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.
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.