pause?
I meant something like “as far as I can tell, Habryka’s procedure for thinking through this decision seems to have been a reasonable one.”
This doesn’t mean I’m vouching for the procedure, because there are many parts of it that I can’t verify/don’t know about.
But it also doesn’t just mean I’m deferring to Habyrka, because I am trying to figure out if he’s running a good decision procedure, and would have commented differently if I thought he wasn’t.
It’s something more like “Habryka has a job, and he seems to be doing his job in a reasonable way in this case”.
Zooming out: on the meta level, the reason I revisited this comment is that I saw some of your exchanges with Cade Metz, in particular the ones where you mentioned that you were engaging with him because you believe in Speech so strongly that you’re willing to pursue a quokka strategy. To me, this seems both admirable in many ways, and also like a fairly unreasonable approach (as I believe Michael also mentioned in the post). Given this, by default I don’t plan to engage with your “Comment on “Banning Said Achmiz”″, because I’m worried that you believing in Speech to this extent will end up being an unproductive crux for us. However, I’m open to arguments for why I should change my mind.
because I’m worried that you believing in Speech to this extent will end up being an unproductive crux for us
I don’t think so: while I concede that my deciding to talk to Metz and my opposition to the Achmiz ban are “correlated” in some sense, I fully expect that many people who would disapprove of the former would agree with my case on the latter. “Whether to talk to a biased journalist” and “whether to ban a Less Wrong user” are actually just pretty different situations, even if they both involve speech. Indeed, Achmiz himself does not share my obsession with transparency maximalism, and has a much dimmer view than me on the merits of talking to journalists, whom he has collectively described as “the scum of the earth”.[1]
It’s something more like “Habryka has a job, and he seems to be doing his job in a reasonable way in this case”.
Great, happy to start there. I think that one particularly legible requirement for doing the job of moderator in a reasonable way—not necessarily the most important requirement, but one that’s easy to check whether it’s being fulfilled—is, “Don’t make false claims to justify moderation decisions, and if you do accidentally make false claims, you should apologize and credibly express intent to not mislead people in that way again.”
However, when I checked with Alexander, he testified that he had “no direct opinion” on Achmiz. I also found an October 2018 comment from Falkovich in which Falkovich wrote that his previous negative affect towards Achmiz had “flipped entirely to become positive” and urged Achmiz to “Do your own thing, and own it.”
When I presented Habryka with Alexander and Falkovich’s statements, rather than apologizing for having made false claims about other people’s stances on Achmiz, Habryka said of Alexander, “My guess is he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” (apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz?) and claimed that Falkovich’s statement was “complicated.”
Habryka continues to stand by a claim stated in the ban announcement post that “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here”, while noting that most complaints about other users are private. The problem here is that when someone claims that some things are examples of a phenomenon, and the things turn out not to be examples when checked, that casts doubt on claimed examples that we can’t check: if the thing Habryka claimed about Alexander and Falkovich was not true when I actually checked, then what should we believe about the “dozens of others” or “many top authors” who weren’t named? As I explain in footnote 17, the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports. (What matters is the likelihood ratio , not whether the speaker was lying or merely confused.) I claim that this is a clear-cut example of Habryka not doing his job in a reasonable way: I think if I were in a position of authority and I justified my actions by appealing to other people’s preferences, upon being presented with statements from the people I named contradicting what I said about them, I would apologize for attributing opinions to people that they do not hold, because that would be embarrassing.
To be clear, this is not a particularly important point in itself. (The stated basis for the ban is not “Scott Alexander said so.”) The reason I’m re-explaining it in this comment (separately from the longer discussion in §III.2) is because it’s particularly legible: you don’t have to evaluate a complicated argument to check the linked statements and see for yourself that Habryka’s claims about authors’ opinions about Achmiz were contradicted by those authors’ own statements. My hope is that this small token of evidence injects enough of a shadow of a doubt into your prior belief that Habryka is doing his job in a reasonable way in this case, that you might find it worth your time to reconsider that belief after reading §II, §III.1, and §IV, which I think are important (but less trivial to evaluate).
If you find any of it persuasive (or unpersuasive), I think it would be in the public interest for you to say so in public.
Specifically, Achmiz wrote to me in a January 2024 email (quoted with permission):
That’s journalist thinking—the idea that as long as you didn’t say the magic words “this is off the record”, you can publish anything anyone says to you in any context. And we all understand quite well by now that this (among other things) is what makes journalists, as a class, the scum of the earth. (“Never talk to a journalist”, one often hears—but why not? Because when you talk to a journalist—unlike when talking to normal people who understand the ideas of private communication and discretion and basic decency—you might well find your words broadcast publicly.)
I am not going to engage here in more detail by default, since the moderation team has surely spent far more than our fair share on this, but for anyone reading, I stand behind all of my summaries of conversations I’ve given, to the best of my knowledge, and continue to stand behind “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here” as an accurate description of the state of LW before Said was banned.
Also, what is going on with you taking two statements by authors I talked to, neither of which directly contradicted how I summarized them, with the summary “was not true when I actually checked” and “having made false claims about people”. Jacob literally started his sentence with “his negative affect towards Achmiz” and I gave you more context on the Scott conversation which Scott didn’t dispute (though he also doesn’t seem to remember it, which isn’t that surprising, it’s now been almost a decade ago or so). Like, you can call them “disputed” if you want, but I don’t understand what you are doing here.
Also, what is going on with you taking two statements by authors I talked to, neither of which directly contradicted how I summarized them, with the summary “was not true when I actually checked” and “having made false claims about people”.
The claim I was checking was the list of allegedly discouraged authors in your 15 June 2025 comment:
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
I’m saying that I don’t think the additional context in your 12 July 2025 comment rescues the discouragement claims in the 15 June comment.
Jacob literally started his sentence with “his negative affect towards Achmiz”
Specifically, the sentence in question was (bold in original) “But now that you’ve stated that you’re disagreeable on purpose, the negative effect flipped entirely to become positive.”
In §III.2, I discuss in more detail why I don’t think your interpretation in your 12 July comment rescues the claim in your 15 June comment:
In response to being presented with Falkovich’s comment contradicting his claim about Falkovich’s opinion, Habryka replied:
I think you can clearly see how the Jacob Falkovich one is complicated. He basically says “I used to be frustrated by you, but this thing made that a lot better”. I don’t remember the exact time I talked to Jacob about it, but it had come up sometime some context where we discussed LW comment sections. It’s plausible to me it was before he made this comment, though it would be a bit surprising to me, since that’s pretty early into LW’s history.
In fact, I do not see how the Jacob Falkovich one is “clearly” complicated. Indeed, I dispute Habryka’s characterization of what Falkovich “basically says”: it is tendentious to paraphrase “negative [...] flipped entirely to become positive” as “made that a lot better.” The latter is compatible with Habryka’s original claim that Falkovich is discouraged from using the website by Achmiz, but the former directly contradicts it: if something that’s bothering you is “made [...] a lot better”, the implication is that it’s still bothering you a little bit (although not as much as before); if your attitude towards something “become[s] positive”, that implies that it’s not bothering you.
I gave you more context on the Scott conversation which Scott didn’t dispute
I also discuss this in more detail in §III.2:
Notably, [Alexander’s reported lack of memory] is not a corroboration of Habryka’s original claim that Achmiz “in particular” discouraged Alexander from using Less Wrong: if Achmiz’s comments were so noxious as to drive Alexander off the website, one would have expected Alexander to have at least some memory of it. Indeed, it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name, only that the “name came up” and that Achmiz “was a commenter we discussed.”
Yep, we covered this before, we don’t have to rehash it here. For some quick clarifications:
Indeed, it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name
To my best knowledge Scott brought up Said, not by name but indirectly (referring to a specific commenter whose exact name he didn’t remember). I then provided the name, which seemed to match.
The latter is compatible with Habryka’s original claim that Falkovich is discouraged from using the website by Achmiz, but the former directly contradicts it: if something that’s bothering you is “made [...] a lot better”, the implication is that it’s still bothering you a little bit (although not as much as before); if your attitude towards something “become[s] positive”, that implies that it’s not bothering you.
If you find it impossible to think that I had a conversation with Falkovich in which he complained to me about Said, given that comment, then I don’t know how to help you. You could dispute that such a conversation happened, but trying to somehow claim that something straightforwardly contradictory happened is absurd. Do you really think that Falkovich leaving that comment is incompatible with him having complained to me about Said at a different point in time? (This is a rhetorical question, I am not actually interested in engaging in a longer conversation here)
My take after observing this exchange and evidence:
My sense is that Habryka was doing a kind of frustrated exaggeration when making that list, in the sense of reaching for examples that were a bit marginal (e.g. he had some evidence but not strong evidence that this person fell in this category). I notice this particular mental pattern in myself sometimes when I’m trying to prove a point.
It would have been more epistemically virtuous for him to respond to Zack’s objection by noticing confusion about how two of the authors on his list had characterized themselves differently in writing. This kind of confusion might then have led to a productive reevaluation of exactly what criticisms he was making of Said.
However, it’s hard to do the move of noticing confusion when you feel like you’re in an adversarial conversational setting, and both Zack and Said were behaving fairly adversarially. For example, “You are making false claims” is a pretty confrontational way for Zack to phrase his point, as is the “clearly contradicted” claim (it sounds like Jacob and maybe Scott were “such people” at one point in time, and then stopped being such people, which makes the situation less clear).
Re Said being adversarial—yeah, his comment above Habryka’s is extremely annoying to me, even reading it a year later. For example, describing his opponents’ position as “absurd”, expressing incredulity that people who are annoyed by him can make useful contributions, the sly dig of “none of them are remotely flattering. But such things aren’t what you have in mind… are they?”, etc.
Actually, rereading Said’s comment above Habryka’s made me significantly more object-level supportive of banning him. There’s a whole bunch of conversational moves he does in even that one comment which read to me as highly optimized to be corrosive to discourse. The thing it most reminds me of is the twitter meme “It’s amazing how much political discourse is just people pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.” Said is both repeatedly pretending to not understand things, and also peppering insults throughout his comment behind the fig leaf of asking questions. Each of those independently seems ban-worthy if he were doing them regularly.
Overall: I already had the sense that Habryka sometimes makes overly strong claims when he gets mad. This is a flaw, but given my own evaluation of Said, I think that getting mad at him is a pretty appropriate response, and so this exchange doesn’t much change my original read that Habyrka is doing his job well (at least with regard to this issue).
It would have been more epistemically virtuous for him to respond to Zack’s objection by noticing confusion about how two of the authors on his list had characterized themselves differently in writing.
I really wouldn’t mind people trying to bring in evidence about what top authors believe (and I thanked Zack for doing so!). Figuring out what annoys people about LW is a tricky epistemic problem that I would gladly accept help with.
But that conversation wasn’t about that. It was a conversation in which Zack took small pieces of evidence that were evidence against a big picture assessment I made (which will of course be common, people are mercurial and complicated and change their mind all the time, as Falkovich’s comment itself illustrates), and tried to frame it as proof that I am lying about the evidence I introduced. Clearly the most important thing is to argue and share evidence about whether I am lying and maliciously making things up, not what the actual current epistemic state of Falkovich’s beliefs was or is. The former matters so much more for everyone here than the latter, and Zack was clearly talking about the former.
I am not confused about whether those conversations happened, and I wasn’t trying to have a conversation about the object level, I was responding to the accusation of lying.[1]
Like, just to look at Zack’s specific comment here:
You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.
I endorse the way I replied. Zack said that I was making “false claims”, and I am not. The supposed “false” statement was that this list of author had complained about Said, specifically. They have. No one has provided any compelling evidence against this, though it’s sad that Scott doesn’t remember the conversation. And this continues to be the right thing to focus on while Zack is going around telling people that I lied about what others have said to me.
I am not going to play this fun little Motte and Bailey game where in one sentence Zack says “you are lying, therefore no one should trust you” and in another sentence says “I believe you were wrong and I am just sharing evidence that you are wrong”. Those are two drastically different conversational operations! I am here responding to the former, and I was responding to the former in that other conversational context.
And I am also not trying to have that conversation in this thread! If you want to discuss what authors actually currently believe, or used to believe, I am happy to do that! But the topic of conversation here is “did Habryka lie about the evidence he presented in the linked conversation” not “how much were authors actually bothered by Said”, and I don’t think it would be virtuous to make this or the other conversation suddenly about the latter.
I interpret Zack’s “you are making false claims” as stronger than “you are incorrect” but weaker than “you are lying”/”you are deliberately making false claims”.[1] I think that a more epistemically virtuous version of Zack would have separated “you’re incorrect about two of these people” from any further inference he wanted to make about whether you did it deliberately. Instead, the phrasing he used is halfway between the two, strong enough to carry some implication that you’re lying, but not actually making that accusation outright. Given this, I think a more epistemically virtuous version of you would have tried to clarify whether he was claiming you were deliberately or just accidentally making false claims, and wouldn’t summarize the interaction as Zack accusing you of lying unless he confirmed the former.
I’d take this back if he specifically said elsewhere that you were lying about this, but I haven’t seen that. Note that in his comment above he mentions the case “if you do accidentally make false claims”, which suggests that he’s not interpreting “make false claims” as requiring deliberate intent to lie.
The claim you made was not “these people have criticized Said to me”, but rather “these people are [such people]”, which is most naturally read to be referring to Said’s description of “[usefully contributing] authors who find this person’s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that… it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”. And so it might be true that people have criticized Said to you in the past, while false that they currently fall into that category overall. In other words, the most natural interpretation IMO is that their comments to you are evidence about whether they’re in this category, not determinant of whether they’re in this category, and so you could be wrong without lying.
I also think that it’s fairly obvious from the outside that when you defended your statement you were interpreting it as something like “these people have criticized Said to me”. A more epistemically virtuous version of Zack would have noted that the thing you literally said is not “these people have criticized Said” but rather “these people are [the kinds of people Said was describing]” and asked you to clarify which of these you were actually defending. Instead, Zack made claims like “(apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz)” which seems like a (motivated) failure to understand what you were trying to do.
To be clear, I find it very understandable to be frustrated by all of these interactions, since both Said and (to a much lesser extent) Zack phrased statements in ways that I consider to be norm-violatingly aggressive. Hence why I said above that I continue to think you’re doing a good job with all of this. However, on these specific points of interpretation, you seem to be incorrect or at least uncharitable, most specifically in interpreting “making false claims” as an outright accusation of lying.
I also think that “you made false claims” is slightly weaker than “you are making false claims”, because the present tense implies that there’s more of a continuous deliberate action.
I think that readers who read that comment were likely to walk away with the belief that, as of June 2025, Falkovich found Achmiz’s very presence in a discussion so unpleasant that it was enough to discourage Falkovich from posting on Less Wrong altogether. I’m saying that that belief is contradicted by Falkovich’s October 2018 comment. I agree that this is compatible with you having had an earlier conversation with Falkovich in which he made some sort of complaint about Achmiz. If you think the wording in my post is unclear, I’m happy to consider suggested edits.
(This is a rhetorical question, I am not actually interested in engaging in a longer conversation here)
Sure. I’m not asking you to engage in a longer conversation. I’m correcting your public characterization of my position.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. Let me try again. I’m saying that that belief is contradicted by Falkovich’s October 2018 comment.
Look, you said the words:
if the thing Habryka claimed about Alexander and Falkovich was not true when I actually checked
And:
Habryka with Alexander and Falkovich’s statements, rather than apologizing for having made false claims about other people’s stances on Achmiz
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
The thing you link to that I said was that “these people complained about Said”. They have! You did try to check whether that happened and got some inconclusive evidence. Report your evidence as inconclusive on that claim. Don’t go around saying that I reported false evidence.
And this isn’t the first time you are doing this. A year ago in the previous thread on this you said “You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.”
I agree that this is compatible with you having had an earlier conversation with Falkovich in which he made some sort of complaint about Achmiz. If you think the wording in my post is unclear, I’m happy to consider suggested edits.
IMO you are pretty unambiguously claiming I am misreporting what people have said to me. Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy. Are you going to tell me this isn’t what this is about? I am responding to those statements.
Yes, whether those people at other times said contradictory things is relevant evidence for assessing whether I lied. But indeed, that is why I am repeatedly saying “you can see how Falkovich’s comment is complicated”. In the discussion of whether I am lying about what people have reported to me, Falkovich’s comment is if anything confirmation that he did at some point find Said, specifically, really annoying, and so it really shouldn’t be surprising that he reported such to me.
You are welcome and encouraged to evaluate whether I am lying to people. But please at least be clear and open to counter-evidence when you are doing that, and don’t retreat to the much weaker statement that I argued for a (by your lights) wrong conclusion. Clearly you are arguing here that I have misrepresented evidence and am an untrustworthy reporter of evidence. If you didn’t intend to say that, then I feel so confused about what we are doing here that and I recommend changing something drastic about your commenting style.
On my understanding of the meaning of that question, if someone is correctly named as an example of such an author, and I go ask them, “Did that commenter’s presence discourage you from posting on Less Wrong?”, I anticipate the experience that they’ll say “Yes.” (Here I’m making an assumption, which you seem to disagree with, that the author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them.)
I furthermore do not anticipate the experience of finding a comment by a correctly named example telling the commenter in question that their opinion of them has “flipped entirely to become positive” and encouraging them to “Do your own thing.” Even though the author is reporting that they used to have a negative opinion of the commenter at an earlier point in time (before it “flipped entirely to become positive”), that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
The reason I think those things are very different is because they’re very different in my own case, and I imagined that other people would be similar. I have some negative opinions (or one could as well use the word “complaints”) about lots of users of this website, but there’s no one I find so unpleasant that it’s enough to discourage me from posting on the website altogether. For example, I’ve complained about, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky (often, actually). If someone said, “Davis complained about Yudkowsky,” that would be a true claim. If someone said, “Davis finds Yudkowsky’s presence so unpleasant that it discourages him from using the website,” that would be a false claim. The claim would still be false even if someone erroneously thought the former implies the latter (and therefore wasn’t lying when they said it). I think it’s epistemically sloppy to collapse those two things (and that epistemically sloppy people are less trustworthy), even if epistemic sloppiness isn’t lying.
Regarding the assumption that an author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them, part of the reason that that seems like a reasonable assumption to me is that the central and uncontroversial case of an author finding Achmiz so unpleasant that it discourages them from using the website is Duncan Sabien, who is on the record saying as much. Sabien definitely remembers Achmiz, and has a direct negative opinion of him! I think it would be weird to put someone who says they have “no direct opinion” on Achmiz on the same list of discouraged authors as Sabien.
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
I see. In retrospect, I wish I had gone with “misleading claims” rather than “false claims.” (Or maybe better, asked a clarifying question, as Richard Ngo suggests.) When a typical reader of my words walks away with a wrong belief, then the thing I said was “misleading” (independently of my conscious intent), even if it might not have been unambiguously “false” (because there exists a construal of my words that would make them true: for example, because my understanding of the question I was being asked differed from how typical readers interpreted the question).
I regret my word choice—by which I mean: I think that this experience will make me more likely to think carefully about whether I should say “misleading” rather than “false” in analogous future situations.
Importantly, both “misleading claims” and “false claims” need not entail lying. If I tell people “Munich is in Russia”, then I made a false claim, because actually, Munich is in Germany. It doesn’t matter whether I thought I was telling the truth (for example, because I misremembered something I read). Claims about “false claims” are about the claim, not the speaker’s private intent. People who see me making that mistake should regard me as less trustworthy about geography.
Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy.
Yes, this whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which you are trustworthy. However—
whether I lied [...] the discussion of whether I am lying [...] evaluate whether I am lying to people
I think there are ways to be (somewhat, quantitatively, in a topic-dependent way) untrustworthy without consciously lying, but simply by being biased: for example, by overestimating the degree to which other people share your dislike of Achmiz and interpreting ambiguous statements from them in the light of that prior without being clear in your reports to others about the interpretive lens that you’re adding. (I’ve been writing about this kind of phenomenon for years.)
I think I’ve been very careful to not sloppily misuse the l-word. That’s why I made sure to explain above (and in my post) that “the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports” because “[w]hat matters is the likelihood ratio”. If it helps, think about a machine learning classifer rather than a human: if a classifer assigns positive labels to data points that are confirmed to be negative, that does make the classifier less trustworthy.
I don’t think I’m holding you to standards that I wouldn’t hold myself. If someone asked me, “Who dislikes Alice?” and I replied, “Bob dislikes Alice,” on the basis of my fuzzy memories of a conversation that I had with Bob seven years ago (in which Bob said something negative about someone whose name he didn’t know, and I supplied Alice’s name, which seemed to match the description Bob gave) and then Dave came to me and said, “You are making false claims; I talked to Bob, and he said he has no direct opinion of Alice”, I think I would be embarrassed! In addition to giving my side of the story about why I said what I did (about what I remembered about that conversation with Bob seven years ago), I think I would apologize for having replied to the literal question “Who dislikes Alice?” with the literal answer “Bob dislikes Alice” when Bob isn’t corroborating that. I think if I stood by my original answer and insisted I had done nothing wrong, people would be right to (quantitatively) distrust me more because of that!
Oh, maybe this is the whole problem with this issue? This is the sentence I wrote:
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
This is the sentence I am pretty sure I meant to write (and is as far as I can tell the only way to make the sentence work out grammatically):
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, [have complained along these lines] about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
It’s now been long enough that I am not 100% confident this is what I meant to write, but it’s certainly how I remember that thread.
That said, even granting that I had instead written something more like “My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on have been discouraged from posting on this site because of you, in-particular”, then I absolutely stand by that as well! “Being discouraged” from something does not mean “they have completely stopped the relevant behavior”.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”. I do not hear about the vast vast majority of things that cause people to be discouraged from posting on LW. By the time I hear about them it’s a much bigger deal than the vast majority of things in that class.
I agree that in as much you interpreted my statement as “these authors have all stopped posting on the site because of you”, then of course my statement is obviously blatantly wrong. But I don’t understand how that hypothesis would even be available, given that I myself was in the list, and I am of course still posting on the site!
I think upon rereading it’s plausible Said did intend to only refer to people who completely stopped posting on the site. I think I extended the category of person in a somewhat rude way, and I think that was not ideal. But I also think I did so in a way that was pretty obvious and not actually misleading, as again I included myself in the category which really feels like it makes it hard to interpret my statement that way. I also think the fact that Said asked Ben “(Are you one of them?)” clearly implies he is just talking about a general kind of “discouragement” since of course Ben has not been driven off site by Said.
Yeah, thinking more about this, I stand behind my initial reaction. The fact that Said asked Ben “Are you one of them” clearly implies Said is not talking about authors that were literally driven off the site, but just talking about authors who were generally (non-trivially) discouraged by posting on the site by Said. This makes this interpretation of yours seem highly tenuous:
that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
I think it’s quite clear from context that Said and Ben and I were talking about “authors discouraged by Said from posting on LW”. Not in a way that implies they completely stopped posting, but in a way that it played some non-trivial impediment, and I continue to think this true of everyone I listed, and this is of course a much lower bar than “complaining about a commenter”. By the time someone directly complains about a commenter the discouragement is quite intense.
I intended to report specific complaints that provide evidence of people being discouraged (in some non-trivial way), but did sure produce a non-grammatical sentence that made it sound more like I am making a statement of general fact about the net-discouragement of those people.
I do also stand behind that broader statement, and would find your responses frustrating and exaggerated and ungrounded even if I had intended to say that, and unambiguously done so. But, if I had understood your read of my sentence better, would have reacted with somewhat less frustration (because saying that someone is misleading about a statement of difficult interpretation in the presence of contravening evidence, even if that seems unsubstantiated, is still much less frustrating than having someone go around and say that you are lying about directly observable facts).
For the fraction of our conversation that was frustrating due to my grammatical error, and unclear communication in that comment, as well as further frustration caused by me not noticing that what I wrote was unclear earlier in this conversation, I apologize.
In my model of the conversation you kept directly indicating that I was misreporting evidence, but I now see how my sentence was more ambiguous than I thought. That said, I continue to strongly disagree that in the world where I did make an unambiguous statement of general inference (that these authors were discouraged from posting on LW) that you finding the kind of comment that Jacob made, or the kind of statement that Scott made, that this would be any substantial evidence against my integrity (indeed, I continue to believe the same and would continue to write that same statement today, though in the case of Jacob would link to his 2018 comment as some countervailing evidence).
As an outsider to all of this, from my perspective I don’t know why you keep letting him bait you into continuing this argument. It doesn’t appear productive and it’s just dragging everyone through the mud as everyone tries to get the last word in?
(apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz?)
Hm.
I think this makes sense. habryka has a strong incentive to care about why and when influential people reduce their usage of the site; his social status and employment status are tied very heavily to the site. It seems much more likely that the ACT author said something to habryka and then forgot about it (given habryka is significantly more incentivized to remember a comment about the site than the ACT author) than habryka fabricating evidence.
I say this as someone who does not really mind Achmiz and is not particularly fond of any of the moderators of this site (I think many of the post-LW2 changes have been really bad and have unreasonably-weighted the wrong sort): I think you are working backwards from the outcome you want and allowing your reasoning to get sloppy to support it, while posting in sufficient volume to give the illusion of rigor when in reality you’re just out-bandwidthing. I am generally fond of your participation on the site, because I am a fan of people having fun on chat forums, and “never stop posting” is a mantra I believe in, but I think this is a trend for you and your patterns of thought at large in a way that seems genuinely distressing to you.
I mean this in the nicest way, as someone who thinks you may share part of the most-unfortunate piece of their mental scaffolding: Have you ever been screened for obsessive-compulsive disorder?
It might even be too reasonable…as there’s no real limit on what site administrators can do to their own site, they can replace all of LW with a giant poop emoji if they really wanted to, so such enormously long elaborations might be counterproductive even for the intended purpose.
At least to me, a few paragraphs with flawless airtight logic is more genuinely convincing than dozens of paragraphs of less than airtight logic.
Speaking of which, I got the itch while writing this to add in an extra few sentences to elaborate in further detail… so there may be a subtle memetic effect too.
Edit: I seem to have attracted 4 random downvoters who appear too ashamed to even indicate a rationale. Which seems to indicate my comment touches upon something of substance.
Edit: I seem to have attracted 4 random downvoters who appear too ashamed to even indicate a rationale. Which seems to indicate my comment touches upon something of substance.
This is not a strong argument. It is equally plausible that 4+ people think your post is simply bad and not worth the effort to criticize.
This is not meant as an attack on you, but I do think your post here is guilty of some of the same misbehaviour that the OP explains.
The quoted text wasn’t an argument, it doesn’t make sense to pretend it was…?
It’s clearly an edit to add in my own personal opinion that I wasn’t seeking an argument about.
And frankly, probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post, including you. So it wouldn’t make sense at all.
Edit: I just realized that does imply the downvoters are also being mildly deceptive, since they would know they didn’t read the full text. So ironically it reinforces the original point in a counterintuitive way, and if you squint at it, it might imply an argument on the meta level of multiple deceivers roaming around… but then pretty much everyone who commented or voted would fall under suspicion too, so that would be a real stretch.
Double Edit: It’s somewhat of a startling implication, could literally everyone who voted under this post be behaving mildly deceptively? I didn’t even consider the possibility when I wrote the original comment but now am leaning towards that being the case, if typical forum norms of reading the full text are taken literally. Thanks for raising the unsettling point. I’ll take a bit of karma loss for that.
I did actually read all of the post. it was interesting read. the claim that “probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post” looks to me as example of Typical Mind Fallacy, and one that reflects poorly on you.
I also updated toward the possibility i made the same mistake, and i should stop assuming that 90%+ the commenters read the post. thank you for that.
Of course there could be people that fully read it and didn’t comment?
It clearly wasn’t meant to exclude every single possible reader on the internet that could have come across it. That would be a crazy interpretation.
At most, it can be read as calling out every single commentator underneath the post who did pretend to read all of it. And yes it’s clear not every commentator pretended that, so they wouldn’t fall into that category.
Trying to score points in such an obvious way is also pretty deceptive.
see, I actually assumed everyone obviously read it all before commenting, before I saw your comment. WHY you assume they didn’t? why you assume they/we pretending?
I say nothing about people who read and didn’t comment and have no idea from where this weird misunderstanding, and the accusation came from.
at this point I have the hypothesis you inclined to assume bad path where there are none, and then jump to accusations before checking if it even true. I saw zero evidence to people commented without reading, but you rise the hypothesis and then behave as if you encountered some evidence to it being true.
where is the part, when after thinking about it, you search for evidence?
Why would I reply on a public comment how exactly I detected this, assuming you do believe there is in fact some technique?
Asking me in a public comment to reveal techniques that would obviously help such pretenders evade better in the future is just nonsensical, at least put it in a DM.
And if you don’t believe there is any such technique, why pretend to ask in the first place?
See, my leading hypothesis is that you inclined to make negative interpretations, without noticing you are doing it or that there are alternative, and without checking what interpretation is more likely. I think this because i saw you doing it twice.
so saying that you did look on the alternative, that you considered both options and then chose one, is already giving new information. although, you didn’t actually said you did that.
I will say on my part that in Facebook I frequently have the experience of reading comments when it looks like they didn’t read the post they commented on, and I didn’t have this impression here.
and also that the “obviously help such pretenders evade better” is yet another example of the “making negative assumptions”. like… you do understand it’s not obvious, yes? that your negative assumptions look obviously wrong to me, and that you provide exactly zero evidence, and what is worse, that it doesn’t look like you understand that “providing evidence” is something you should do?
do you notice that negative interpretation step you are doing? because what I want is for you to stop doing it for short time, but… do you see there is a thing you are doing, and you can do something else instead?
because, it’s actually pretty hard to communicate when you jump to some wrong conclusions every comment, but it doesn’t look you can the jumps.
and going that “your comment assuming wrong negative interpretation” each time is not working. I say and you assume A-> B and then replay to B and if I try to replay instead of meta-replay, it would have looked like… “But I didn’t say B, or C, or D, and the options are not F or G, I actually think H, and also, you can’t claim B C D without any reason, and you didn’t react in any way to A, which is the thing I actually said”.
This comment is utterly incompressible and full of baseless accusations. I will now downvote it. Am I behaving deceptively? How about if I had silently downvoted it? No.
How can your opinion even affect the probability of deception in the first place? It seems incapable of moving the needle in that way, so I don’t see the logical connection.
By definition, deception means that there might be some pretense/ulterior motives/deflection/tricks/etc… behind the face value reading of your comments.
May I ask what your motivation was when you wrote and published this post of yours?
Were you trying to learn something? Or were you trying to teach me something? Or were you just responding to the knee-jerk impulse to win a fight online?
My post above was an attempt to teach you something. I hope that this wording does not come off as condescending; it is not meant as such. I am here on LessWrong primarily to learn. As such, I appreciate it when someone genuinely tries to teach me something. I hope that you will take it in the same spirit.
I think your first post above had some flaws in terms of rationality. I think your follow-up is even less rational.
Am I making sense? I might not be. I can try to be clearer, but only if you truly want to know what I am trying to say.
The motivation, after the double edit, is clearly to express suprise after connecting the dots and to enumerate it…
I wrote it in the most straightforward and direct manner possible?
After re-reading it twice, I get that clearly implicates you too, so I get why you may be upset.
But even if it might have been better worded given more time… by definition all commentators under a post at least potentially voted. So I don’t see how the implication could have been avoided entirely while still getting the gist across.
The motivation, after the double edit, is clearly to express suprise after connecting the dots and to enumerate it…
Sure, but do you need to express all your emotions?
In my experience (as a rough guideline), when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse. The latter is something I want to catch and notice as often as I can, in order to learn to be more conscious and more rational as much of the time as possible.
Since you read and post on LessWrong, I assume that you want to learn to be more rational. Am I right?
I may have been expressing myself too vaguely. What I have been trying to say is this: I think that when you write these posts, you are in the grip of subconscious urges—presumably an urge to defend yourself and “win fights” in order to secure your social status. I am trying to convince you that you can train and improve your own rationality by introspecting more about why you do the things you do.
I wrote it in the most straightforward and direct manner possible?
Is this a question? Or are you just defending yourself again?
not relevant to the larger discussion, but you wrote sentence i disagree with: “when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse”
well, in my model, i act to achieve goal of from some impulse. the impulsive doesn’t have to be subconscious. I don’t think acting on impulses is always bad or oppose rationality, in the same way that emotions are not always irrational.
I don’t see acting on an urge itslef bad. moreover, there are circumstances when i try to act on my impulses more rather then less!
so… what is the problem on acting on impulses, exactly? i don’t need to express all my emotions, but all else equal, consider it good thing to do that. because i want to. things are not else equal, but you need tactfully say what is the problem. writing comments because i want to (under some constrains) seem to me like the right thing to do.
“Why do you do this? In order to achieve some goal?” my best answer to this is “because I want to”, but I mostly think it’s the wrong question. you are assuming that people do things to achieve goals, and I’m saying that achieving goals is not the only reason to do things, that “what goal it is achieving” is the wring level of meta to ask.
why do you think that the right sort of answers are in the forms of goals and not in the form of impulses?
there is a pattern when i want something, i experience urge or desire or want to do something or have something. then i act on that impulse/urge/desire. then i satisfied it, and i feel sated of happy or fulfilled. this is good!
the way i model such things, this is important part of what my non-existent Utility Function is. that is the first level. sometimes, acting on a urge does not fulfill it, or even anti-fulfill it. sometimes i want things that are actually to abstract of complicated to be described as urges i can act upon without planning in thinking. but this is the exception, not the rule.
as i see it, something like CEV work like that—do what i want, because i want that. encounter problems, or things that need planning. plan to solve the problems or plan to achieve goals.
but all the part of goals and planing is kicking on only as reaction to problems or wanting something in the form of result and not urge. having urge → acting on urge → being satisfied is the basic loop, the default that does not need explanation or justification.
while it’s look to me that you see having goal and act to achieve it as the basic loop that does not need explanation or justification.
so to try again answer to the question: “Why do you do this?” because this is my Utility function. the urges are, to first approximation, my utility function. they are obviously not a function, but the way i will have some utility function, if humankind survive, if i will get to live long enough, is by weaving together the different things that i want. and part of it is goal-shaped, part of it is in the form of “i want the world be in that state”. but a lot of it is in the form “i want to do x”.
there is important difference, in my ontology, between wants in the form “i want the world be in x state”, as in—i want the dished to be washed, i want the food be prepare, i want my home be clean, and “i want do x”. i want to play the video game, to read the post, to read the book, to eat the tasty food, to listen to music, to go to a walk.
you can translate that to goal-framing by saying that my goal is the experience of walking or the pleasant sensation, but i think that translation lose something important, and that it’s the wrong framing.
Can you please elaborate on what important thing you think is lost?
imagine i try to explain some proof in geometry to my hypothetical friend that think in feeling. I’m trying to explain her congruent triangles. and she replay to me—“so if there are three things that same you feel like it’s the same triangle, but you need to have at least one side, because angles doesn’t feel real enough to you?”
and, like, this is not wrong description, per se. she will be able to recognize congruent triangles. but I still notice that it doesn’t look like she understand the concept of proof at all!
I can describe the different predictions that I can make when i say something is a urge or a goal—when it’s urge i can’t fail to get it, i do the thing i want to do, and feel satisfied. while in goal i want to change the world state, and i can try to achieve the goal, and fail, and be unsatisfied. but this only can explain why i think there are two clusters here, and it’s not what I’m trying to do.
but what I’m actually trying to do is to connect personal experience with words. didn’t you ever feel the impulse to do something, and then did that, and then turned out the result is not what you wanted and was disappointed? didn’t you ever have the impulse to do something, and did that, and was satisfied, despite the result wasn’t what you ostensibly want?
those are the words that i use to describe this two experiences of mine.
I can describe the different predictions that I can make when i say something is a urge or a goal—when it’s urge i can’t fail to get it, i do the thing i want to do, and feel satisfied.
This is not my experience. When I act on an urge, I do not necessarily feel satisfied. There is generally some pleasure associated with the act, but it can be extremely fleeting and short-lived.
This fleeting pleasure is better than nothing, and I will often act on an urge in order to get this feeling. But after the feeling has passed, I do not feel satisfied.
I only feel satisfied after I have accomplished something that feels valuable—a goal.
Interesting! I wonder to what extend we are different physiologically, to what extend we use different words to describe same experiences, and to what extend our opinions on things shapes our experiences. alas, we don’t have a way to communicate our feelings directly, yet. and I honestly have no idea how to check.
Well, I am somewhat anhedoniac by nature. There are a lot of positive experiences which many (most?) people report and which I do not recognize. For example, the sunset does nothing for me. Sex has its moments but is overall disappointing and a far cry from its reputation. Live concerts are described by some as borderline religious experiences; for me they are cool and fun but nothing really exceptional.
Fortunately, my Buddhist-inspired meditation practice is helping me discover more joy in life.
Thank you Habryka (and the rest of the mod team) for the effort and thoughtfulness you put into making LessWrong good.
I personally have had few problems with Said, but this seems like an extremely reasonable decision. I’m leaving this comment in part to help make you feel empowered to make similar decisions in the future when you think it necessary (and ideally, at a much lower cost of your time).
When you say that it seems like an extremely reasonable decision, do you mean that you personally vouch for the soundness of the reasoning in the announcement, or are you deferring to Habryka’s apparent effort and thoughtfulness? (When you say “I personally have had few problems with Said, but”, that makes it sound like you’re deferring, rather than enthusiastically supporting the ban on the merits independently of your loyalty to Habryka.)
The distinction is critical when you’re calling for similar future decisions to be made with less effort! If you’re confident that that the decision is extremely reasonable because you personally checked, then it makes sense to recommend spending less effort next time, but if you’re deferring, I think you should be much more worried that you were mistaken to defer!
As it happens, I don’t think this was a reasonable decision at all, as I explain in detail in a new commentary post. If you’re vouching for the ban reasoning, that implies that you disagree with me quite a lot, and I’d be grateful if you could spare the time to tell me what I’m getting wrong in the comments. On the other hand, if you’re deferring, I wonder whether my objection holds enough weight to give you any pause?
I meant something like “as far as I can tell, Habryka’s procedure for thinking through this decision seems to have been a reasonable one.”
This doesn’t mean I’m vouching for the procedure, because there are many parts of it that I can’t verify/don’t know about.
But it also doesn’t just mean I’m deferring to Habyrka, because I am trying to figure out if he’s running a good decision procedure, and would have commented differently if I thought he wasn’t.
It’s something more like “Habryka has a job, and he seems to be doing his job in a reasonable way in this case”.
Zooming out: on the meta level, the reason I revisited this comment is that I saw some of your exchanges with Cade Metz, in particular the ones where you mentioned that you were engaging with him because you believe in Speech so strongly that you’re willing to pursue a quokka strategy. To me, this seems both admirable in many ways, and also like a fairly unreasonable approach (as I believe Michael also mentioned in the post). Given this, by default I don’t plan to engage with your “Comment on “Banning Said Achmiz”″, because I’m worried that you believing in Speech to this extent will end up being an unproductive crux for us. However, I’m open to arguments for why I should change my mind.
Thanks for commenting!
I don’t think so: while I concede that my deciding to talk to Metz and my opposition to the Achmiz ban are “correlated” in some sense, I fully expect that many people who would disapprove of the former would agree with my case on the latter. “Whether to talk to a biased journalist” and “whether to ban a Less Wrong user” are actually just pretty different situations, even if they both involve speech. Indeed, Achmiz himself does not share my obsession with transparency maximalism, and has a much dimmer view than me on the merits of talking to journalists, whom he has collectively described as “the scum of the earth”. [1]
Great, happy to start there. I think that one particularly legible requirement for doing the job of moderator in a reasonable way—not necessarily the most important requirement, but one that’s easy to check whether it’s being fulfilled—is, “Don’t make false claims to justify moderation decisions, and if you do accidentally make false claims, you should apologize and credibly express intent to not mislead people in that way again.”
As I document in §III.2 of my post, Habryka claimed in June 2025 that Scott Alexander and Jacob Falkovich, among “dozens of others”, were discouraged from using the website by Achmiz’s comments.
However, when I checked with Alexander, he testified that he had “no direct opinion” on Achmiz. I also found an October 2018 comment from Falkovich in which Falkovich wrote that his previous negative affect towards Achmiz had “flipped entirely to become positive” and urged Achmiz to “Do your own thing, and own it.”
When I presented Habryka with Alexander and Falkovich’s statements, rather than apologizing for having made false claims about other people’s stances on Achmiz, Habryka said of Alexander, “My guess is he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” (apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz?) and claimed that Falkovich’s statement was “complicated.”
Habryka continues to stand by a claim stated in the ban announcement post that “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here”, while noting that most complaints about other users are private. The problem here is that when someone claims that some things are examples of a phenomenon, and the things turn out not to be examples when checked, that casts doubt on claimed examples that we can’t check: if the thing Habryka claimed about Alexander and Falkovich was not true when I actually checked, then what should we believe about the “dozens of others” or “many top authors” who weren’t named? As I explain in footnote 17, the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports. (What matters is the likelihood ratio
To be clear, this is not a particularly important point in itself. (The stated basis for the ban is not “Scott Alexander said so.”) The reason I’m re-explaining it in this comment (separately from the longer discussion in §III.2) is because it’s particularly legible: you don’t have to evaluate a complicated argument to check the linked statements and see for yourself that Habryka’s claims about authors’ opinions about Achmiz were contradicted by those authors’ own statements. My hope is that this small token of evidence injects enough of a shadow of a doubt into your prior belief that Habryka is doing his job in a reasonable way in this case, that you might find it worth your time to reconsider that belief after reading §II, §III.1, and §IV, which I think are important (but less trivial to evaluate).
If you find any of it persuasive (or unpersuasive), I think it would be in the public interest for you to say so in public.
Specifically, Achmiz wrote to me in a January 2024 email (quoted with permission):
I am not going to engage here in more detail by default, since the moderation team has surely spent far more than our fair share on this, but for anyone reading, I stand behind all of my summaries of conversations I’ve given, to the best of my knowledge, and continue to stand behind “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here” as an accurate description of the state of LW before Said was banned.
Also, what is going on with you taking two statements by authors I talked to, neither of which directly contradicted how I summarized them, with the summary “was not true when I actually checked” and “having made false claims about people”. Jacob literally started his sentence with “his negative affect towards Achmiz” and I gave you more context on the Scott conversation which Scott didn’t dispute (though he also doesn’t seem to remember it, which isn’t that surprising, it’s now been almost a decade ago or so). Like, you can call them “disputed” if you want, but I don’t understand what you are doing here.
To clarify for anyone reading—
The claim I was checking was the list of allegedly discouraged authors in your 15 June 2025 comment:
I’m saying that I don’t think the additional context in your 12 July 2025 comment rescues the discouragement claims in the 15 June comment.
Specifically, the sentence in question was (bold in original) “But now that you’ve stated that you’re disagreeable on purpose, the negative effect flipped entirely to become positive.”
In §III.2, I discuss in more detail why I don’t think your interpretation in your 12 July comment rescues the claim in your 15 June comment:
I also discuss this in more detail in §III.2:
Yep, we covered this before, we don’t have to rehash it here. For some quick clarifications:
To my best knowledge Scott brought up Said, not by name but indirectly (referring to a specific commenter whose exact name he didn’t remember). I then provided the name, which seemed to match.
If you find it impossible to think that I had a conversation with Falkovich in which he complained to me about Said, given that comment, then I don’t know how to help you. You could dispute that such a conversation happened, but trying to somehow claim that something straightforwardly contradictory happened is absurd. Do you really think that Falkovich leaving that comment is incompatible with him having complained to me about Said at a different point in time? (This is a rhetorical question, I am not actually interested in engaging in a longer conversation here)
My take after observing this exchange and evidence:
My sense is that Habryka was doing a kind of frustrated exaggeration when making that list, in the sense of reaching for examples that were a bit marginal (e.g. he had some evidence but not strong evidence that this person fell in this category). I notice this particular mental pattern in myself sometimes when I’m trying to prove a point.
It would have been more epistemically virtuous for him to respond to Zack’s objection by noticing confusion about how two of the authors on his list had characterized themselves differently in writing. This kind of confusion might then have led to a productive reevaluation of exactly what criticisms he was making of Said.
However, it’s hard to do the move of noticing confusion when you feel like you’re in an adversarial conversational setting, and both Zack and Said were behaving fairly adversarially. For example, “You are making false claims” is a pretty confrontational way for Zack to phrase his point, as is the “clearly contradicted” claim (it sounds like Jacob and maybe Scott were “such people” at one point in time, and then stopped being such people, which makes the situation less clear).
Re Said being adversarial—yeah, his comment above Habryka’s is extremely annoying to me, even reading it a year later. For example, describing his opponents’ position as “absurd”, expressing incredulity that people who are annoyed by him can make useful contributions, the sly dig of “none of them are remotely flattering. But such things aren’t what you have in mind… are they?”, etc.
Actually, rereading Said’s comment above Habryka’s made me significantly more object-level supportive of banning him. There’s a whole bunch of conversational moves he does in even that one comment which read to me as highly optimized to be corrosive to discourse. The thing it most reminds me of is the twitter meme “It’s amazing how much political discourse is just people pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.” Said is both repeatedly pretending to not understand things, and also peppering insults throughout his comment behind the fig leaf of asking questions. Each of those independently seems ban-worthy if he were doing them regularly.
Overall: I already had the sense that Habryka sometimes makes overly strong claims when he gets mad. This is a flaw, but given my own evaluation of Said, I think that getting mad at him is a pretty appropriate response, and so this exchange doesn’t much change my original read that Habyrka is doing his job well (at least with regard to this issue).
I really wouldn’t mind people trying to bring in evidence about what top authors believe (and I thanked Zack for doing so!). Figuring out what annoys people about LW is a tricky epistemic problem that I would gladly accept help with.
But that conversation wasn’t about that. It was a conversation in which Zack took small pieces of evidence that were evidence against a big picture assessment I made (which will of course be common, people are mercurial and complicated and change their mind all the time, as Falkovich’s comment itself illustrates), and tried to frame it as proof that I am lying about the evidence I introduced. Clearly the most important thing is to argue and share evidence about whether I am lying and maliciously making things up, not what the actual current epistemic state of Falkovich’s beliefs was or is. The former matters so much more for everyone here than the latter, and Zack was clearly talking about the former.
I am not confused about whether those conversations happened, and I wasn’t trying to have a conversation about the object level, I was responding to the accusation of lying.[1]
Like, just to look at Zack’s specific comment here:
I endorse the way I replied. Zack said that I was making “false claims”, and I am not. The supposed “false” statement was that this list of author had complained about Said, specifically. They have. No one has provided any compelling evidence against this, though it’s sad that Scott doesn’t remember the conversation. And this continues to be the right thing to focus on while Zack is going around telling people that I lied about what others have said to me.
I am not going to play this fun little Motte and Bailey game where in one sentence Zack says “you are lying, therefore no one should trust you” and in another sentence says “I believe you were wrong and I am just sharing evidence that you are wrong”. Those are two drastically different conversational operations! I am here responding to the former, and I was responding to the former in that other conversational context.
And I am also not trying to have that conversation in this thread! If you want to discuss what authors actually currently believe, or used to believe, I am happy to do that! But the topic of conversation here is “did Habryka lie about the evidence he presented in the linked conversation” not “how much were authors actually bothered by Said”, and I don’t think it would be virtuous to make this or the other conversation suddenly about the latter.
Two disagreements with you Habryka:
I interpret Zack’s “you are making false claims” as stronger than “you are incorrect” but weaker than “you are lying”/”you are deliberately making false claims”.[1] I think that a more epistemically virtuous version of Zack would have separated “you’re incorrect about two of these people” from any further inference he wanted to make about whether you did it deliberately. Instead, the phrasing he used is halfway between the two, strong enough to carry some implication that you’re lying, but not actually making that accusation outright. Given this, I think a more epistemically virtuous version of you would have tried to clarify whether he was claiming you were deliberately or just accidentally making false claims, and wouldn’t summarize the interaction as Zack accusing you of lying unless he confirmed the former.
I’d take this back if he specifically said elsewhere that you were lying about this, but I haven’t seen that. Note that in his comment above he mentions the case “if you do accidentally make false claims”, which suggests that he’s not interpreting “make false claims” as requiring deliberate intent to lie.
The claim you made was not “these people have criticized Said to me”, but rather “these people are [such people]”, which is most naturally read to be referring to Said’s description of “[usefully contributing] authors who find this person’s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that… it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”. And so it might be true that people have criticized Said to you in the past, while false that they currently fall into that category overall. In other words, the most natural interpretation IMO is that their comments to you are evidence about whether they’re in this category, not determinant of whether they’re in this category, and so you could be wrong without lying.
I also think that it’s fairly obvious from the outside that when you defended your statement you were interpreting it as something like “these people have criticized Said to me”. A more epistemically virtuous version of Zack would have noted that the thing you literally said is not “these people have criticized Said” but rather “these people are [the kinds of people Said was describing]” and asked you to clarify which of these you were actually defending. Instead, Zack made claims like “(apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz)” which seems like a (motivated) failure to understand what you were trying to do.
To be clear, I find it very understandable to be frustrated by all of these interactions, since both Said and (to a much lesser extent) Zack phrased statements in ways that I consider to be norm-violatingly aggressive. Hence why I said above that I continue to think you’re doing a good job with all of this. However, on these specific points of interpretation, you seem to be incorrect or at least uncharitable, most specifically in interpreting “making false claims” as an outright accusation of lying.
I also think that “you made false claims” is slightly weaker than “you are making false claims”, because the present tense implies that there’s more of a continuous deliberate action.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. Let me try again.
Your 15 June 2025 comment replied to a question about “authors who find [someone]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” with a list that included Falkovich’s name.
I think that readers who read that comment were likely to walk away with the belief that, as of June 2025, Falkovich found Achmiz’s very presence in a discussion so unpleasant that it was enough to discourage Falkovich from posting on Less Wrong altogether. I’m saying that that belief is contradicted by Falkovich’s October 2018 comment. I agree that this is compatible with you having had an earlier conversation with Falkovich in which he made some sort of complaint about Achmiz. If you think the wording in my post is unclear, I’m happy to consider suggested edits.
Sure. I’m not asking you to engage in a longer conversation. I’m correcting your public characterization of my position.
I wrote a bit more here.
Look, you said the words:
And:
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
The thing you link to that I said was that “these people complained about Said”. They have! You did try to check whether that happened and got some inconclusive evidence. Report your evidence as inconclusive on that claim. Don’t go around saying that I reported false evidence.
And this isn’t the first time you are doing this. A year ago in the previous thread on this you said “You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.”
IMO you are pretty unambiguously claiming I am misreporting what people have said to me. Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy. Are you going to tell me this isn’t what this is about? I am responding to those statements.
Yes, whether those people at other times said contradictory things is relevant evidence for assessing whether I lied. But indeed, that is why I am repeatedly saying “you can see how Falkovich’s comment is complicated”. In the discussion of whether I am lying about what people have reported to me, Falkovich’s comment is if anything confirmation that he did at some point find Said, specifically, really annoying, and so it really shouldn’t be surprising that he reported such to me.
You are welcome and encouraged to evaluate whether I am lying to people. But please at least be clear and open to counter-evidence when you are doing that, and don’t retreat to the much weaker statement that I argued for a (by your lights) wrong conclusion. Clearly you are arguing here that I have misrepresented evidence and am an untrustworthy reporter of evidence. If you didn’t intend to say that, then I feel so confused about what we are doing here that and I recommend changing something drastic about your commenting style.
That’s not my understanding of what you were being asked. You were asked a question about “authors who find [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, and you answered with a list of names.
On my understanding of the meaning of that question, if someone is correctly named as an example of such an author, and I go ask them, “Did that commenter’s presence discourage you from posting on Less Wrong?”, I anticipate the experience that they’ll say “Yes.” (Here I’m making an assumption, which you seem to disagree with, that the author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them.)
I furthermore do not anticipate the experience of finding a comment by a correctly named example telling the commenter in question that their opinion of them has “flipped entirely to become positive” and encouraging them to “Do your own thing.” Even though the author is reporting that they used to have a negative opinion of the commenter at an earlier point in time (before it “flipped entirely to become positive”), that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
The reason I think those things are very different is because they’re very different in my own case, and I imagined that other people would be similar. I have some negative opinions (or one could as well use the word “complaints”) about lots of users of this website, but there’s no one I find so unpleasant that it’s enough to discourage me from posting on the website altogether. For example, I’ve complained about, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky (often, actually). If someone said, “Davis complained about Yudkowsky,” that would be a true claim. If someone said, “Davis finds Yudkowsky’s presence so unpleasant that it discourages him from using the website,” that would be a false claim. The claim would still be false even if someone erroneously thought the former implies the latter (and therefore wasn’t lying when they said it). I think it’s epistemically sloppy to collapse those two things (and that epistemically sloppy people are less trustworthy), even if epistemic sloppiness isn’t lying.
Regarding the assumption that an author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them, part of the reason that that seems like a reasonable assumption to me is that the central and uncontroversial case of an author finding Achmiz so unpleasant that it discourages them from using the website is Duncan Sabien, who is on the record saying as much. Sabien definitely remembers Achmiz, and has a direct negative opinion of him! I think it would be weird to put someone who says they have “no direct opinion” on Achmiz on the same list of discouraged authors as Sabien.
I see. In retrospect, I wish I had gone with “misleading claims” rather than “false claims.” (Or maybe better, asked a clarifying question, as Richard Ngo suggests.) When a typical reader of my words walks away with a wrong belief, then the thing I said was “misleading” (independently of my conscious intent), even if it might not have been unambiguously “false” (because there exists a construal of my words that would make them true: for example, because my understanding of the question I was being asked differed from how typical readers interpreted the question).
I regret my word choice—by which I mean: I think that this experience will make me more likely to think carefully about whether I should say “misleading” rather than “false” in analogous future situations.
Importantly, both “misleading claims” and “false claims” need not entail lying. If I tell people “Munich is in Russia”, then I made a false claim, because actually, Munich is in Germany. It doesn’t matter whether I thought I was telling the truth (for example, because I misremembered something I read). Claims about “false claims” are about the claim, not the speaker’s private intent. People who see me making that mistake should regard me as less trustworthy about geography.
Yes, this whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which you are trustworthy. However—
I think there are ways to be (somewhat, quantitatively, in a topic-dependent way) untrustworthy without consciously lying, but simply by being biased: for example, by overestimating the degree to which other people share your dislike of Achmiz and interpreting ambiguous statements from them in the light of that prior without being clear in your reports to others about the interpretive lens that you’re adding. (I’ve been writing about this kind of phenomenon for years.)
I think I’ve been very careful to not sloppily misuse the l-word. That’s why I made sure to explain above (and in my post) that “the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports” because “[w]hat matters is the likelihood ratio”. If it helps, think about a machine learning classifer rather than a human: if a classifer assigns positive labels to data points that are confirmed to be negative, that does make the classifier less trustworthy.
I don’t think I’m holding you to standards that I wouldn’t hold myself. If someone asked me, “Who dislikes Alice?” and I replied, “Bob dislikes Alice,” on the basis of my fuzzy memories of a conversation that I had with Bob seven years ago (in which Bob said something negative about someone whose name he didn’t know, and I supplied Alice’s name, which seemed to match the description Bob gave) and then Dave came to me and said, “You are making false claims; I talked to Bob, and he said he has no direct opinion of Alice”, I think I would be embarrassed! In addition to giving my side of the story about why I said what I did (about what I remembered about that conversation with Bob seven years ago), I think I would apologize for having replied to the literal question “Who dislikes Alice?” with the literal answer “Bob dislikes Alice” when Bob isn’t corroborating that. I think if I stood by my original answer and insisted I had done nothing wrong, people would be right to (quantitatively) distrust me more because of that!
Oh, maybe this is the whole problem with this issue? This is the sentence I wrote:
This is the sentence I am pretty sure I meant to write (and is as far as I can tell the only way to make the sentence work out grammatically):
It’s now been long enough that I am not 100% confident this is what I meant to write, but it’s certainly how I remember that thread.
That said, even granting that I had instead written something more like “My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on have been discouraged from posting on this site because of you, in-particular”, then I absolutely stand by that as well! “Being discouraged” from something does not mean “they have completely stopped the relevant behavior”.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”. I do not hear about the vast vast majority of things that cause people to be discouraged from posting on LW. By the time I hear about them it’s a much bigger deal than the vast majority of things in that class.
I agree that in as much you interpreted my statement as “these authors have all stopped posting on the site because of you”, then of course my statement is obviously blatantly wrong. But I don’t understand how that hypothesis would even be available, given that I myself was in the list, and I am of course still posting on the site!
I think upon rereading it’s plausible Said did intend to only refer to people who completely stopped posting on the site. I think I extended the category of person in a somewhat rude way, and I think that was not ideal. But I also think I did so in a way that was pretty obvious and not actually misleading, as again I included myself in the category which really feels like it makes it hard to interpret my statement that way. I also think the fact that Said asked Ben “(Are you one of them?)” clearly implies he is just talking about a general kind of “discouragement” since of course Ben has not been driven off site by Said.
Yeah, thinking more about this, I stand behind my initial reaction. The fact that Said asked Ben “Are you one of them” clearly implies Said is not talking about authors that were literally driven off the site, but just talking about authors who were generally (non-trivially) discouraged by posting on the site by Said. This makes this interpretation of yours seem highly tenuous:
I think it’s quite clear from context that Said and Ben and I were talking about “authors discouraged by Said from posting on LW”. Not in a way that implies they completely stopped posting, but in a way that it played some non-trivial impediment, and I continue to think this true of everyone I listed, and this is of course a much lower bar than “complaining about a commenter”. By the time someone directly complains about a commenter the discouragement is quite intense.
I intended to report specific complaints that provide evidence of people being discouraged (in some non-trivial way), but did sure produce a non-grammatical sentence that made it sound more like I am making a statement of general fact about the net-discouragement of those people.
I do also stand behind that broader statement, and would find your responses frustrating and exaggerated and ungrounded even if I had intended to say that, and unambiguously done so. But, if I had understood your read of my sentence better, would have reacted with somewhat less frustration (because saying that someone is misleading about a statement of difficult interpretation in the presence of contravening evidence, even if that seems unsubstantiated, is still much less frustrating than having someone go around and say that you are lying about directly observable facts).
For the fraction of our conversation that was frustrating due to my grammatical error, and unclear communication in that comment, as well as further frustration caused by me not noticing that what I wrote was unclear earlier in this conversation, I apologize.
In my model of the conversation you kept directly indicating that I was misreporting evidence, but I now see how my sentence was more ambiguous than I thought. That said, I continue to strongly disagree that in the world where I did make an unambiguous statement of general inference (that these authors were discouraged from posting on LW) that you finding the kind of comment that Jacob made, or the kind of statement that Scott made, that this would be any substantial evidence against my integrity (indeed, I continue to believe the same and would continue to write that same statement today, though in the case of Jacob would link to his 2018 comment as some countervailing evidence).
As an outsider to all of this, from my perspective I don’t know why you keep letting him bait you into continuing this argument. It doesn’t appear productive and it’s just dragging everyone through the mud as everyone tries to get the last word in?
Hm.
I think this makes sense. habryka has a strong incentive to care about why and when influential people reduce their usage of the site; his social status and employment status are tied very heavily to the site. It seems much more likely that the ACT author said something to habryka and then forgot about it (given habryka is significantly more incentivized to remember a comment about the site than the ACT author) than habryka fabricating evidence.
I say this as someone who does not really mind Achmiz and is not particularly fond of any of the moderators of this site (I think many of the post-LW2 changes have been really bad and have unreasonably-weighted the wrong sort): I think you are working backwards from the outcome you want and allowing your reasoning to get sloppy to support it, while posting in sufficient volume to give the illusion of rigor when in reality you’re just out-bandwidthing. I am generally fond of your participation on the site, because I am a fan of people having fun on chat forums, and “never stop posting” is a mantra I believe in, but I think this is a trend for you and your patterns of thought at large in a way that seems genuinely distressing to you.
I mean this in the nicest way, as someone who thinks you may share part of the most-unfortunate piece of their mental scaffolding: Have you ever been screened for obsessive-compulsive disorder?
It might even be too reasonable…as there’s no real limit on what site administrators can do to their own site, they can replace all of LW with a giant poop emoji if they really wanted to, so such enormously long elaborations might be counterproductive even for the intended purpose.
At least to me, a few paragraphs with flawless airtight logic is more genuinely convincing than dozens of paragraphs of less than airtight logic.
Speaking of which, I got the itch while writing this to add in an extra few sentences to elaborate in further detail… so there may be a subtle memetic effect too.
Edit: I seem to have attracted 4 random downvoters who appear too ashamed to even indicate a rationale. Which seems to indicate my comment touches upon something of substance.
This is not a strong argument. It is equally plausible that 4+ people think your post is simply bad and not worth the effort to criticize.
This is not meant as an attack on you, but I do think your post here is guilty of some of the same misbehaviour that the OP explains.
The quoted text wasn’t an argument, it doesn’t make sense to pretend it was…?
It’s clearly an edit to add in my own personal opinion that I wasn’t seeking an argument about.
And frankly, probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post, including you. So it wouldn’t make sense at all.
Edit: I just realized that does imply the downvoters are also being mildly deceptive, since they would know they didn’t read the full text. So ironically it reinforces the original point in a counterintuitive way, and if you squint at it, it might imply an argument on the meta level of multiple deceivers roaming around… but then pretty much everyone who commented or voted would fall under suspicion too, so that would be a real stretch.
Double Edit: It’s somewhat of a startling implication, could literally everyone who voted under this post be behaving mildly deceptively? I didn’t even consider the possibility when I wrote the original comment but now am leaning towards that being the case, if typical forum norms of reading the full text are taken literally. Thanks for raising the unsettling point. I’ll take a bit of karma loss for that.
I did actually read all of the post. it was interesting read. the claim that “probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post” looks to me as example of Typical Mind Fallacy, and one that reflects poorly on you.
I also updated toward the possibility i made the same mistake, and i should stop assuming that 90%+ the commenters read the post. thank you for that.
Of course there could be people that fully read it and didn’t comment?
It clearly wasn’t meant to exclude every single possible reader on the internet that could have come across it. That would be a crazy interpretation.
At most, it can be read as calling out every single commentator underneath the post who did pretend to read all of it. And yes it’s clear not every commentator pretended that, so they wouldn’t fall into that category.
Trying to score points in such an obvious way is also pretty deceptive.
see, I actually assumed everyone obviously read it all before commenting, before I saw your comment. WHY you assume they didn’t? why you assume they/we pretending?
I say nothing about people who read and didn’t comment and have no idea from where this weird misunderstanding, and the accusation came from.
at this point I have the hypothesis you inclined to assume bad path where there are none, and then jump to accusations before checking if it even true. I saw zero evidence to people commented without reading, but you rise the hypothesis and then behave as if you encountered some evidence to it being true.
where is the part, when after thinking about it, you search for evidence?
Why would I reply on a public comment how exactly I detected this, assuming you do believe there is in fact some technique?
Asking me in a public comment to reveal techniques that would obviously help such pretenders evade better in the future is just nonsensical, at least put it in a DM.
And if you don’t believe there is any such technique, why pretend to ask in the first place?
See, my leading hypothesis is that you inclined to make negative interpretations, without noticing you are doing it or that there are alternative, and without checking what interpretation is more likely. I think this because i saw you doing it twice.
so saying that you did look on the alternative, that you considered both options and then chose one, is already giving new information. although, you didn’t actually said you did that.
I will say on my part that in Facebook I frequently have the experience of reading comments when it looks like they didn’t read the post they commented on, and I didn’t have this impression here.
and also that the “obviously help such pretenders evade better” is yet another example of the “making negative assumptions”. like… you do understand it’s not obvious, yes? that your negative assumptions look obviously wrong to me, and that you provide exactly zero evidence, and what is worse, that it doesn’t look like you understand that “providing evidence” is something you should do?
do you notice that negative interpretation step you are doing? because what I want is for you to stop doing it for short time, but… do you see there is a thing you are doing, and you can do something else instead?
because, it’s actually pretty hard to communicate when you jump to some wrong conclusions every comment, but it doesn’t look you can the jumps.
and going that “your comment assuming wrong negative interpretation” each time is not working. I say and you assume A-> B and then replay to B and if I try to replay instead of meta-replay, it would have looked like… “But I didn’t say B, or C, or D, and the options are not F or G, I actually think H, and also, you can’t claim B C D without any reason, and you didn’t react in any way to A, which is the thing I actually said”.
This comment is utterly incompressible and full of baseless accusations. I will now downvote it. Am I behaving deceptively? How about if I had silently downvoted it? No.
How can your opinion even affect the probability of deception in the first place? It seems incapable of moving the needle in that way, so I don’t see the logical connection.
By definition, deception means that there might be some pretense/ulterior motives/deflection/tricks/etc… behind the face value reading of your comments.
May I ask what your motivation was when you wrote and published this post of yours?
Were you trying to learn something? Or were you trying to teach me something? Or were you just responding to the knee-jerk impulse to win a fight online?
My post above was an attempt to teach you something. I hope that this wording does not come off as condescending; it is not meant as such. I am here on LessWrong primarily to learn. As such, I appreciate it when someone genuinely tries to teach me something. I hope that you will take it in the same spirit.
I think your first post above had some flaws in terms of rationality. I think your follow-up is even less rational.
Am I making sense? I might not be. I can try to be clearer, but only if you truly want to know what I am trying to say.
The motivation, after the double edit, is clearly to express suprise after connecting the dots and to enumerate it…
I wrote it in the most straightforward and direct manner possible?
After re-reading it twice, I get that clearly implicates you too, so I get why you may be upset.
But even if it might have been better worded given more time… by definition all commentators under a post at least potentially voted. So I don’t see how the implication could have been avoided entirely while still getting the gist across.
Sure, but do you need to express all your emotions?
In my experience (as a rough guideline), when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse. The latter is something I want to catch and notice as often as I can, in order to learn to be more conscious and more rational as much of the time as possible.
Since you read and post on LessWrong, I assume that you want to learn to be more rational. Am I right?
I may have been expressing myself too vaguely. What I have been trying to say is this: I think that when you write these posts, you are in the grip of subconscious urges—presumably an urge to defend yourself and “win fights” in order to secure your social status. I am trying to convince you that you can train and improve your own rationality by introspecting more about why you do the things you do.
Is this a question? Or are you just defending yourself again?
not relevant to the larger discussion, but you wrote sentence i disagree with:
“when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse”
well, in my model, i act to achieve goal of from some impulse. the impulsive doesn’t have to be subconscious. I don’t think acting on impulses is always bad or oppose rationality, in the same way that emotions are not always irrational.
I don’t see acting on an urge itslef bad. moreover, there are circumstances when i try to act on my impulses more rather then less!
so… what is the problem on acting on impulses, exactly? i don’t need to express all my emotions, but all else equal, consider it good thing to do that. because i want to. things are not else equal, but you need tactfully say what is the problem. writing comments because i want to (under some constrains) seem to me like the right thing to do.
(alas, my longer explanations on this are in Hebrew.
https://hadoveretharishona.wordpress.com/?p=7130 )
Fair point. It is possible to be conscious of an impulse and act on it even if it does not serve any particular goal. Let us rephrase:
When I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some impulse.
Why do you do this? In order to achieve some goal?
“Why do you do this? In order to achieve some goal?”
my best answer to this is “because I want to”, but I mostly think it’s the wrong question. you are assuming that people do things to achieve goals, and I’m saying that achieving goals is not the only reason to do things, that “what goal it is achieving” is the wring level of meta to ask.
why do you think that the right sort of answers are in the forms of goals and not in the form of impulses?
there is a pattern when i want something, i experience urge or desire or want to do something or have something. then i act on that impulse/urge/desire. then i satisfied it, and i feel sated of happy or fulfilled. this is good!
the way i model such things, this is important part of what my non-existent Utility Function is. that is the first level. sometimes, acting on a urge does not fulfill it, or even anti-fulfill it. sometimes i want things that are actually to abstract of complicated to be described as urges i can act upon without planning in thinking. but this is the exception, not the rule.
as i see it, something like CEV work like that—do what i want, because i want that. encounter problems, or things that need planning. plan to solve the problems or plan to achieve goals.
but all the part of goals and planing is kicking on only as reaction to problems or wanting something in the form of result and not urge. having urge → acting on urge → being satisfied is the basic loop, the default that does not need explanation or justification.
while it’s look to me that you see having goal and act to achieve it as the basic loop that does not need explanation or justification.
so to try again answer to the question: “Why do you do this?”
because this is my Utility function. the urges are, to first approximation, my utility function. they are obviously not a function, but the way i will have some utility function, if humankind survive, if i will get to live long enough, is by weaving together the different things that i want. and part of it is goal-shaped, part of it is in the form of “i want the world be in that state”. but a lot of it is in the form “i want to do x”.
there is important difference, in my ontology, between wants in the form “i want the world be in x state”, as in—i want the dished to be washed, i want the food be prepare, i want my home be clean, and “i want do x”. i want to play the video game, to read the post, to read the book, to eat the tasty food, to listen to music, to go to a walk.
you can translate that to goal-framing by saying that my goal is the experience of walking or the pleasant sensation, but i think that translation lose something important, and that it’s the wrong framing.
What is CEV?
That is how I would explain it.
Can you please elaborate on what important thing you think is lost?
Coherent Extrapolated Volition
this look to me like failure in Noticing Frame Differences
imagine i try to explain some proof in geometry to my hypothetical friend that think in feeling. I’m trying to explain her congruent triangles. and she replay to me—“so if there are three things that same you feel like it’s the same triangle, but you need to have at least one side, because angles doesn’t feel real enough to you?”
and, like, this is not wrong description, per se. she will be able to recognize congruent triangles. but I still notice that it doesn’t look like she understand the concept of proof at all!
I can describe the different predictions that I can make when i say something is a urge or a goal—when it’s urge i can’t fail to get it, i do the thing i want to do, and feel satisfied. while in goal i want to change the world state, and i can try to achieve the goal, and fail, and be unsatisfied. but this only can explain why i think there are two clusters here, and it’s not what I’m trying to do.
but what I’m actually trying to do is to connect personal experience with words. didn’t you ever feel the impulse to do something, and then did that, and then turned out the result is not what you wanted and was disappointed? didn’t you ever have the impulse to do something, and did that, and was satisfied, despite the result wasn’t what you ostensibly want?
those are the words that i use to describe this two experiences of mine.
This is not my experience. When I act on an urge, I do not necessarily feel satisfied. There is generally some pleasure associated with the act, but it can be extremely fleeting and short-lived.
This fleeting pleasure is better than nothing, and I will often act on an urge in order to get this feeling. But after the feeling has passed, I do not feel satisfied.
I only feel satisfied after I have accomplished something that feels valuable—a goal.
Interesting! I wonder to what extend we are different physiologically, to what extend we use different words to describe same experiences, and to what extend our opinions on things shapes our experiences. alas, we don’t have a way to communicate our feelings directly, yet. and I honestly have no idea how to check.
Well, I am somewhat anhedoniac by nature. There are a lot of positive experiences which many (most?) people report and which I do not recognize. For example, the sunset does nothing for me. Sex has its moments but is overall disappointing and a far cry from its reputation. Live concerts are described by some as borderline religious experiences; for me they are cool and fun but nothing really exceptional.
Fortunately, my Buddhist-inspired meditation practice is helping me discover more joy in life.
This doesn’t make sense as a reply…
How is your opinion on perceived emotional expressiveness even relevant to the prior comment ?
Let me ask you just one question: Do you truly want to learn to be more rational?
Please give me a direct answer to this.