By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forths with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
I think few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong as Said. More than 50% of the time when I would ask posters, commenters and lurkers about their models of LessWrong culture, they’d say some version of either:
Of all the places on the internet, LessWrong is a place that really forces you to get your arguments together. It’s very much a no-bullshit culture, and I think this is one of the things that makes it one of the most valuable forums on the internet.
Or
Man, posting on LessWrong seems really unrewarding. You show up, you put a ton of effort into a post, and at the end the comment section will tear apart some random thing that isn’t load bearing for your argument, isn’t something you consider particularly important, and whose discussion doesn’t illuminate what you are trying to communicate, all the while implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas.
And frequently when I dig into how they formed these impressions, a comment by Said would be at least heavily involved in that.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote
and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
Then why did you cite Lukas’s comment count and karma value?
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
No, I really don’t think that there is.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
I confirm that my understanding of top author was close to what Said describes here.
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
Uh… yeah, of course the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong.
Why would you think that I “seem unable to conceive” of this? This is really a very strange reply.
The OP uses the complaints as an illustration of the supposed problem, and as evidence for said supposed problem.
If the alleged evidence is poor, then the claim that the supposed problem exists is correspondingly undermined.
Is this not obvious?
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
This, as I have already pointed out, is not true.
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
And praise! It was a setup and explanation symmetric in complaint and praise!