This is the mentioned comment thread under which Said can comment for the next two weeks. Anyone can ask questions here if you want Said to have the ability to respond.
Said, feel free to ask questions of commenters or of me here (and if you want to send me some statement of less than 3,000 words, I can add it to the body of the post, and link to it from the top).
(I will personally try to limit my engagement with the comments of this post to less than 10 hours, so please forgive if I stop engaging at some point, I just really have a lot of stuff to get to)
I decided to not actually check the “ban” flag on Said’s account, on account of trusting him to not post and vote under his account, and this allowing him to keep accessing any drafts he has on his account, and other things that might benefit from being able to stay logged in.
I am, of course, ambivalent about harshly criticizing a post which is so laudatory toward me.[1] Nevertheless, I must say that, judging by the standards according to which LessWrong posts are (or, at any rate, ought to be) judged, this post is not a very good one.
The post is very long. The length may be justified by the subject matter; unfortunately, it also helps to hide the post’s shortcomings, as there is a tendency among readers to skim, and while skimming to assume that the skimmed-over parts say basically what they seem to, argue coherently for what they promise to argue for, do not commit any egregious offenses against good epistemics, etc. Regrettably, those assumptions fail to hold for many parts of the post, which contains a great deal of sloppy argumentation, tendentious characterizations, attempts to sneak in connotations via word choice and phrasing, and many other improprieties.
The problems begin in the very first paragraph:
For roughly [7 years] have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.
This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (and which I do not understand), and something which I should wish to “learn” (and which I have failed, or have not tried, to learn). This, of course, begs the question. The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
Of course, phrasing it in this neutral way, although it would be unimpeachably accurate, would not afford @habryka the chance to take the moral high ground. In a disagreement, after all, one side may be right, or the other; or both could be wrong. One must argue for one’s own side.
But by describing the situation as one in which he has some (presumptively correct) understanding, which remains only for him to impart to me, and some (presumptively useful) skill, which remains only for me to learn, @habryka attempts to sidestep the need to make his case.
Please note that this is not a demand that said case be made in this post itself (nor even that it be summarized, if previously made… although a hyperlink would not be amiss here—if indeed there’s anything to link to!). I am simply saying that an honest account would only say: “I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness”. It would not try to sneak in the presumption that there’s some failure to understand on my part, and only on my part.
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
I think few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong as Said.
Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100? Less than 1,000? Still, intuitively it seems like an outlandish claim. If you ask a hundred people, randomly selected out of all those who are familiar with LessWrong, to name those people who have been important to the site’s culture, how many of them will even recall my name at all, to say nothing of naming me in answer to the question? If the number exceeded the single digits, I would be flattered… but it seems unlikely.
Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here
This claim has been made before. When investigated, it has turned out to be dubious, at best. (The linked comment describes two cases where some “top author” is described by @habryka as having this sort of view, and the reality turns out to be… not really that. I would add the case of @Benquo as well, where failing to mention this comment—which was written after the discussions cited later in this post—constitutes severe dishonesty.)
We have, to my knowledge, had zero examples of this sort of claim (“top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW”) turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
This is important on its own, but it’s also important for the purposes of evaluating any other claims, made by @habryka, that are based on purported information which is available to him (e.g. in his capacity as LW administrator), but which are not readily verifiable. For example:
And frequently when I dig into how they formed these impressions, a comment by Said would be at least heavily involved in that.
I expect that whatever impression is formed in a typical reader’s mind upon reading this line, the reality is something far less impressive, where my comment(s) turn out to play a far less significant role. (Again, this supposition is not a vague denial, but rather is based on @habryka’s aforementioned record w.r.t. describing other people’s views about me.)
And I do think Said moves LessWrong substantially towards that path [toward the “Sneer Attractor”]. When Said is at his worst, he writes comments like this:
…
This, to be clear, is still better than the SneerClub comment visible above. For example when asked to clarify, Said obliges:
…
But the overall effect on the culture is still there, and the thread still results in Benquo eventually disengaging in frustration intending to switch his moderation guidelines to “Reign of terror” and deleting any future similar comment threads, as Said (as far as I can tell) refuses to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread until Benquo runs out of energy.
It seems remiss not to note that the ensuing discussion thread contained over a dozen more comments from me, which together come to almost 6,000 words, and in which I explain my reasoning at length (and several of which are highly upvoted). (This is counting only comments on the object level, i.e. elaborating on my top-level comment; I am not counting the comments in the “meta” subthread started by Ben Pace.) To say that I “refuse[d] to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread” is, quite frankly, implausible.
(Were I more inclined to play fast and loose with connotations, I could say that I was trying to get my interlocutors to understand my position, but failed…)
With non-trivial probability your post or comment ends up hosting a 100+ comment thread with detailed discussion of Said’s behavior and moderation norms and whether it’s ever OK to ban anyone
The passive voice is inappropriate here. Those 100+ comment threads are, invariably, started and kept going largely by the LW moderators. (If you doubt this, I invite you to check.)
That said, most of the time, when I was in those environments, I could tell what was going on, and I mostly knew that other people could tell as well. If someone repeatedly asked questions in a way that did clearly indicate an understanding of a flaw in the provided proofs or arguments, but kept insisting on only getting there via Socratic questioning, they would lose points over time. And if they kept asking probing questions in each seminar that were easily answered, with each question taking up space and bandwidth, then they would quickly lose lots of points and asked to please interrupt less.
(Emphasis mine.)
That’s the key, isn’t it? In your math-department scenario, the bad critic is asking questions that are easily answered. But is this the case for questions that I ask on Less Wrong?
Here’s an exercise: look up all of my comments that are some version of “Examples?”, and count how many of them were “easily answered” (i.e., by the post/comment author, or someone else, readily rattling off a list of examples of whatever it is).
Before trying this, what would you predict the percentage will be? 100%? 50%? 10%?
If it turns out that I’m not asking questions that are “easily answered”, then the analogy fails to hold, and the argument has no force.
As far as I can tell, the linked comment does not, in fact, ask me to do or not do anything. Most of the comment lays out various bits of reasoning about discussion norms and such. Then there’s this bit:
So from here on out, I, along with the rest of the mod team, do plan to treat all the comments of yours that put in low interpretive effort on your part—ones that feel like you’re requesting a large amount of effort from someone else, whilst doing no signalling that you intend to reciprocate—as bad for the health of the culture on LessWrong, and strong-downvote them accordingly, with no exceptions.
That’s really the only concrete part of the comment. As you can see, it asks nothing of me—certainly nothing to do with “stop implying obligations to authors”.
How could I have refused the mod team’s request, when no request was made? (And if I did “reject… [something] as a thing [I] was doing or a coherent ask”, why not link to the comment or comments where this rejection was expressed?)
This is quite a tendentious characterization of a comment thread where I only express and argue for my views, without at any point calling for anyone to do anything, encouraging anyone to do anything, etc. If I called for “authors to face censure”, the obvious questions are—what censure? In what form, from whom, how? But if one tries to find the answers to these questions (by clicking on the link, perhaps), it turns out to be impossible, because… the alleged calls for “authors to face censure” never took place.
So ultimately, what other option do we have but a ban?
What option, indeed? Well, except for options like implementing a robust ignore system for LessWrong (the UX design of which I would be happy to help with); or creating “subreddits” with various degrees of expected rigor (akin to the “Main” vs. “Discussion” distinction on the old LessWrong—perhaps by expanding the role of the Shortform feature, and adding some UX affordances?); or making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments; or any number of other possibilities…[2]
There is, of course, a sense in which this entire comment is an exercise in pointlessness. After all, I hardly expect that @habryka might read my commentary, think “you know, he’s right; my arguments are bad”, and reverse his decision. (Given his position as LessWrong’s admin, it is not as if he needs to justify his banning decisions in the first place!)
Still, there was, presumably, some purpose to writing this post—some goal ostensibly served by it. Whatever that goal might be, to the extent that it is well-served by a post as deeply flawed as this one, I oppose it. And if the goal is a worthy one, then the inaccuracies, misleading statements, tendentious characterizations, and other epistemic and rhetorical misdeeds with which the post is rife, can only be detrimental to it.
I leave off such obviously outlandish and improbable suggestions as “encouraging authors to reply to questions and criticisms of their posts by answering the questions and addressing the criticisms”.
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
FWIW, this seems to me like a totally fine sentence. The “by my lights” at the end is indeed communicating the exact thing you are asking for here, trying to distinguish between a claim of obvious correctness, and a personal judgement.
Feel free to summarize things like this in the future, I would not object.
Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100?
It of course depends on how active someone on LessWrong is (you are not as widely known as Eliezer or Scott, of course). My modal guess would be that you would be around place 20 in how people would bring up your name. I think this would be an underestimate of your effect on the culture. If someone else thinks this is implausible, I would be happy to operationalize, find someone to arbitrate, and then bet on it.
I mean, I have a whole section of this post where I am making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments. That’s what the precedent section is about. Of course, you are likely to disagree that those qualify as appropriate rules, or good rules, but that’s what got us to this point.
We have, to my knowledge, had zero examples of this sort of claim (“top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW”) turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
Quickly responding to this: The OP directly links to 2 authors who have made statements to this effect on LessWrong itself, and one author who while saying it wasn’t a major reason for leaving, still was obviously pretty upset (Benquo)[1]. I wouldn’t consider Gordon a “top author” but would consider Duncan and Benquo to be ones. There are more, though I have fewer links handy.
I wasn’t able to find an easily extractable quote from Duncan, though I am sure he would be happy to provide affirmation of his position on this when he reads this, and readers can form their own judgement reading this thread.
Since we’re talking about it, I have also told the mods that Said is one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience.
I also don’t have a public quote by EVN handy, though I am sure she would also be happy to attest to something close to this.
I don’t have as many receipts as I would like to be able to share here, but saying there are “zero examples” is just really straightforwardly false. You were even involved in a big moderation dispute with one of them!
While you link to a comment where he says some more positive things about you 7 years ago, I quote from his most recent overall summary in the OP, where to be clear, he was not overall in favor of banning you, though really did not have a positive impression.
But you just said that you don’t consider Gordon a “top author”, and you can’t find a quote from Duncan saying anything like this?
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
If you get people to post new things, then this may change. But what I wrote seems to me to be entirely correct.
No, at the very least it’s Duncan? That’s literally the text of my comment (though slightly circuitously).
I didn’t say I couldn’t find any quote, I said I couldn’t find any easily extractable quote. The relevant thread contains plenty of multi-paragraph sections that make this position of his quite clear, just nothing that happened to be easy to easily removed from context.
Edit: Ok, fine, after spending 20 more minutes on reading through random old threads, here is a pretty clear and extractable comment from Duncan (it really was also otherwise very obvious from the link I provided, but due to some of the indirect nature of the discussion was hard to quote):
It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically. Like, literally that specific essay, I consciously considered where to put it, and decided not to put it here because, at the time, there was no way to prevent you from being part of the subsequent conversation.
This sure seems like an example of a top author citing you directly as the reason for not wanting to post on LW.
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?
I’ve already explained this multiple times, but sure, I’ll explain it again:
If someone says “X has happened a bunch of times”, and you say “Examples please?”, and they say “here are examples A, B, and C”; and you look at A, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at B, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at C, and it turns out to not be X; and you say “… none of those things are X, though?”; and your intelocutor continues to insist that “X has happened a bunch of times”…
… what is the correct position for you to take, at that point?
It is, honestly, quite distressing, how many times I have had to explain this, not just in this context but in many others: if someone makes a claim, and when asked for examples of that claim provides things that turn out not to actually be examples, then not only does their claim remain totally unsupported at that point, but also, the fact that this person thought that the given things were examples of their claim, when they actually were not—the fact that they made this error—should cause you to doubt their ability to recognize what is and is not an example of their claim, in general.
Alice: White ravens exist! Bob: Yeah? For real? Where, can I see? Alice (looking around and then pointing): Right… there! That one! Bob (peering at the bird in question): But… that raven is actually black? Like, it’s definitely black and not white at all.
Now not only is Bob (once again, as he was at the start) in the position of having exactly zero examples of white ravens (Alice’s one purported example having been revealed to be not an example at all), but—and perhaps even more importantly!—Bob has reason to doubt not only Alice’s possession of any examples of her claim (of white ravens existing), but her very ability to correctly perceive what color any given raven is.
Now if Alice says “Well, I’ve seen a lot of white ravens, though”, Bob might quite reasonably reply: “Have you, though? Really? Because you just said that that raven was white, and it is definitely, totally black.” What’s more, not only Bob but also Alice herself ought rightly to significantly downgrade her confidence in her belief in white ravens (by a degree commensurate with how big a role her own supposed observations of white ravens have played in forming that belief).
(The other possibility, of course, is that the claimant was simply lying, in which case you should integrate that into your assessment of them.)
What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that?
I do not keep in my head the specifics of every comment written in every conversation on LessWrong that involves me. I recalled the conversation in vague terms, but given @habryka’s track record on this subject, I expected that there was a good chance that he was misrepresenting what Duncan had said, in the same way that he misrepresented what several other authors had said. That turned out not to have been the case, of course, but the expectation was valid, given the information available at that time.
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
I mean, I literally already provided a quote quite close to what you desire for DirectedEvolution (is his wording as perfectly of an exact match as Duncan’s, no, but I think it is close enough to count). To remind you, the quote is:
Since we’re talking about it, I have also told the mods that Said is one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience.
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
I really haven’t tried to produce many quotes, because those quotes have little bearing on my overall bottom-line on this situation. I have enough inside-view model of this situation to cause me to make the same decision even if no top author had complained about you, and you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
But sure, here is another one, if you really want to go out on a limb and predict that no such quotes exist (this time from Lukas Gloor who I do consider a top author):[1]
Said’s way of asking questions, and the uncharitable assumptions he sometimes makes, is one of the most off-putting things I associate with LW. I don’t find it okay myself, but it seems like the sort of thing that’s hard to pin down with legible rules.
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out:
Here’s a bit of metadata on this: I can recall offhand 7 complaints from users with 2000+ karma who aren’t on the mod team (most of whom had significantly more than 2000 karma, and all of them had some highly upvoted comments and/or posts that are upvoted in the annual review). One of them cites you as being the reason they left LessWrong a few years ago, and ~3-4 others cite you as being a central instance of a pattern that means they participate less on LessWrong, or can’t have particularly important types of conversations here.
I also think most of the mod team (at least 4 of them? maybe more) of them have had such complaints (as users, rather than as moderators)
I think there’s probably at least 5 more people who complained about you by name who I don’t think have particularly legible credibility beyond “being some LessWrong users.”
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
(I should have disengaged earlier, but since you seem to insist the history of complaints about you is made up, I figured I would comment with some more things that aren’t private communication and I can easily share)
Update May 2024: It’s been more than a year since the above comment and in that year, I remember I liked a couple of comments by Said and I don’t remember any particular ones that I thought exhibited the above pattern.
This also roughly aligns with the period where I thought Said was behaving somewhat better (until it got worse again in the past few months, precipitating this ban). Maybe Lukas agrees, or not. The comment itself nevertheless seems clear.
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
Indeed, we certainly can argue about that. If he’s a “top author” but Gordon isn’t (as you have said), then your concept of “top author” is incoherent.
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false. Your own words, from the OP:
Why spend so much time engaging with a single commenter? Well, the answer is that I do think the specific way Said has been commenting on the site had a non-trivial chance of basically just killing the site, in the sense of good conversation and intellectual progress basically ceasing, if not pushed back on and the collateral damage limited by moderator action.
Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here, and also I personally (and the LessWrong team more broadly) would have had little interest in further investing in LessWrong if the kind of the kind of culture that Said brings had taken hold here.
So the stakes have been high
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
… surely you jest? I have nothing at all against the guy, but he’s written five posts, ever, in 13 years of being a LessWrong member. How does he qualify as a “top author”, but not Gordon?
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out
You know perfectly well how little this sort of thing is worth. Yes, it’s correlated evidence. And it’s another report of more alleged private communications. Any way to verify them? Nope. Any way to check whether some or most or all of them are being mis-remembered, mis-characterized, mis-summarized, etc.? Nope.
Of course Ray would not have to be “totally making things up”, just like you have not been “totally making things up”—that is obviously a strawman! You weren’t “totally making up” the examples of Jacob Falkovich, Scott Alexander, etc.—your reporting of the relevant facts was just severely skewed, filtered, etc. Why the same cannot be true for Ray, I really can’t see.
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
Whether I “want another piece of evidence” is immaterial to the question, which is whether the already-claimed evidence in fact exists and in fact is as described. Introducing more pieces of other evidence has no bearing on that.
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
Elizabeth is (was? I’m not sure where to even find the most up to date version of this info, actually) a LessWrong moderator. This obviously disqualifies her opinion about this from consideration.
Oh? But then I must be even more of a “top author”, yes? (I also have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”, after all; in approximately as many years of being an LW member, I’ve accumulated about five times as much karma as Lukas has!)
And what of Gordon, of whom @habryka has said that he is not a “top author”—but he, too, seems to have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”?
This standard of who is and is not a “top author” seems awfully fluid, I must say…
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forths with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
I think few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong as Said. More than 50% of the time when I would ask posters, commenters and lurkers about their models of LessWrong culture, they’d say some version of either:
Of all the places on the internet, LessWrong is a place that really forces you to get your arguments together. It’s very much a no-bullshit culture, and I think this is one of the things that makes it one of the most valuable forums on the internet.
Or
Man, posting on LessWrong seems really unrewarding. You show up, you put a ton of effort into a post, and at the end the comment section will tear apart some random thing that isn’t load bearing for your argument, isn’t something you consider particularly important, and whose discussion doesn’t illuminate what you are trying to communicate, all the while implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas.
And frequently when I dig into how they formed these impressions, a comment by Said would be at least heavily involved in that.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
Absolutely, hilariously false.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote
and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to lie write in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: onetwothree.)
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.
He did not say that they made such claims on LessWrong, where he would be able to publicly cite them. (I have seen/heard those claims in other contexts.)
If someone (supposedly) says something to you in private, and you report this (alleged) conversation in public, then as far as public knowledge is concerned, is not correct to say that it has “turned out to be straightforwardly true” that that (alleged) conversation took place. Nothing has “turned out” in any way; there’s just a claim that’s been made—that is all.
The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
This is also my sense of things.
And rightly so…
To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. (Elsewhere, I claimed that I had no personal problem with Said’s comments and someone privately replied to me “shouldn’t you, if you believe he’s burning the commons?”. I’m still considering it, but I suspect “keep your identity small” reasons will end up dominating.)
What’s the virtue or consequence that you’re focused on, here?
To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. …
What’s the virtue or consequence that you’re focused on, here?
A longer quote, for context and easier readability:
For roughly [7 years] have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.
This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (and which I do not understand), and something which I should wish to “learn” (and which I have failed, or have not tried, to learn). This, of course, begs the question. The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
…
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
The virtue is simply that one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view. These things are bad, and objecting to them is good.
one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view
is a strong argument for objecting to the median and modal Said comment.
If you see me doing any such things, you should definitely object to them.
As I do not in fact make a habit of doing such things, I have no fear of my median and/or modal comments falling afoul of such objections.
EDIT: Well. I guess I should amend this reply somewhat. In the counterfactual scenario where I were not banned from LessWrong, I would say the above. In actuality, it would obviously be unfair for you to object to any of my comments (by means of replying to them, say), as I would not be able to respond (and, as far as I know, there is no UI indicator along the lines of “user A has been banned, and thus cannot reply to this reply by user B to his comment”).
However, I welcome objections, criticisms, etc., in any public venue where I can respond, such as on Data Secrets Lox.
I think this reply is rotated from the thing that I’m interested in—describing vice instead of virtue, and describing the rule that is being broken instead of the value from rule-following. As an analogy, consider Alice complaining about ‘lateness’ and Bob asking why Alice cares; Alice could describe the benefits of punctuality in enabling better coordination. If Alice instead just says “well it’s disrespectful to be late”, this is more like justifying the rule by the fact that it is a rule than it is explaining why the rule exists.
But my guess at what you would say, in the format I’m interested in, is something like “when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions.” Instead of tussling about whether the framing unfairly favors one side, we can focus on the object level. (I was tempted to write “irrelevant controversies”, but part of the issue here is that the controversies are about relevant features. If we accept the framing that habryka knows something that you don’t, that’s relevant to which side the audience should take in a disagreement about principles.)
That said, let us replace the symbol with the substance. Habryka could have written:
For roughly 7 years, I have spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to reach agreement with Said on proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one. Today I am declaring defeat on that goal and giving him a 3 year ban.
In my culture, I think the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar. The question of whether he or you is right about propriety for LessWrong is stored in the other words in the post, in the other discussion elsewhere, and in the legitimacy structures that have made habryka an admin of LW and how they react to this decision. I think very little of it is stored in the framing of whether this is an intractable disagreement or a failure of education.
I also don’t find the charge that it is “tendentious” all that compelling because of the phrase “by my lights”. Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
In your culture, are the two highly different? What is the framework I could use to immediately spot the difference between the paragraphs?
I also don’t find the charge that it is “tendentious” all that compelling because of the phrase “by my lights”. Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
Disagree. Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be? It’s his standards, which he believes are the correct ones. That phrase adds nothing. It’s contentless boilerplate.
(This is a frequent feature of the sort of writing which, as I have said many times, is bad. If you say “X is true”, you are claiming to believe that X is true. There is no need to add a disclaimer that you believe that X is true. We know that you believe this, because you’re claiming it.)
(Now, sometimes one might say such a thing as a rhetorical flourish, or to highlight a certain aspect of the discussion, or for other such reasons. But the idea that it’s necessary to add such a disclaimer, or that such a disclaimer saves you from some charge, or whatever, because the disclaimer communicates some important difference between just claiming that X is true and claiming that you believe that X is true, is foolishness.)
But my guess at what you would say, in the format I’m interested in, is something like “when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions.”
FWIW, this guess is so far removed from being right that I have trouble even imagining how you could have generated it. (Yet another in a very long series of examples of why “interpretive labor” is bad, and trying to guess what one’s interlocutor thinks when you already know that you don’t understand their view is pointless.)
Habryka could have written:
For roughly 7 years, I have spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to reach agreement with Said on proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one. Today I am declaring defeat on that goal and giving him a 3 year ban.
He could have written that, yes. But it would have been a strange, unnatural, and misleading thing to write, given the circumstances. The formulation you offer connotes a scenario where two parties enter into discussions and/or negotiations as equals, without presupposing that their own view is necessarily correct or that no compromises will need to be made, etc. But of course nothing remotely like that was the case. (The power relation in this case has always been massively asymmetric, for one thing.)
And, as I said, it’s also a strange thing to write. An admin is banning a member of a forum, because they can’t agree on proper rules/norms/practices…? Why should they need to agree? Doesn’t the admin just make rules, and if someone breaks the rules enough, ban them…? What’s all this business about “trying to reach agreement”? Why is that a goal? And why declare defeat on it now? And what does it have to do with banning?
So, in a certain sense, “the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar”, in that they would both be disingenuous, though in different ways (one weirder than the other).
What is the framework I could use to immediately spot the difference between the paragraphs?
One I like to use is “how would the other guy describe this?”. Another good one is “how would a reasonable, intelligent, but skeptical third party, who has no particular reason to trust or believe me, and is in fact mildly (but only mildly) suspicious of me and/or my motives and/or my ideas, read this?”.
FWIW, this guess is so far removed from being right that I have trouble even imagining how you could have generated it. (Yet another in a very long series of examples of why “interpretive labor” is bad, and trying to guess what one’s interlocutor thinks when you already know that you don’t understand their view is pointless.)
What do you think, then? Why are those things bad and why is objecting to them good?
If you can’t answer those questions, then I’m not sure what arguments about propriety we could have. If we are to design functional site norms, we should be guided by goals, not merely following traditions.
(The point of interpretive labor, according to me, is to help defeat the Illusion of Transparency. If I read your perfectly clear sentence and returned back a gross misunderstanding—well, then a communication breakdown happened somewhere. By looking at what landed for me, we have a stacktrace of sorts for working backwards and figuring out what should have been said to transmit understanding.)
The virtue is simply that one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view. These things are bad, and objecting to them is good.
And you want me to explain why these things are bad?
Well, the “sneaking in connotations” bit is a link to a Sequence post (titled, oddly enough, “Sneaking in Connotations”). I don’t think that I can explain the problem there any better than Eliezer did.
The other stuff really seems like it’s either self-explanatory or can be answered with a dictionary lookup (e.g., “begging the question”).
It’s not like we disagree that these things are bad, right? You’re doing, like, a Socratic thing; like, “why is murder bad?”—yeah, we all agree that murdering people is bad, but we should be able to explain why it’s bad, in order to write good laws. Yes?
If so, then—sure, I don’t in principle object to such exercises—on the contrary, I often find them to be useful—but why do this here, now, about these specific things? Why ask me, in particular? If we want to interrogate our beliefs about discussion norms in this sort of way, surely doing it systematically, and in a context other than a post like this, would make more sense…
On the other hand, if what you’re saying is that you disagree that the aforementioned things are bad, then… I guess I’m not sure how to respond to that, or what the point would even be…
And you want me to explain why these things are bad?
Yes. Part of this is because my long experience is that sometimes our sense of communication or our preferences for norms have flipped signs. If you think something is bad, that’s moderate but not strong evidence that I think it’s bad, and we might be able to jump straight to our disagreement by trying to ground out in principles. I think in several previous threads I wish I had focused less on the leaves and more on the roots, and here was trying to focus on roots.
If so, then—sure, I don’t in principle object to such exercises—on the contrary, I often find them to be useful—but why do this here, now, about these specific things? Why ask me, in particular?
...
On the other hand, if what you’re saying is that you disagree that the aforementioned things are bad, then… I guess I’m not sure how to respond to that, or what the point would even be…
I mean, I am genuinely uncertain about several parts of this! I think that the audience might also be uncertain, and stating things clearly might help settle them (one way or the other). I think there is value in clear statements of differences of opinion (like that you have a low opinion of interpretative labor and I have a high opinion of it), and sometimes we can ground those opinions (like by following many conversations and tracking outcomes).
Like, I understand ‘tendentious’ to be a pejorative word, but I think the underlying facts of the word are actually appropriate for this situation. That doesn’t mean it’s generically good, just that criticizing it here seems inappropriate to me. Should we not invite controversy on ban announcements? Should we not explain the point of view that leads us to make the moderation decisions we make?
But perhaps you mean something narrower. If the charge is more “this is problem only a few users have, but unfortunately one of them is an admin, and thus it is the site rule”—well, we can figure out whether or not that’s the case, but I don’t actually think that’s a problem with the first paragraph, and I think it can be pointed at more cleanly.
Well, the “sneaking in connotations” bit is a link to a Sequence post (titled, oddly enough, “Sneaking in Connotations”). I don’t think that I can explain the problem there any better than Eliezer did.
As it happens, I reread that post thru your link. I thought that it didn’t quite apply to this situation; I didn’t see how habryka was implying things about you thru an argument via definition, rather than directly stating his view (and then attempting to back it up later in the post). I thought Frame Control would’ve been a better link for your complaint here (and reread our discussion of it to see whether or not I thought anything had changed since then).
The other stuff really seems like it’s either self-explanatory or can be answered with a dictionary lookup (e.g., “begging the question”).
I also didn’t quite buy that “begging the question” applied to the first paragraph. (For the audience, this is an argument that smuggles in its conclusion as a premise.) I understood that paragraph to be the conclusion of habryka’s argument, not the premise.
Overall, my impression was—desperation, or scrambling for anything that might stick? Like, I think it fits as a criticism of any post that states its conclusion and then steps thru the argument for that conclusion, instead of essaying out from a solid premise and discovering where it takes you. I think both styles have their virtues, and think the conclusion-first style is fine for posts about bans (I’ve used it for that before), and so I don’t find that criticism persuasive. (Like, it’s bad to write your bottom line and then construct the argument, but it’s not bad to construct an argument and then edit your introduction to include your conclusion!)
But maybe I missed the thing you’re trying to convey, since we often infer different things from the same text and attend to different parts of a situation. I tried to jump us to the inferences and the salient features, and quite possibly that’s not the best path to mutual understanding.
Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be?
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
I think a frequent source of conflict has been differing judgments on what is usual and what is unusual, or what is normal and what is abnormal.
The formulation you offer connotes a scenario where two parties enter into discussions and/or negotiations as equals, without presupposing that their own view is necessarily correct or that no compromises will need to be made, etc. But of course nothing remotely like that was the case. (The power relation in this case has always been massively asymmetric, for one thing.)
I understood us not to be discussing power relations (was anyone ever confused about who was the admin of LessWrong?) but something more like legitimacy relations (what should be the rules of LessWrong?). You’ve been here longer; you might know the Sequences better; you might have more insight into the true spirit of rationality than habryka. In order to adjudicate that, we consult arguments and reasons and experience, not the database.
Using the lens of power relations, your previous complaint (“This phrasing assumes”) seems nonsensical to me; of course the mod would talk about educating the problem user, of whether they understand and learn the models and behaviors as handed down from on high.
Here I would like to take a step outward and complain about what I perceive as a misstep in the conversational dance. Having criticized habryka’s paragraph, you describe its flaws and went so far as to propose a replacement:
I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness.
My replacement differs from yours. But I claim this criticism of my replacement (that it connotes a discussion of equals) applies just as readily to yours, if not more readily because my version includes the ban. (A more fair comparison probably ends at ‘on that goal’ and drops the last phrase.) If not, it is for minor variations of style and I suspect any operationalization we come up with for measuring the difference (polling Turkers or LLMs or whatever) will identify differences between their connotations as minor (say, a split more even than 66-34 on which connotes more even power relations).
Here my thoughts turn to the story in The Crackpot Offer, and the lesson of looking for counterarguments to your own counterarguments.
Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be?
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
Here is a demonstration that adding those sorts of disclaimers and caveats does absolutely nothing to prevent the LW moderators from judging my comments to be unacceptable, as though no such disclaimers were present.
Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” says:
sharing a negative opinion is not in and of itself anti-social.
But as several people have pointed out, this opinion was shared in a way that generated a lot of unnecessary friction. A simple “I think that...” or ”...for me” would have done a great deal to resolve this problem.
This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!
I’ve said before that I don’t take such suggestions (to add the disclaimers) at all seriously; and here we have an unambiguous demonstration that I am right to take that stance.
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
You wrote:
Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
But of course his standards can’t be controversial, because he’s the admin. If someone disagrees with his standards—irrelevant; he doesn’t have to care. There is no practical difference between his standards and “the correct” standards, because he does not have any need to distinguish between those things. Therefore the “by my lights” clause is noise.
I understood us not to be discussing power relations (was anyone ever confused about who was the admin of LessWrong?) but something more like legitimacy relations (what should be the rules of LessWrong?).
I understood us to be discussing a thing that Habryka wrote in the post. If the thing he wrote involves power relations, or connotations about power relations, then how can we not be discussing power relations…?
Using the lens of power relations, your previous complaint (“This phrasing assumes”) seems nonsensical to me; of course the mod would talk about educating the problem user, of whether they understand and learn the models and behaviors as handed down from on high.
A moderator talking about “educating the problem user” is extremely suspect.
Here I would like to take a step outward and complain about what I perceive as a misstep in the conversational dance. … I claim this criticism of my replacement (that it connotes a discussion of equals) applies just as readily to yours, if not more readily because my version includes the ban.
I… disagree, mostly. But also…
At this point… I am also confused about what it is we’re even talking about. What’s the purpose of this line of inquiry? With each of your comments in this thread, I have ended up with less and less of an idea of what you’re trying to ask, or say, or argue, or… anything.
There are several. The overarching goal is that I want LessWrong’s contribution to global cognition to be beneficial. As a subgoal to that, I want LessWrong’s mod team to behave with integrity and skill. As subgoals to that, I’m trying to figure out whether there were different ways of presenting these ideas that would have either worked better in this post, or worked better in our discussions over the years at grounding out our disagreement; I’m also interested in figuring out if you’re right and we’re wrong!
Related to the last subgoal, I think your typology of selective/corrective/structural is useful to think about. I view us as applying all three—we screen new users (a much more demanding task now that LLMs are directing people to post on LessWrong), we give warnings and feedback and invest some in rationality training projects, and we think about the karma system and UI changes and various programs and projects that can cause more of what we want to see in the world. I don’t think behaving as a corrective authority is weird and bad; I think the polite and detailed version of “read the sequences” is good.
But more narrowly—looking at this conversational chain—you made a criticism of habryka’s post, and I tried to take it seriously. Does it matter that the post expresses or promotes a particular point of view? Does it matter that it’s controversial? What would it look like to fix the problems in the first paragraph? I left comments on an earlier draft of this post, and I tried to apply a framework like “how would the other guy describe this?”, and I missed those problems in the first paragraph. Tsuyoku Naritai.
[I think that you deserve me giving this a real try, and that the other mods deserve me attempting to get to ground on something with you where we start off with a real disagreement, or where I don’t understand your position.]
I understood us to be discussing a thing that Habryka wrote in the post. If the thing he wrote involves power relations, or connotations about power relations, then how can we not be discussing power relations…?
Reductionism—the idea that things are made out of parts. We can focus on different parts of it at different times. To me this also relates to the idea of True Rejections. If what you are objecting to is that habryka is banning you and that he’s the mod and you aren’t, then—I feel sympathy for you, but there’s really not much to discuss. I think there is a lot to discuss about whether or not it’s right for LW to ban you, because I am pretty invested in pushing LW to do the right thing. And that one is not a power relations question, and seems like one that we can discuss without power relations.
Yes, even if we construct airtight arguments, habryka might still ignore them and go through with the ban anyway. Yes, some people will reflexively support the mods because they like the website existing and want to subsidize working on it. But some people are watching and thinking and deciding how to relate to LW moving forward based on how these arguments shake out. That is...
But of course his standards can’t be controversial, because he’s the admin. If someone disagrees with his standards—irrelevant; he doesn’t have to care.
I think there are meaningful stakeholders whose disapproval would sink habryka’s ability to run LessWrong, and I think attempting to run LessWrong in an unethical or sloppy way would lead to the potential benefits of the site turning to ash.
(I also think this is a nonstandard usage of ‘controversial’. It just means ‘giving rise to public disagreement’, which moderation decisions and proposed norms and standards often do. Like, you’re controverting it right now!)
Returning to true rejections—suppose a fundamental issue here is that you have one vision for LW, where there’s no corrective authority, and we have a different vision for LW, where there is corrective authority. Then I think either we find out why we want those things and identify cruxes and try to learn more about the science of communication and moderation so that we can better achieve our shared goals, or we decide that our goals are sufficiently in conflict that we should pursue them separately. And, like, the value I see in habryka’s offer to edit in your text to the post is that you can make your pitch for your vision, and maybe people who prefer that vision will follow you to Data Secrets Lox, and the more clarity we can reach the more informative that pitch can be.
I’m also interested in figuring out if you’re right and we’re wrong!
Ok, fair enough.
I don’t think behaving as a corrective authority is weird and bad; I think the polite and detailed version of “read the sequences” is good.
I also think this… I think? I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by “the polite and detailed version”.
But, uh, I must protest that I definitely have read the sequences. I have read them several times. If these attempts, by the mods, at “correction”, are intended to be any version (polite or otherwise) of “read the sequences”, then clearly someone here is very confused, and I don’t think that it’s me. (Indeed, it usually seems to me as though the people I am arguing with, e.g. Habryka, are the ones who need to be told to read the Sequences!)
To me this also relates to the idea of True Rejections. If what you are objecting to is that habryka is banning you and that he’s the mod and you aren’t, then—I feel sympathy for you, but there’s really not much to discuss. I think there is a lot to discuss about whether or not it’s right for LW to ban you, because I am pretty invested in pushing LW to do the right thing. And that one is not a power relations question, and seems like one that we can discuss without power relations.
Well, for one thing, I don’t actually think that the concept of “true rejections” is as useful as it’s been made out to be. I think that in practice, in many or maybe even most cases when someone opposes or rejects or dislikes something, there just is not any such thing as some single “true rejection”.
That aside—well, sure, obviously I object to being banned, that goes without saying; but no, that wasn’t at all the point that I was making in that comment.
As for whether it’s right for LW to ban me—again I think it’s pretty obvious what my position on that question is. But that, too, was not my point.
Yes, even if we construct airtight arguments, habryka might still ignore them and go through with the ban anyway.
Eh?? What do you mean, “might”?! As far as I am aware, there is no “might” here, but only a decision already made!
Is this not the case? If so, then I think this should really be made clear. Otherwise, I must say that I do not at all appreciate you talking as if the decision isn’t final, when in fact it is.
Like, you’re controverting it right now!
Sure, in a very circumscribed way (I’m not even allowed to upvote or downvote comments outside of this top-level thread—Habryka made sure to send me a message about that!), and only until the ban proper takes effect.
But some people are watching and thinking and deciding how to relate to LW moving forward based on how these arguments shake out. … I think there are meaningful stakeholders whose disapproval would sink habryka’s ability to run LessWrong
Well, I’d certainly like to believe so. I find these vague references to “stakeholders” to be suspect at the best of times, though.
Returning to true rejections—suppose a fundamental issue here is that you have one vision for LW, where there’s no corrective authority, and we have a different vision for LW, where there is corrective authority. Then I think either we find out why we want those things and identify cruxes and try to learn more about the science of communication and moderation so that we can better achieve our shared goals, or we decide that our goals are sufficiently in conflict that we should pursue them separately. And, like, the value I see in habryka’s offer to edit in your text to the post is that you can make your pitch for your vision, and maybe people who prefer that vision will follow you to Data Secrets Lox, and the more clarity we can reach the more informative that pitch can be.
Everything else aside, let me address the Data Secrets Lox point first. While I would of course be delighted if people who have found my writing here on LW useful joined DSL, and of course everyone here who wants to join is welcome to do so, I must note that DSL is not really “LessWrong, done the way that Said thinks it should be done”; it wasn’t intended to be such a thing. I would call DSL a “rationalist-adjacent”, general-interest discussion forum. It’s not really aiming at anything like the same goals as LW is.
Anyhow, yes, sure, this is all fine, finding out why we want things, all of that is good. It seems rather “too little, too late”, though. I’ve been making my “pitch” for years; I’ve been explaining why I want things, what I think is the right way to run a forum like this and why I think those things, etc. The amount of uptake of those ideas, from the LW mods’ side, has been approximately zero. (Even when I have offered to provide free design and development work in the service of making those ideas happen—an offer which, as I expect you know, is not an idle one, when coming from me!—still, nothing.) Well, alright, obviously you have no obligation to find my views compelling and my arguments convincing, but my point is that this thing you propose has already been tried. At some length.
So… I am somewhat less than enthusiastic.
But! Despite all that, let’s give it a shot anyway. To the object level:
But more narrowly—looking at this conversational chain—you made a criticism of habryka’s post, and I tried to take it seriously. Does it matter that the post expresses or promotes a particular point of view? Does it matter that it’s controversial? What would it look like to fix the problems in the first paragraph? I left comments on an earlier draft of this post, and I tried to apply a framework like “how would the other guy describe this?”, and I missed those problems in the first paragraph. Tsuyoku Naritai.
As I wrote earlier, an honest version of that paragraph would say:
“I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness.”
Obviously that’s an incomplete replacement, so let’s try to write the full one. It might look like this (we’ll leave the first sentence as it is):
“For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year discussing, debating, and arguing with Said about norms, rules, and practices of forum moderation. These discussions and arguments have often taken place in the context of moderation actions taken, or considered, against Said (whose comments, and interactions with other site members, I have often found to be problematic; although Said, of course, disagrees, for what he believes to be principled reasons). Despite those discussions and arguments, our disagreements remain; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness. Today I am declaring defeat on the goal of convincing Said that I am right and he is wrong (and to alter his behavior accordingly). I am thus giving him a 3 year ban.”
I wouldn’t call this perfect, exactly, but it would be a great improvement.
Note that the above passage is basically honest (though a bit oblique) in making explicit the relevant power relations. It is also honest about the relative “consensus value” of the opposing views (namely, that they’re equal in both being “I think this and he thinks that”, no more and no less, with no very strong reason to assume that one side is right). The formulation also prompts, from the reader, the obvious question (“well, maybe you aren’t right, eh? maybe the other guy’s right and you’re wrong?”), which is exactly as it should be.
Note, by the way, that—unlike with the text of the actual first paragraph as it stands in the post—an alert reader will come away from the passage above with a vague sense that the decision that’s been reached is a rather odd one, reached for rather odd reasons. This, too, is exactly as it should be. The text of the post does attempt to address the sorts of questions that such a vague sense might rightly be operationalized as (such as “eh, if this guy broke your rules, why didn’t you just ban him a long time ago? … he did break your rules, right? otherwise why would you ban him”), but it’s important that the reader should notice the problem—otherwise, they will not be able to effectively evaluate the attempt to resolve it.
I also think this… I think? I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by “the polite and detailed version”.
Then perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by “corrective authority”? It seems to me like “read the Sequences” is an example of “apply such measures as will make the people in your system alter their behavior, to conform to relevant optimality criteria”. But then I find it difficult to square with:
attempting to behave as a “corrective authority”, in the context of a forum like this, is weird and bad.
Perhaps the difference is between “read the sequences” and “if you keep posting low-quality comments, we will ban you, and this part of the sequences explains the particular mistake you made here”? Or perhaps the difference is between the centralized moderator decision-making (“this comment is bad because Alice says so and her comments have a fancy border”) and decentralized opinion-aggregation and norm enforcement (“this comment is bad because its net karma is negative”)?
There is a different way to make things coherent, of course, which is that as part of the transition to LW 2.0 the mod team attempted to shift the culture, which involved shifting the optimality criteria, and the objection to us being corrective authorities in this way is not an objection to corrective authority as a method but instead an objection to our target. Which, that’s fair and not a surprise, but also it seems like the correct response to that sort of difference is for us to shake hands and have different websites with different target audiences (who are drawn to different targets). Otherwise we’ll just be locked in conflict forever (as happens when two control systems are trying to set the same variable to different reference values) and this doesn’t seem like a productive conflict to me. (I do think we’ve written about culture and Zack has written about culture downstream of this disagreement in a way that feels more productive than the moderation discussions about specific cases, but this feels way worse than, say, artists jockeying for status by creating new pieces of art.)
there just is not any such thing as some single “true rejection”.
I think this is correct, in that many decisions are made by aggregating many factors, and it’s only rarely going to be the case that a single factor (rather than a combination of factors) will be decisive.
(I do note this is a situation where both of us ‘disagree with the Sequences’ by having a better, more nuanced view, while presumably retaining the insight that sometimes decisive factors are unspeakable, and so discussions that purport to be about relevant information exchange sometimes aren’t.)
Otherwise, I must say that I do not at all appreciate you talking as if the decision isn’t final, when in fact it is.
Fair. I think it is challenging to express the position of “New information could persuade me, but I don’t expect to come across new information of sufficient strength to persuade me.”
(On the related stakeholders point: I agree that it is often vague, but in this specific case I’m on the board that can decide to fire habryka, and one of the people who is consulted about decisions like this before they’re made. I suspect that in the counterfactual where I left the mod team at the start of 2.0, you would have been banned several years earlier. This is, like, a weird paragraph to write without the context of the previous paragraph; I was in fact convinced this time around, and it is correspondingly challenging to convince me back the other direction, and it seems cruel to create false hope, and difficult to quantitatively express how much real hope there is.)
an offer which, as I expect you know, is not an idle one, when coming from me!
Indeed; I have appreciated a lot of the work that you’ve done over the years and am grateful for it.
It is also honest about the relative “consensus value” of the opposing views
Something about the “consensus value” phrasing feels off to me, but I can’t immediately propose a superior replacement. That is, it would be one thing if just Oli disagreed with you about moderation and another different thing if “the whole mod team disagrees with Said about moderation”. The mods don’t all agree with each other—and it took us years to reach sufficient agreement on this—but I do think this is less like “two people disagree” and more like “two cultures are clashing”.
That said, I do think I see the thing that I could have noticed if I were more alert, which is that I already had the view that we were optimizing for different targets, and making that the headline has more shared-reality nature to it. Like, I think the following framing is different from yours but hopefully still seems valid to you:
Since the beginning of LW 2.0, and the mod team’s attempts to move LessWrong’s culture in a direction that we thought would be more productive for our broader goals, we have been disagreeing with Said about which cultural elements are features and which are bugs. We think this is downstream of differences of preference, principle, and experience. Because of Said’s many positive qualities and many beneficial contributions to the site, the mod team has spent quite a bit of effort on attempting to persuade him to move in our direction, and I personally have spent about a hundred hours a year on moderating Said and his influence on LW’s culture. Today I am declaring defeat on the goal of getting Said to not shape LessWrong’s culture in directions I think are bad for our goals, and am giving him a 3 year ban.
I do think this is less like “two people disagree” and more like “two cultures are clashing”
Sure; my point was just that it’s more like either “two people disagree” or “two cultures are clashing” than it is like “physicists are explaining Newtonian mechanics to the Time Cube guy”.
I think the following framing is different from yours but hopefully still seems valid to you
(By a mod, obviously. Who else has a strength-10 vote and is following this discussion so closely?)
Indeed, I notice that the mods (yes, obviously it’s the mods) have been strong-downvoting pretty much all of my comments in this discussion with you.
So, before I continue engaging, I really do have to ask: this project of yours, where you are engaging in this apparently good-faith discussion with me, trying to hash out disagreement, etc.—what do the other mods think of it?
Is this just you on your own quixotic sidequest, with no buy-in from anyone else who matters?
If that’s the case, then that seems to make the whole thing rather farcical and pointless.
(Really, strong-downvoting a reply, to a moderator, written on that moderator’s request! If we want to talk about problems with voting behaviors, I’d suggest that the mods start by looking in the mirror.)
I asked in the sunshines channel on the LW slack and people there said that they were voting comments based on quality as a comment, and while one is downvoting many of your comments on the page overall, was not downvoting the majority of the comments in this thread.
There are more 10-strength users than just the mods; it may be the case that enough of them are downvoting comments that are at positive karma but leaving the −8 comments alone, which results in no one person downvoting more than a few comments in the thread, but the comments being underwater as a whole. But if there is a single mod who is trying to make this thread not happen, they’re not telling me (which seems worth doing because it would affect my behavior more than the downvoting would). [Edit: the person who did the database query clarified, and I now think that the votes are primarily coming from mods.]
I made the classic mistake of ‘asking two questions together’ and so primarily got responses on voting behavior and not what they think of the project, but I would (from their other writing) guess they are mostly out of hope about it.
I’m not sure if it was a mod, but the existence of high-strength votes and people willing to use them liberally seems like a problem to me. I also have a 10-strength vote but almost never use it because I don’t trust my own judgment enough to want to strongly influence the discourse in an unaccountable way. But others apparently do trust themselves this way, and I think it’s bad that LW gives such people disproportionate influence.
FWIW, my guess is the site would be in a better place if you voted more, and used your high vote-strength more. My guess is you would overall add a bunch of positive signal, much more than an average commenter, which is why it IMO makes sense for your votes to have a lot more weight.
I do think voting around the zero point tends to be more whack and have a bunch of more complicated consequences, and often a swing of 10 points feels disproportionate to what is going on when a comment is between 1 and 10 karma. I’ve considered making various changes to the vote system to reduce the effects of this, but haven’t found something worth the tradeoff in complexity.
If I were a moderator, I would have banned Jesus Christ Himself if He required me to spend one hundred hours moderating His posts on multiple occasions. Given your description here I am surprised you did not do this a long time ago. I admire your restraint, if not necessarily your wisdom.
This strikes me as either deeply confused, or else deliberately… let’s say “manipulative”[1].
Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.
Alright, but still, can’t such a claim be true? To some degree, yes; for example, suppose that someone constantly lodges complaints, makes accusations against others, etc., requiring an investigation each time. (On the other hand, if the complaints are valid and the accusations true, then it seems odd to say that it’s the complainant/accuser who’s responsible for the workload involved in dealing with the issues.) Of course, that doesn’t apply here; I don’t complain much, on LessWrong.
Well, but surely the LW mods spent all those hours on something, right? Writing comments. Talking to various people. Well, yes. But… LessWrong isn’t a government agency, or a court of law, or a corporation with contractual obligations to members, etc. The mods weren’t obligated to do any of those things. It would have been very easy for them to avoid spending all that effort. The following scenario illustrates how they might’ve done so:
Carol (a LessWronger): I wrote a post on LessWrong, and this one dude wrote a comment on it, where he criticized me unfairly!
Dave (a moderator of LessWrong): People write all sorts of comments
Carol: I found it very unpleasant!
Dave: Downvote it and move on with your life
Carol: But other people upvoted it!
Dave: They’re allowed to do that
Carol: Aren’t you going to do something about this?
Dave: No, why would we
Carol: Because that guy’s comment was wrong!
Dave: Feel free to reply saying that, I guess
Carol: Ugh! That would be even more unpleasant! I shouldn’t have to do that!
Dave:shrug
Carol: Well! I don’t think I’ll be using this website!
Dave: Sure, that’s your right
Pretty easy. Definitely doesn’t require hours, much less tens of hours, much less hundreds of hours.
Of course, Dave could choose to have a longer discussion with Carol, if he wants. He could join the conversation himself, to facilitate communication between Carol and the author of the offending comment. He could do all sorts of things. But he could also… not do any of those things.
And in almost all cases where the LW moderators did anything whatsoever that had anything to do with me, it was the wrong thing to do, and the far superior choice (not necessarily the best choice, but far better than what they in fact did) would have been, precisely, to do absolutely nothing. In pretty much all of the examples given in the OP, doing nothing at all would’ve been a huge improvement. Writing no long comments. Having no long conversations with anyone. Just… nothing.
So, indeed, it is right to question the wisdom of the moderators in the choices they’ve made! But to speak of their “restraint” is absurd. These problems, all of these terrible mountains of effort which they’ve supposedly had to expend—it’s all been self-inflicted.
And to use such self-inflicted problems to justify banning someone—well. It’s approximately as honest as a schoolyard bully saying “I bruised my hand when I was beating you up for your lunch money, so now you owe me, and I’m gonna take your jacket as payment!”.
Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.
Yep, I agree with this as a common and IMO very perverse dynamic. I don’t think someone being “difficult to moderate” is almost ever an appropriate justification for banning someone. At the very least they must also have some property that requires interfacing with them as a subject of moderation that isn’t located solely in the choice of the moderators. Otherwise this becomes a catch-22 with no grounding in reality.
Furthermore, if authors had been willing to put a disclaimer at the top of their posts along the lines of “This is just a hypothesis I’m considering. Please help me develop it further rather than criticizing it, because it’s not ready for serious scrutiny yet.” my impression is that Said would have been completely willing to cooperate.
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the first post that Said received a moderation warning for, which is this Ray’s post on ‘Musings on Double Crux (and “Productive Disagreement”)’. You might notice the very first line of that post:
Epistemic Status: Thinking out loud, not necessarily endorsed, more of a brainstorm and hopefully discussion-prompt.
It’s not the exact kind of disclaimer you proposed here (it importantly doesn’t say that readers shouldn’t criticize it) but it also clearly isn’t claiming some kind of authority or fully worked-out theory, and is very explicit about the draft status of it. This didn’t change anything about Said’s behavior as far as I can tell, resulting in a heavily-downvoted comment with a resulting moderator warning.
This is a thoroughly disingenuous response—so misleading as to be indistinguishable from a lie.
Consider the comment of mine to which Habryka refers. Here is its text in its entirety:
My take on “why isn’t Double Crux getting more uptake”:
This ‘Double Crux’ thing seems like a complicated technique/process/something, with:
benefits that are nothing close to manifestly clear from the description
no clear, public examples of anyone using it (much less, successfully)
no endorsements from anyone whose opinion I respect (like Scott Alexander or Eliezer—or perhaps Eliezer did endorse it? but then I guess I wouldn’t ever know about it; such is the downside of using Facebook…)
There does not seem to be any reason why I should pay attention it. That it’s not getting uptake seems to require little explanation; it’s the default outcome that I would expect.
(Also, it comes from CFAR, which is an anti-endorsement. This probably wouldn’t matter if all, or even any, of the above three things were different; but as is, for me, it’s the only thing influencing my inclination to really look deeply into the whole matter, and that influence is in the downward direction…)
Why did I write this comment? Because the post began by asking:
Double Crux has been making the rounds lately (mostly on Facebook but I hope for this to change). It seems like the technique has failed to take root as well as it should. What’s up with that?
In other words, the OP asked a question. And I answered it.
Note that:
I explicitly marked my answer to the OP as “my take”, said that Double Crux “seems like” a certain thing, that there “does not seem to be” a reason to pay attention to it, and that it not getting uptake is the default outcome “that I would expect”. Even my parenthetical about CFAR was explicitly and repeatedly noted to be my personal opinion.
There are all the disclaimers that people keep saying I should add! And yet, somehow, this turns out to make no difference at all, and still incurred a visit from the “Sunshine Regiment”.
My comment does not criticize the post at all. There is nothing in the comment that is at all critical of the post itself, or of its author (@Raemon) for writing it. On the contrary, I take the post at face value, and provide a good faith answer directly to the central question which the post asks.
In other words, this comment is the most cooperative possible engagement with the post, precisely as the post itself requests (“discussion-prompt”).
And yet, despite all that, it was heavily downvoted, and incurred a moderator warning.
I can conclude only that when the moderators talk about what behavior they would like to see, what is rewarded, and what is punished, they are simply lying.
Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” (i.e., the moderator judgment on the linked comment) says:
sharing a negative opinion is not in and of itself anti-social.
But as several people have pointed out, this opinion was shared in a way that generated a lot of unnecessary friction. A simple “I think that...” or ”...for me” would have done a great deal to resolve this problem.
This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that Elizabeth meant you should have added “I think that...” or ”...for me” specifically to the line “Also, it comes from CFAR, which is an anti-endorsement.”
But regardless, it seems crazy that your comment was downvoted to −17 (-16 now, someone just upvoted it by 1) and got a negative mod judgment for this.
Crazy indeed. And—as in several other of these example cases—I will note that the author of the post himself evidently had no problem with my comment, and had no difficulty writing a perfectly reasonable reply, which resulted in an entirely civil and productive discussion.
Which makes this yet another example of the pattern where, if the mods had simply left it alone, it would’ve been fine. (Even better would’ve been for them to write something like “yes of course it’s ok to write polite, clearly cooperative, mildly critical comments like this, don’t be silly”, but we can’t expect miracles…)
FWIW, I’ve had some genuinely positive interactions with Said in the last couple weeks. I was surprised as anyone. I don’t know if it’s because he was trying to be on his best behavior or what, but if that was how Said commented on everything, I’d be very happy to see him unbanned (I had even had the idea that if we continued to have positive interactions I would unban him after whatever felt like enough time for me to believe in the new pattern).
While of course you should not trust my self-report on this, I will nonetheless note for the record that I have made no special attempt to alter my commenting style or approach, recently or (to my recollection) ever.[1]
I am glad to hear that you’ve found my comments to be useful (assuming that this is what you meant by “positive”).
If I understand correctly, a big part of the problem is that people perceive your comments as having a certain hostile-flavored subtext. You deny that this subtext is actually present and fault them for inferring things that you hadn’t stated explicitly.
I strongly suspect that you are capable of writing in such a way where people don’t perceive this hostile-flavored subtext. A softer, gentler type of writing.
Assuming that you are in fact capable of this type of writing, my question is why you choose to not write in this manner.
I’ve had this specific conversation, what feels like a dozen times now. This exact question has been asked, answered, discussed, argued, absolutely to death.
I can dig up links if you really want me to, but… should I? Are you asking because you’re unaware of the prior art? Or are you aware of the previous discussions, but find them unsatisfactory somehow? Or something else?
That makes sense. I am not familiar with such previous conversations, haven’t really been following any of this, and didn’t read the OP too thoroughly. I am not motivated to dig up previous conversations. If you or someone else would like to I’d appreciate it, but no worries if not.
Alright. Well, here’s one starting point, I guess. (You can also Cmd-F in the comments on that post for “insult” and “social attack”; I think that should get you to most of the relevant subthreads.)
(There are many other examples, but this will do for now.)
I spent a few minutes trying to do so and feel overwhelmed. I’m not motivated to continue.
Edit:
If you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate a concise summary. No worries if you’d prefer not to though.
In particular, I’m wondering why you might think that your approach to commenting leads to more winning than the more gentle approach I referred to.
Is it something you enjoy? That brings you happiness? More than other hobbies or sources of entertainment? I suspect not.
Are your motivations altruistic? Maybe it’s that despite being not fun to you personally, you feel you are doing the community a service by defending certain norms. This seems somewhat plausible to me but also not too likely.
My best guess is that the approach to commenting you have taken is not actually a thoughtful strategy that you expect will lead to the most winning, but instead is the result of being unable to resist the impulse of someone being wrong on the internet. (I say this knowing that you are the type of person who appreciates candidness.)
Replying to the added-by-edit parts of the parent comment.
My approach to commenting is the correct one.
(Or so I claim! Obviously, others disagree. But you asked about my motivations, and that’s the answer.)
Part of the answer to your question is the “gentle approach” you refer to is not real. It’s a fantasy. In reality, there is my approach, and there are other approaches which don’t accomplish the same things. There is no such thing as “saying all the same things that Said says, but more nicely, and without any downsides”. Such an option simply does not exist.
I strongly suspect that you are capable of writing in such a way where people don’t perceive this hostile-flavored subtext. A softer, gentler type of writing.
Well, setting aside the question of whether I can write in a “softer, gentler” way, it’s clear enough that many other people can write like that, and often do. One can see many examples of such writing on the EA Forum, for instance.
Of course, the EA forum is also almost entirely useless as a place to have any kind of serious, direct discussion of difficult questions. The cause of this is, largely, a very strong, and zealously moderator-enforced, norm for precisely that sort of “softer, gentler” writing.
Regardless of whether I can write like that, I certainly won’t. That would be wrong, and bad—for me, and for any intellectual community of which I am a member. To a first approximation, no one should ever write like that, on a forum like LessWrong.
My best guess is that the approach to commenting you have taken is not actually a thoughtful strategy that you expect will lead to the most winning, but instead is the result of being unable to resist the impulse of someone being wrong on the internet. (I say this knowing that you are the type of person who appreciates candidness.)
Indeed I do appreciate candidness.
As far as “the most winning” goes, I can’t speak to that. But the “softer, gentler” path is the path of losing—of that, I am very sure.
As far as the xkcd comic goes… well. I must tell you that, while of course I cannot prove this, I suspect that that single comic is responsible for a large chunk of why the Internet, and by extension the world, is in the shape that it’s in, these days.[1] (Some commentary on my own views on the subject of arguing with people who are wrong on the internet can be found in this comment.)
I am not sure if it’s worse than the one about free speech as far as long-term harm goes, but xkcd #386 at least a strong contender for the title of “most destructive webcomic strip ever posted”.
Given your beliefs, I understand why you won’t apply this “softer, gentler” writing style. You would find it off-putting and you think it would do harm to the community.
There is something that I don’t understand and would like to understand though. Simplifying, we can say that some people enjoy your engagement style and others don’t. What I don’t understand is why you choose to engage with people who clearly don’t enjoy your engagement style.
I suspect that your thinking is that the responsibility falls on them to disengage if they so desire. But clearly some people struggle with that (and I would pose the same question to them as well: why continue engaging). So from your perspective, if you’re aiming to win, why continue to engage with such people?
Does it make you happy? Does it make them happy? Is it an altruistic attempt to enforce community norms?
Or is it just that duty calls and you are not in fact making a conscious attempt to win? I suspect this is what is happening.
(And I apologize if this is too “gentle”, but hey, zooming out, being agent-y, and thinking strategically about whether what you’re doing is the best way to win is not easy. I certainly fail at it the large majority of the time. I think pretty much everyone does.)
Does it make you happy? Does it make them happy? Is it an altruistic attempt to enforce community norms?
Or is it just that duty calls and you are not in fact making a conscious attempt to win? I suspect this is what is happening.
None of the above.
The answer is that thinking of commenting on a public discussion forum simply as “engaging with” some specific single person is just entirely the wrong model.
It’s not like I’m having a private conversation with someone, they say “Um I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore” and run away, and I chase after them, yelling “Come back here and respond to my critique! You’re not getting away from me that easily! I have several more points to make!!”, while my hapless victim frantically looks for an alley to hide in.
LessWrong is a public discussion forum. The point of commenting is for the benefit of everyone—yourself, the person you’re replying to, any other participants in the discussion, any readers of the discussion, any future readers of the discussion…
Frankly, the view where someone finding your comments aversive is a general reason to not reply to their comments or post under their posts, strikes me as bizarre. Why would someone who only considered the impact of their comments on the specific user they were replying to, even bother commenting on LessWrong? It seems like a monstrously inefficient use of one’s time and energy…
Let me make this more concrete. Suppose you are going back and forth with a single user in a comments thread—call them Bob—and there have been nine exchanges. Bob wrote the ninth comment. You get the sense that Bob is finding the conversation unpleasant, but he continues to respond anyway.
You have the option of just not responding. Not writing that tenth comment. Not continuing to respond in that comment thread at all. (I don’t think you’d dispute this.)
And so my question is: why write the tenth comment? You point out that, as a public discussion forum, when you write that tenth comment in response to Bob, it is not just for Bob, but for anyone who might read or end up contributing to the conversation.
But that observation itself is, I think you’d agree, insufficient to explain why it’d make sense to write the tenth comment. To the extent your goals are altruistic, you’d have to posit that this tenth comment is having a net benefit to the general public. Is that your position? That despite potentially causing harm to Bob, it is worth writing the tenth comment because you expect there to be enough benefit to the general public?
And so my question is: why write the tenth comment?
Why not write the tenth comment…? I mean, presumably, in this scenario, I have some reason why I am posting any comments on this hypothetical thread at all, right? Some argument that I am making, some point that I am explaining, some confusion that I am attempting to correct (whether that means “a confusion on Bob’s part, which I am correcting by explaining whatever it is”, or “a confusion on my part, which I think that the discussion with Bob may help me resolve”), something I am trying to learn or understand, etc. Well, why should that reason not still apply to the tenth comment, just as it did to the first…?
To the extent your goals are altruistic, you’d have to posit that this tenth comment is having a net benefit to the general public. Is that your position? That despite potentially causing harm to Bob, it is worth writing the tenth comment because you expect there to be enough benefit to the general public?
I don’t accept this “causing harm to Bob” stipulation. It’s basically impossible for that to happen (excepting certain scenarios such as “I post Bob’s private contact info” or “I reveal an important secret of Bob’s” or something like that; presumably, this is not what we’re talking about).
That aside: yes, the purpose of participating in a public discussion on a public discussion forum is (or should be!) public benefit. That is how I think about commenting on LessWrong, at any rate.
I will again note that I find it perplexing to have to explain this. The alternative view (where one views a discussion in the comments on a LessWrong post as merely an interaction between two individuals, with no greater import or impact) seems nigh-incomprehensible to me.
Thank you for clarifying that your motivation in writing the tenth comment is to altriusitically benefit the general public at large. That you are making a conscious attempt to win in this scenario by writing the tenth comment.
I suspect that this is belief in belief. Suppose that we were able to measure the impact of your tenth comment. If someone offered you a bet that this tenth comment would have a net negative overall impact on the general public, at 1-to-1 odds, for a large sum of money, I don’t think you would take it because I don’t think you actually predict the tenth comment to have this net positive impact.
Well, why should that reason not still apply to the tenth comment, just as it did to the first…?
Because you have more information after the first nine comments. You have reason to believe that Bob finds the discussion to be unpleasant, that you are unlikely to update his beliefs, and that he is unlikely to update yours.
I don’t accept this “causing harm to Bob” stipulation.
Hm. “Cause” might be oversimplifying. In the situation I’m describing let’s suppose that Bob is worse off in the world where you write the tenth comment than he is in the counterfactual world where you don’t. What word/phrase would you use to describe this?
I will again note that I find it perplexing to have to explain this. The alternative view (where one views a discussion in the comments on a LessWrong post as merely an interaction between two individuals, with no greater import or impact) seems nigh-incomprehensible to me.
My belief here is that impact beyond the two individuals varies. Sometimes lots of other people are following the conversation. Sometimes they get value out of it, sometimes it has a net negative impact on them. Sometimes few other people follow the conversation. Sometimes zero other people follow it.
I expect that you share this set of beliefs and that basically everyone else shares this set of beliefs.
Thank you for clarifying that your motivation in writing the tenth comment is to altriusitically benefit the general public at large. That you are making a conscious attempt to win in this scenario by writing the tenth comment.
This is not an accurate summary.
It seems like you’re trying very hard to twist my words so as to make my views fit into your framework. But they don’t.
Well, why should that reason not still apply to the tenth comment, just as it did to the first…?
Because you have more information after the first nine comments. You have reason to believe that Bob finds the discussion to be unpleasant, that you are unlikely to update his beliefs, and that he is unlikely to update yours.
None of that is either particularly relevant to the considerations described, that affect my decision to write a comment.
I don’t accept this “causing harm to Bob” stipulation.
Hm. “Cause” might be oversimplifying. In the situation I’m describing let’s suppose that Bob is worse off in the world where you write the tenth comment than he is in the counterfactual world where you don’t. What word/phrase would you use to describe this?
I would describe it like you just did there, I guess, if I were inclined to describe it at all. But I generally wouldn’t be. (I say more about this in the thread I linked earlier.)
I will again note that I find it perplexing to have to explain this. The alternative view (where one views a discussion in the comments on a LessWrong post as merely an interaction between two individuals, with no greater import or impact) seems nigh-incomprehensible to me.
My belief here is that impact beyond the two individuals varies. Sometimes lots of other people are following the conversation. Sometimes they get value out of it, sometimes it has a net negative impact on them. Sometimes few other people follow the conversation. Sometimes zero other people follow it.
This seems to be some combination of “true but basically irrelevant” (of course more people read some comment threads than others, but so what?) and “basically not true” (a net negative impact? seems unlikely unless I lie or otherwise behave unethically, which I do not). None of this has any bearing on the fact that comments on a public forum aren’t just written for one person.
I usually find that I get negative value out of “said posts many comments drilling into an author to get a specific concern resolved”. usually, if I get value from a Said comment thread, it’s one where said leaves quickly, either dissatisfied or satisfied; when Said makes many comments, it feels more like polluting the commons by inducing compute for me to figure out whether the thread is worth reading (and I usually don’t think so). if I were going to make one change to how said comments, it’s to finish threads with “okay, well, I’m done then” almost all the time after only a few comments.
(if I get to make two, the second would be to delete the part of his principles that is totalizing, that asserts that his principles are correct and should be applied to everyone until proven otherwise, and replace it with a relaxation of that belief into an ensemble of his-choice-in-0.0001<x<0.9999-prior-probability context-specific “principle is applicable?” models, and thus can update away from the principles ever, rather than assuming anyone who isn’t following the principles is necessarily in error.)
(if I get to make two, the second would be to delete the part of his principles that is totalizing, that asserts that his principles are correct and should be applied to everyone until proven otherwise, and replace it with a relaxation of that belief into an ensemble of his-choice-in-0.0001<x<0.9999-prior-probability context-specific “principle is applicable?” models, and thus can update away from the principles ever, rather than assuming anyone who isn’t following the principles is necessarily in error.)
What specific practical difference do you envision between the thing that you’re describing as what you want me to believe, and the thing that you think I currently believe? Like, what actual, concrete things do you imagine I would do differently, if your wish came true?
(EDIT: I ask this because I do not recognize, in your description, anything that seems like it accurately describes my beliefs. But maybe I’m misunderstanding you—hence the question.)
well, in this example, you are applying a pattern of “What specific practical difference do you envision”, and so I would consider you to be putting high probability on that being a good question. I would prefer you simply guess, describe your best guess, and if it’s wrong, I can then describe the correction. you having an internal autocomplete for me would lower the ratio of wasted communication between us for straightforward shannon reasons, and my intuitive model of human brains predicts you have it already. and so in the original claim, I was saying that you seem to have frameworks that prescribe behaviors like “what practical difference”, which are things like—at a guess—“if a suggestion isn’t specific enough to be sure I’ve interpreted correctly, ask for clarification”. I do that sometimes, but you do it more. and there are many more things like this, the more general pattern is my point.
anyway gonna follow my own instructions and cut this off here. if you aren’t able to extract useful bits from it, such as by guessing how I’d have answered if we kept going, then oh well.
I would prefer you simply guess, describe your best guess, and if it’s wrong, I can then describe the correction. you having an internal autocomplete for me would lower the ratio of wasted communication between us for straightforward shannon reasons, and my intuitive model of human brains predicts you have it already.
I see… well, maybe it will not surprise you to learn that, based on long and much-repeated experience, I consider that approach to be vastly inferior. In my experience, it is impossible for me to guess what anyone means, and also it is impossible for anyone else to guess what I mean. (Perhaps it is possible for other people to guess what other people mean, but what I have observed leads me to strongly doubt that, too.) Trying to do this impossible thing reliably leads to much more wasted communication. Asking is far, far superior.
In short, it is not that I haven’t considered doing things in the way that you suggest. I have considered it, and tried it, and had it tried on me, many times. My conclusion has been that it’s impossible to succeed and a very bad idea to try.
Hm. I’m realizing that I’ve been presuming that you are at least roughly consequentialist and are trying to take actions that lead to good consequences for affected parties. Maybe that’s not true though.
But if it is true, here is how I am thinking about it. We can divide affected parties into 1) you, 2) Bob, and 3) others. We’ve stipulated that with the tenth comment you expect it to negatively affect Bob. So then, I’d think that’d mean that your reason for posting the tenth comment is that you expect the desirable consequences for you and others to outweigh the undesirable consequences for Bob.
Furthermore, you’ve emphasized “public benefit” and the fact that this is a public forum. You also haven’t indicated that you have particularly selfish motives that would make you want to do things that benefit you at the expense of others, at least not to an unusual degree. So then, I presume that the expected benefit to the third group—others—is the bulk of your reason for posting the tenth comment.
It seems like you’re trying very hard to twist my words so as to make my views fit into your framework. But they don’t.
I’m sorry that it came across that way. I promise that I am not trying to twist your words. I just would like to understand where you are coming from.
I’m realizing that I’ve been presuming that you are at least roughly consequentialist and are trying to take actions that lead to good consequences for affected parties. Maybe that’s not true though.
“Roughly consequentialist” is a basically apt label. But as I have written a few times, act consequentialism is pretty obviously non-viable; the only reasonable way to be a consequentialist is rule consequentialism.
This makes your the reasoning you outline in your second paragraph inapplicable and inappropriate.
I describe my views on this a bit in the thread I linked earlier. Some more relevant commentary can be found in this comment (Cmd-F “I say and write things” for the relevant ~3 paragraphs, although that entire comment thread is at least partly relevant to this discussion, as it talks about consequentialism and how to implement it, etc.).
One thing I want to note is that I hear you and agree with you about how these comments are taking place in public forums and that we need to consider their effects beyond the commenter and the person being replied to.
I’m interested in hearing more about why you expect your hypothetical tenth comment in this scenario we’ve been discussing to have a net positive effect. I will outline some things about my model of the world and would love to hear about how it meshes with your model.
Components of my model:
People generally don’t dig too deeply into long exchanges on comment threads. And so the audience is small. To the extent this is true, the effects on Bob should be weighed more heavily.
This hypothetical exchange is likely to be perceived as hostile and adversarial.
When perceived that way, people tend to enter a soldier-like mindset.
People are rather bad at updating their believes when they have such a mindset.
Being in a soldier mindset might cause them to, I’m not sure how to phrase this, but something along the lines of practicing bad epidemics, and this leading to them being weaker epistemically moving forward, not stronger.
I guess this doesn’t mesh well with the hypothetical I’ve outlined, but I feel like a lot of times the argument you’re making is about a relatively tangential and non-central point. To the extent this is true, there is less benefit to discussing it.
The people who do read through the comment thread, the audience, often experience frustration and unhappiness. Furthermore, they often get sucked in, spending more time than they endorse.
(I’m at the gym on my phone and was a little loose with my language and thinking.)
One possibility I anticipate is that you think that modeling things this way and trying to predict such consequences of writing the tenth comment is a futile act consequentialist approach and one should not attempt this. Instead they should find rules roughly similar to “speak the truth” and follow them. If so, I would be interested in hearing about what rules you are following and why you have chosen to follow those rules.
I’m interested in hearing more about why you expect your hypothetical tenth comment in this scenario we’ve been discussing to have a net positive effect.
… I get the sense that you haven’t been reading my comments at all.
I didn’t claim that I “expect [my] hypothetical tenth comment in this scenario we’ve been discussing to have a net positive effect”. I explicitly disclaimed the view (act consequentialism) which involves evaluation of this question at all. The last time you tried to summarize my view in this way, I specifically said that this is not the right summary. But now you’re just repeating that same thing again. What the heck?
One possibility I anticipate is that you think that modeling things this way and trying to predict such consequences of writing the tenth comment is a futile act consequentialist approach and one should not attempt this. Instead they should find rules roughly similar to “speak the truth” and follow them. If so, I would be interested in hearing about what rules you are following and why you have chosen to follow those rules.
… ok, I take it back, it seems like you are reading my comments and apparently (sort of, mostly) understanding them… but then where the heck did the above-quoted totally erroneous summary of my view come from?!
Anyhow, to answer your question… uh… I already answered your question. I explain some relevant “rules” in the thread that I linked to.
That having been said, I do want to comment on your outlined model a bit:
People generally don’t dig too deeply into long exchanges on comment threads. And so the audience is small. To the extent this is true, the effects on Bob should be weighed more heavily.
First of all, “the effects on Bob” of my comments are Bob’s own business, not mine.
Let’s be clear about what it is that we’re not discussing. We’re not talking about “effects on Bob” that are of the form “other people read my comment and then do things that are bad for Bob” (which would happen if e.g. I doxxed Bob, or posted defamatory claims, etc.). We’re not talking about “effects on Bob” that come from the comment just existing, regardless of whether Bob ever read it (e.g., erroneous and misleading descriptions of Bob’s ideas). And we’re definitely not talking about some sort of “basilisk hack” where my comment hijacks Bob’s brain in some weird way and causes him to have seizures (perhaps due to some unfortunate font rendering bug).
No, the sorts of “effects” being referred to, here, are specifically and exclusively the effects, directly on Bob, of Bob reading my comments (and understanding them, and thinking about them, etc.), in the normal way that humans read ordinary text.
Well, for one thing, if Bob doesn’t want to experience those effects, he can just not read the comment. That’s a choice that Bob can make! “Don’t like, don’t read” applies more to some things than others… but it definitely applies to some obscure sub-sub-sub-thread of some discussion deep in the weeds of the comment section of a post on Less Wrong dot com.
But also, and more generally, each person is responsible for what effects reading some text has on them. (We are, again, not talking about some sort of weird sci-fi infohazard, but just normal reading of ordinary text written by humans.) Part of being an adult is that you take this sort of very basic responsibility for how things affect your feelings, and if you don’t like doing something, you stop doing it. Or not! Maybe you do it anyway, for any number of reasons. That’s your call! But the effects on you are your business, not anyone else’s.
So in this hypothetical calculation which you allude to, “the effects on Bob” (in the sense that we are discussing) should be weighted at exactly zero.
This hypothetical exchange is likely to be perceived as hostile and adversarial.
If that perception is correct, then it is right and proper to perceive it thus. If it is incorrect, then the one who mis-perceives it thus should endeavor to correct their error.
Being in a soldier mindset might cause them to, I’m not sure how to phrase this, but something along the lines of practicing bad epidemics, and this leading to them being weaker epistemically moving forward, not stronger.
Maintaining good epistemics in the face of pressure is an important rationality skill—one which it benefits everyone to develop. And the “pressure” involved in arguing with some random nobody on LessWrong is one of the mildest, most consequence-free forms of pressure imaginable—the perfect situation for practicing those skills.
I feel like a lot of times the argument you’re making is about a relatively tangential and non-central point. To the extent this is true, there is less benefit to discussing it.
If our hypothetical Bob thinks this, then he should have no problem at all disengaging from the discussion, and ignoring all further replies in the given thread. “I think that this is not important enough for me to continue spending my time on it, so thank you for the discussion thus far, but I won’t be replying further” is a very easy to thing to say.
The people who do read through the comment thread, the audience, often experience frustration and unhappiness. Furthermore, they often get sucked in, spending more time than they endorse.
Then perhaps these hypothetical readers should develop and practice the skill of “not continuing to waste their time reading things which they can see is a waste of their time”. “Somehow finding yourself doing something which you don’t endorse” is a general problem, and thus admits of general solutions. It is pointless to try to take responsibility for the dysfunctional internet-forum-reading habits of anyone who might ever read one’s comments on LessWrong.
… ok, I take it back, it seems like you are reading my comments and apparently (sort of, mostly) understanding them… but then where the heck did the above-quoted totally erroneous summary of my view come from?!
I don’t have the strongest grasp of what rule consequentialism actually means. I’m also very prone to thinking about things in terms of expected value. I apologize if either of these things has lead to confusion or misattribution.
My understanding of rule consequentialism is that you choose rules that you think will lead to the best consequences and then try to follow those rules. But it is also my understanding that it is often a little difficult to figure out what rules apply to what situations, and so in practice some object level thinking about expected consequences bleeds in.
It sounds like that is not the case here though. It sounds like here you have rules you are following that clearly apply to this decision to post the tenth comment and you are not thinking about expected consequences. Is that correct? If not would you mind clarifying what is true?
Anyhow, to answer your question… uh… I already answered your question. I explain some relevant “rules” in the thread that I linked to.
I would appreciate it if you could outline 1) what the rules are and 2) why you have selected them.
So in this hypothetical calculation which you allude to, “the effects on Bob” (in the sense that we are discussing) should be weighted at exactly zero.
Hm. I’d like to clarify something here. This seems important.
It’s one thing to say that 1) “tough love” is good because despite being painful in the short term, it is what most benefits the person in the long term. But it is another thing to say 2) that if someone is “soft” then their experiences don’t matter.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think that it is gesturing at something that is important and in the ballpark of what we’re talking about. I’m having trouble putting my finger on it. Do you think there is something useful here, perhaps with some amendments? Would you like to comment on where you stand on (1) vs (2)?
I’ll also try to ask a more concrete question here. Are you saying a) by taking the effects on Bob into account it will lead to less good consequences for society as a whole (ie. Bob + everyone else), and thus we shouldn’t take the effects of Bob into account? Or are you saying b), that the effects on Bob simply don’t matter at all?
It sounds like here you have rules you are following that clearly apply to this decision to post the tenth comment and you are not thinking about expected consequences. Is that correct? If not would you mind clarifying what is true?
Sure, that’s basically true. Let’s say, provisionally, that this is a reasonable description.
I would appreciate it if you could outline 1) what the rules are and 2) why you have selected them.
I’m talking about stuff like this:
I say and write things[3] because I consider those things to be true, relevant, and at least somewhat important.
Now, is that the only rule that applies to situations like this (i.e., “writing comments on a discussion forum”)? No, of course not. Many other rules apply. It’s not really reasonable to expect me to enumerate the entirety of my moral and practical views in a comment.
As for why I’ve selected the rules… it’s because I think that they’re the right ones, of course.
Like, at this point we’ve moved into “list and explain all of your opinions about morality and also about everything else”. And, man, that is definitely a “we’re gonna be here all day or possibly all year or maybe twelve years” sort of conversation.
So in this hypothetical calculation which you allude to, “the effects on Bob” (in the sense that we are discussing) should be weighted at exactly zero.
Hm. I’d like to clarify something here. This seems important.
It’s one thing to say that 1) “tough love” is good because despite being painful in the short term, it is what most benefits the person in the long term. But it is another thing to say 2) that if someone is “soft” then their experiences don’t matter.
Well, yes, those are indeed two different things. But also, neither of them are things that I’ve said, so neither of them seems relevant…?
Do you think there is something useful here, perhaps with some amendments?
I think that you’re reading things into my comments that are not the things that I wrote in those comments. I’m not sure what the source of the confusion is.
I’ll also try to ask a more concrete question here. Are you saying a) by taking the effects on Bob into account it will lead to less good consequences for society as a whole (ie. Bob + everyone else), and thus we shouldn’t take the effects of Bob into account? Or are you saying b), that the effects on Bob simply don’t matter at all?
Well, things don’t just “matter” in the abstract, they only matter to specific people. I’m sure that the effects on Bob of Bob reading my comments matter to Bob. This is fine! Indeed, it’s perfect: the effects matter to Bob, and Bob is the one who knows best what the effects are, and Bob is the one best capable of controlling the effects, so a policy of “the effects on Bob of Bob reading my comments are Bob’s to take care of” is absolutely ideal in every way.
And, yes indeed, it would be very bad for society as a whole (and relevant subsets thereof, such as “the participants in this discussion forum”) if we were to adopt the opposite policy. (Indeed, we can see that it is very bad for society, almost every time we do adopt the opposite policy.)
Like, very straightforwardly, a society that takes the position that I have described is just better than a society that takes the opposite position. That’s the rule consequentialist reasoning here.
This is starting to feel satisfying, like I understand where you are coming from. I have a relatively strong curiosity here; I want to understand where you’re coming from.
It sounds like there are rules such as “saying things that are true, relevant and at least somewhat important” that you strongly believe will lead to the best outcomes for society. These rules apply to the decision to post the tenth comment, and so you follow the rule and post the comment.
Like, very straightforwardly, a society that takes the position that I have described is just better than a society that takes the opposite position. That’s the rule consequentialist reasoning here.
So to be clear would it be accurate to say that you would choose (a) rather than (b) in my previous question? Perhaps with some amendments or caveats?
I’m trying to ask what you value.
And as for listing out your entire moral philosophy, I am certainly not asking for that. I was thinking that there might be 3-5 rules that are most relevant and that would be easy to rattle off. Is that not the case?
So to be clear would it be accurate to say that you would choose (a) rather than (b) in my previous question? Perhaps with some amendments or caveats?
Right.
I was thinking that there might be 3-5 rules that are most relevant and that would be easy to rattle off. Is that not the case?
I guess I’d have to think about it. The “rules” that are relevant to this sort of situation have always seemed to me to be both very obvious and also continuous with general principles of how to live and act, so separating them out is not easy.
I think your comment here epitomizes what I value about your posting. I’m not here to feel good about myself, I want to learn stuff correctly the first time. If I want to be coddled I can go to my therapist.
I also think that there’s a belief in personal agency that we share. No one is required to read or comment, and I view even negative comments as a valuable gift of the writer’s time and energy.
I wish I could write as sharply and itintelligently as you do. Most people waste too many words not saying anything with any redeeming factor except social signaling. (At least when I waste words i try to make it funny and interesting, which is not much better but intended as sort of an unspoken apology)
I hope that, at least, you now have some idea of why I view such suggestions as “why can’t you just write more nicely” as something less than an obviously winning play.
EDIT: The parent comment was heavily edited after I posted this reply; originally it contained only the first paragraph. The text above is a reply to that. I will reply to the edited-in parts in a sibling comment.
(Sorry about the edit Said, and thank you for calling it out and stating your intent. I was going to DM you but figured you might not receive it due to some sort of moderation action, which is unfortunate. I figured there’d be a good chance that you’d see the edit and so I’d wait a few hours before replying to let you know I had edited the comment.)
Here’s the comment where you say it’s normatively correct to “stick one’s heels in and be unwilling to budge on a position regardless of reason or argument”.
My best guess is that you just wrote that in order to write something that reads as a definitive slap-down, but regardless it is a pretty silly thing to write (and made me respect you less!).
My best guess is that you just wrote that in order to write something that reads as a definitive slap-down
It would seem that you didn’t follow the link in that text. My best guess is that you just wanted to score a point against me, and didn’t bother to check or figure out what it was that I was actually saying.
Schopenhauer is saying that—to put it in modern terms—we do not have the capability to instantly evaluate all arguments put to us, to think in the moment through all their implications, to spot flaws, etc., and to perform exactly the correct update (or lack of update). So if we immediately admit that our interlocutor is right and we are wrong, as soon as this seems to be the case, then we can very easily be led into error!
So we don’t do that. We defend our position, as it stands at the beginning. And then, after the dispute concludes, we can consider the matter at leisure, and quite possibly change our minds.
As you can see, this is very much not “epistemically committed to not changing his mind in the face of evidence and argument”.
I’ll take that retraction and apology now, please.
Once again I think you kind of don’t understand good communication and are being silly. That comment is recommending people not change their minds in comment threads. Like, you go on in that comment to say:
So let us not demand—neither of our interlocutors, nor of ourselves—that a compelling argument be immediately accepted. It may well be that stubborn defense of one’s starting position—combined with a willingness to reflect, after the dispute ends, and to change one’s mind later—is a better path to truth.
And yet here you demand I immediately change my mind in response to reason and evidence.
You go on to praise Schopenhauer when he writes about how to have discourse, including (for example) this line:
As a rule, then, every man will insist on maintaining whatever he has said, even though for the moment he may consider it false or doubtful.
That comment of mine you’re responding to is one where I describe talking to you often as similar to “an LLM in whose system prompt it was written that it should not be able to either agree with or understand your point”. Zack Davis describes that position as “laughable, obviously wrong, and deeply corrosive” but then you go on to link to yourself repeatedly endorsing not changing your mind in comment sections and say that such behavior is “normatively correct”. You guys have got to decide whether the position is laughable or obviously correct! These are consequentially different! There may be some light between your position and my description but they’re quite close.
I’m not invested in more litigation of your behavior and so on. We’ve made our call.
And yet here you demand I immediately change my mind in response to reason and evidence.
I think this is an improperly narrow interpretation of the word now in the grandparent’s “I’ll take that retraction and apology now.” A retraction and apology in a few days after you’ve taken some time to cool down and reflect would be entirely in line with Schopenhauer’s advice. I await the possibility with cautious optimism.
Zack Davis describes that position as “laughable, obviously wrong, and deeply corrosive”
You had just disparagingly characterized Achmiz as “describing [interlocutors’] positions as laughable, obviously wrong, deeply corrosive, etc”. I was deliberately “biting the bullet” by choosing to express my literal disagreement with your hyperbolic insult using those same words verbatim, in order to stick up for the right to express disagreement using strong language when appropriate.
Just checking that you “got the joke.”
“normatively correct”. You guys
Please note that I had put a Disagree react on the phrase “normatively correct” on the comment in question. (The react was subsequently upvoted by Drake Morrison and Habryka.)
My actual position is subtler: I think Schopenhauer is correct to point out that it’s possible to concede an argument too early and that good outcomes often result from being obstinate in the heat of an argument and then reflecting at leisure later, but I think describing the obstinacy behavior as “normatively correct” is taking it way too far; that’s not what the word normative means.
I looked over the comment, while I think it was a reasonable stab at what I was trying to say, it didn’t quite meet my standards for expressing my opinion versus stating a verifiable fact, so I’ve edited it.
I’m happy that my comment is more accurate and I’m grateful to Said’s comment for that effect; I do think his comment about not-changing-your-mind-in-response-to-reason-or-argument being ‘normatively correct’ was misleading about his epistemic state (e.g. this also communicated the wrong thing to Zack).
And yet here you demand I immediately change my mind in response to reason and evidence.
I think this is an improperly narrow interpretation of the word now in the grandparent’s “I’ll take that retraction and apology now.” A retraction and apology in a few days after you’ve taken some time to cool down and reflect would be entirely in line with Schopenhauer’s advice. I await the possibility with cautious optimism.
Who could possibly be disagree-voting with this comment? What does it even mean to disagree with me saying that I endorse someone’s interpretation of my own words?
My actual position is subtler: I think Schopenhauer is correct to point out that it’s possible to concede an argument too early and that good outcomes often result from being obstinate in the heat of an argument and then reflecting at leisure later, but I think describing the obstinacy behavior as “normatively correct” is taking it way too far
I think that this position is reasonable, but wrong. On the other hand, perhaps we do not actually disagree on this point, as such, because of the next point:
that’s not what the word normative means
I disagree. Elaborating:
Suppose that we are considering some class of situations, and two possible behaviors, A and B, in such a situation; and we are discussing which is the correct behavior in a situation of the given class. It may be the case (and we may claim) that any of the following hold:
Behavior A is always correct; behavior B is never correct.
Behavior B is always correct; behavior A is never correct.
In all cases, either A or B is fine; both are acceptable, neither is wrong.
In certain situations of the given class, A is correct and B is wrong; in other situations of the given class, B is correct and A is wrong.
In certain situations of the given class, A is correct and B is wrong; in other situations of the given class, B is correct and A is wrong; in yet other situations of the given class, either A or B is fine.
In certain situations of the given class, A is correct and B is wrong; in other situations of the given class, either A or B is fine.
In certain situations of the given class, B is correct and A is wrong; in other situations of the given class, either A or B is fine.
In which of these scenarios would you assent to the claim that “A is normatively correct”?
My own position is that the answer is “all of the above except #2 and possibly #7”. (I can see a definitional argument based on #7, but I am not strongly committed to including it in the definition of “normative”.)
When discussing rationality, I typically use the word normative to refer to what idealized Bayesian reasoners would do, often in contrast to what humans do.
(Example usage, bolding added: “Normatively, theories are preferred to the quantitative extent that they are simple and predict the observed data [...] For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer ‘their own’ ideas, and in that context, a ‘principle of charity’ can be useful as a corrective heuristic—but the corrective heuristic only works by colliding the non-normative bias with a fairness instinct [...]”)
As Schopenhauer observes, the entire concept of adversarial debate is non-normative!
“[N]ot demand[ing] [...] that a compelling argument be immediately accepted” is normatively correct insofar as even pretty idealized Bayesian reasoners would face computational constraints, but a “stubborn defense of one’s starting position—combined with a willingness [...] to change one’s mind later” isn’t normatively correct, because the stubbornness part comes from humans’ innate vanity rather than serving any functional purpose. You could just say, “Let me think about that and get back to you later.”
When discussing rationality, I typically use the word normative to refer to what idealized Bayesian reasoners would do, often in contrast to what humans do.
Understood. However, I am not sure that I approve of this usage; and it is certainly not how I use the word (or, to a first approximation, any words) myself. My comments are, unless specified otherwise, generally intended to refer to actually-existing humans.[1]
As Schopenhauer observes, the entire concept of adversarial debate is non-normative!
Indeed, so either we take this to mean that any normative claims about how to conduct such debates are necessarily meaningless, or else we allow for a concept of normativity that is not restricted to idealized Bayesian reasoners (which, I must remind you, are not actually real things that exist). Now, I am not saying that we should not identify an ideal and try to approach it asymptotically, but surely it makes no sense to behave as if we have already reached that ideal. And until we have (which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon or possibly ever), adversarial debate is a form of epistemic inquiry we will always have with us. So there must be right and wrong ways to go about doing it.
“[N]ot demand[ing] [...] that a compelling argument be immediately accepted” is normatively correct insofar as even pretty idealized Bayesian reasoners would face computational constraints, but a “stubborn defense of one’s starting position—combined with a willingness [...] to change one’s mind later” isn’t normatively correct, because the stubbornness part comes from humans’ innate vanity rather than serving any functional purpose. You could just say, “Let me think about that and get back to you later.”
“Stubbornness” is just the refusal to immediately update. Whether it makes sense to continue defending a point, or whether it makes more sense to say “let me think about it and get back to you”, is contingent on various circumstantial aspects of the situation, the course of the discussion, etc. It does not seem to me like this point can make any substantive difference.
Perhaps not necessarily endorsing the actually existing distributions of certain traits in humans, perhaps generalizing slightly to “actually-existing humans but also very similar entities, humans under small plausible modifications, etc.”, but essentially still “actual humans”, and definitely not “hypothetical idealized Bayesian reasoners, which don’t exist and who maybe (probably?) can’t exist at all”.
And yet here you demand I immediately change my mind in response to reason and evidence.
We are not talking, here, about some subtle point of philosophy, or some complicated position on the facts of some difficult and specialized subject. You made a claim about my views. I disclaimed it. Either you have some support for your claim, or it is unsubstantiated. It would seem that you have no support for your claim.
When one makes objectionable factual claims about another person, and is unable to substantiate those claims, the correct thing to do is to retract it and apologize. (This does not preclude making the claim again in the future, should it so happen that you acquire previously unavailable support for the claim! But currently, you have nothing—and indeed, less than nothing—namely, a statement from me disclaiming your characterization, and nothing from you to support it.)
If you refuse to do so, the only appropriate conclusion is that you are someone who knowingly lies about other people’s views.
You go on to praise Schopenhauer when he writes about how to have discourse, including (for example) this line:
As a rule, then, every man will insist on maintaining whatever he has said, even though for the moment he may consider it false or doubtful.
Schopenhauer was here describing human behavior, having just two sentences prior (in a section which I bolded for emphasis) characterized said behavior as “the weakness of our intellect and the perversity of our will”. To say of this merely that it is “Schopenhauer when he writes about how to have discourse” is disingenuous.
You guys have got to decide whether the position is laughable or obviously correct!
I am not a “you guys” and I reject the notion that I have to decide anything for anyone else. Zack is perfectly capable of speaking for himself, as I am capable of speaking for myself. If I endorse someone’s point, I’ll say so.
What is “normatively correct” is what I described in the section I quoted in the grandparent. I have been completely clear about this view, never wavering from it in the slightest. The idea that there is some sort of ambiguity or vaccilation here is entirely of your own false invention.
Your characterization of me as “an LLM in whose system prompt it was written that it should not be able to either agree with or understand your point” is obviously insulting and, more importantly, unambiguously and verifiably false.[1], insofar as I have agreed with people often.
you go on to link to yourself repeatedly endorsing not changing your mind in comment sections
This again is an erroneous and deceptive characterization.
The bottom line is that, once again, your claim about my views is demonstrably false, and you have no support for it whatsoever. You should retract it and apologize to me.
I was talking about making top-level posts or shortforms with object-level objections. Calling an author a “coward” for banning you from their post, is of course not what I was talking about as something that is fine to do on your shortform.
Your conduct on the site matters, and the conduct you displayed in that thread seemed bad, independently of where it occurred. I didn’t mean to imply that just because something is a top-level post or shortform that it’s OK to write whatever you want there, we still have standards here. But it’s the site-moderators job to enforce those standards, not the original post author’s, which is what this whole post is about.
Or to state it a different way: No, there is nothing deceptive here. The fact that you can make a shortform or top-level post does indeed help lower the cost of authors deleting comments from their posts. It doesn’t change what we do in terms of site-wide moderation.
Calling an author a “coward” for banning you from their post
FYI, that link goes to a very weird URL, which I doubt is what you intended.
The link you had in mind, I am sure, is to this thread. And your description of that thread, in this comment and in the OP, is quite dishonest. You wrote:
Said took to his own shortform where (amongst other things) he and others called that author a coward for banning him
Calling an author a “coward” for banning you from their post
In ordinary conversation between normal people, I wouldn’t hesitate to call this a lie. Here on LessWrong, of course, we like to have long, nuanced discussions about how something can be not technically a lie, what even is “lying”, etc., so—maybe this is a “lie” and maybe not. But here’s the truth: the first use of the word “coward” in that thread was on Gordon’s part. He wrote:[1]
I didn’t have to say anything. I could have just banned you. But I’m not a coward and I’ll own my action. I think it’s the right one, even if I pay some reputational cost for it.
And I replied:
I’m not a coward
Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but now that you’ve denied it explicitly—sorry, no, I have to disagree. Banning critics from your posts is a cowardly act. I think that you know this.
To describe this in the way that you did, has the obvious connotation to any reasonable reader that I, unprompted, went and wrote something like “Gordon is a coward for banning me from his posts!”. That’s the picture that someone would come away with, after reading your characterization. And, of course, it would be completely inaccurate.
You have, again and again in this post and the comments here, relied on this sort of tendentious description and mischaracterization. This is yet another example.
I think that you know perfectly well how dishonest this sort of thing is. The fact that you have to rely on such underhanded tactics to make your case should give you pause.
P.S.: I must note that I am currently rate-limited in my ability to comment (a result of the LW mods strong-downvoting my comments in this thread, e.g. this one). How does this square with “Said, feel free to ask questions of commenters or of me here”?
That’s the picture that someone would come away with, after reading your characterization. And, of course, it would be completely inaccurate.
I’m not sure the more accurate picture is flawless behavior or anything, but I do think I definitely had an inaccurate picture in the way Said describes.
P.S.: I must note that I am currently rate-limited in my ability to comment (a result of the LW mods strong-downvoting my comments in this thread, e.g. this one). How does this square with “Said, feel free to ask questions of commenters or of me here”?
That… is an unfortunate application of the auto rate-limiting system. I’ll see whether I can disable it easily for you. I’ll figure out something in the next few hours, but it might require shipping some new code and disentangling the surrounding systems a bit. Sorry about that. Definitely not intended.
I just enabled “ignore rate limits” for this post (which I assumed we’d want for this post to avoid this issue but I think I’m the only one that remembered that feature existed)
FYI, that link goes to a very weird URL, which I doubt is what you intended.
Ooops, sorry, fixed.
To describe this in the way that you did, has the obvious connotation to any reasonable reader that I, unprompted, went and wrote something like “Gordon is a coward for banning me from his posts!”. That’s the picture that someone would come away with, after reading your characterization. And, of course, it would be completely inaccurate.
I agree that the context is helpful and importantly makes the “coward” aspect more understandable. I also omitted other context that I think makes the thing I intended to communicate with “you called him a coward” a more reasonable summary[1]. I think I am sold that it would have been better for me to give a bit more context and to summarize things a bit differently. I don’t overall agree that it was substantially misleading, but I agree I could have done better.
You’ve had to resort to banning me from your posts, not because my comments were somehow unusually “adversarial” or “unproductive” or any such thing—nothing remotely like that is true (and I invite anyone who doubts this to check out the above link)—but simply because I haven’t gotten fed up with Less Wrong and left on my own, and am still pointing out when you write things that are wrong and/or nonsensical. That’s all.
Which I also consider to follow the same unhelpful patterns described in the OP.
I feel like Said … has a personal distaste of that sort of “post that contains bits that aren’t pinned down,”
This impression is mistaken. I have no such “distaste”.
On the contrary, my comments are often aimed at helping to “pin down” those bits. Asking probing questions, asking for examples, asking authors to explain how they are using certain words, etc., is precisely the correct way to do such “pinning down”.
… it also seemed like he wouldn’t get any closer to seeing the point of those posts or comments when it was explained in additional detail. (Or, in case he did eventually see the points, he’d rarely say thanks or acknowledged that he got it now). That’s pretty frustrating to deal with for authors and other commenters.
The unacknowledged possibility here, for any given post in this category, is that the post had no coherent point, and was in fact confused, nonsensical, simply wrong, or some combination thereof. In such a case, it is entirely correct that I should not “get closer to seeing the point”, and anyone who did “get closer to seeing the point” of such a post would be making a mistake—becoming more wrong instead of less wrong. In other words: if “there is no there there”, then “getting there” is wrong, and “not getting there” is correct.
The way that we can distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that there is something there but it’s difficult to verbalize or to characterize coherently, is precisely via discussion, conceptual analysis, examination of intent behind word choices, examination of examples (or trying to think of examples), etc. And if we find “something there”, the same methods are the means by which we can develop and refine it.
The way that we can distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that there is something there but it’s difficult to verbalize or to characterize coherently, is precisely via discussion, conceptual analysis, examination of intent behind word choices, examination of examples (or trying to think of examples), etc.
It’s not worth making most posts where implied central points are not coherently understood by the author. But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they’ve written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn’t of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already.
The incentives should carve out a niche for this kind of communication, acknowledging practical impossibility to distinguish. The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment, so any incentives should actually want to point the other way, possibly on orthogonal or correlated considerations that can actually be resolved in practice.
But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they’ve written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn’t of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already.
Of course. I wholly agree with this.
The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment
Empirically, this is clearly false. The track record of LW in the past ~8 years makes this very clear.
That seems hard to judge from anything empirical, you’d need to compare with the counterfactual where there is little difficulty in distinguishing and so good tentative takes don’t need to live in squalor among piles of worthless nonsense (especially well-presented “high effort” worthless nonsense). So I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly false, and similarly I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly true, since it has to rely on low-legibility intuitive takes about unobservable counterfactuals.
Also, the problems from the difficulty to distinguish are both on the side of the authors (in the form of incentives) and on the side of the readers (in the form of low availability of good content of this type, and having to endure the worthless nonsense without even being able to know if it actually is worthless nonsense).
The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment
Empirically, this is clearly false. The track record of LW in the past ~8 years makes this very clear.
The examples in this post don’t seem compelling at all. One of the primary examples seems to be Duncan who comes off [from a distance] as thin-skinned and obscurantist, emotionally blowing up at very fair criticism.
What are you talking about? I don’t think I link to a single Duncan/Said interaction in any of the core narratives of the post. I do link the moderation judgement of the previous Said/Duncan thread, but it’s not the bulk of this post.
You might still not find the examples compelling, but there is basically no engagement with Duncan that played any kind of substantial role in any of this.
This seems to me to be spectacularly disingenuous, given the discussion in this subthread, where @habryka writes:
Quickly responding to this: The OP directly links to 2 authors who have made statements to this effect on LessWrong itself, and one author who while saying it wasn’t a major reason for leaving, still was obviously pretty upset (Benquo)[1]. I wouldn’t consider Gordon a “top author” but would consider Duncan and Benquo to be ones. There are more, though I have fewer links handy.
My guess is this is clear to most readers, but to clarify, I said “but there is basically no engagement [of Said] with Duncan that played any kind of substantial role in any of this”. I.e. I don’t think your comments in any threads with Duncan played much into this decision.
Duncan’s complaints about you also preceded his direct conflict with you, as far as I can remember. The quote I dug up for you just happened to have been made in that context (which shouldn’t be very surprising, as people rarely publicly complain about other users on LessWrong in the precise way you were asking about).
I don’t think your comments in any threads with Duncan played much into this decision.
This just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I don’t understand how you can say this and expect to be believed, when you cite Duncan as one of your examples of “many top authors citing [Said] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site” (and indeed as the only example for which you’ve been able to provide any kind of unambiguous proof)—and that, in turn, is your explanation for what “the stakes” of this decision are!
people rarely publicly complain about other users on LessWrong in the precise way you were asking about
I only asked about it because you made the claim in the first place! These are your words! You wrote: “many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here”. For you to now pretend that I am making some weird demand for some weird form of evidence for some weird reason, is yet another example of disingenuousness.
Come on, please, you can figure out what I mean with those sentences.
This just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I don’t understand how you can say this and expect to be believed, when you cite Duncan as one of your examples of “many top authors citing [Said] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site” (and indeed as the only example for which you’ve been able to provide any kind of unambiguous proof)—and that, in turn, is your explanation for what “the stakes” of this decision are!
Yes, many top authors cite you as a reason for why they do not want to post on the site. This does not mean that your specific interactions with the one specific author we are talking about are the reason why many top authors are doing so. These are two at most weakly correlated points. It’s really not hard to imagine how they could come apart. Those interactions are not even the reason why Duncan said the same thing, as his complaints started substantially before the relevant thread where he said it more explicitly.
many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here
I literally clarified this two comments ago, and in like 4 other comment threads you are involved in. Most of these authors cite you, in private communication. This is not a particularly complicated thing to understand. Separately, at least some top authors have publicly complained about you, but that isn’t the load-bearing part of why I wrote the above, or why I believe what I believe. We’ve already discussed this a bunch. I don’t know what you are trying to say here.
This does not mean that your specific interactions with the one specific author we are talking about are the reason why many top authors are doing so.
… nor did I claim this, nor do I think that you have claimed this…? What in the world would make you think that this is what we’re talking about? This just seems like a non sequitur.
I literally clarified this two comments ago, and in like 4 other comment threads you are involved in. Most of these authors cite you, in private communication. This is not a particularly complicated thing to understand. Separately, at least some top authors have publicly complained about you, but that isn’t the load-bearing part of why I wrote the above, or why I believe what I believe. We’ve already discussed this a bunch. I don’t know what you are trying to say here.
I am not sure how this confusion came about, but let me try to clarify. When you say—in a public statement, the purpose of which is to stake out a publicly known, “official” position, supported by publicly made arguments—that “many top authors” cite me as “a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site”, you have two (non-mutually-exclusive) options:
Point to public statements by relevant authors
Allude to private communications from relevant authors
If you just do #2, this is basically worthless. “People have said these-and-such things to me in private”, offered with no corroboration of any kind, may be hold some small weight, in explaining and justifying your actions, if you’ve built up a large amount of trust and good will. But no more.
And so, understandably, you have not relied only on #2, but have also attempted to do a lot of #1. You have attempted to point to several examples of authors who’ve supposedly made such statements, either in public, or in a way that’s verifiable. This, again, would be an entirely understandable thing to do, given your aforementioned purpose.
Naturally, when you cite such evidence, you should expect that you will be expected to actually provide it, and that it will be examined, to verify that it is what you say it is!
And in fact, much of this purported publicly available or verifiable evidence, which you have attempted to provide, has, upon examination, turned out to be flimsy at best.
Importantly, this also means that your word about the existence of the private evidence (which cannot be publicly verified) is cast into doubt.
It’s been many years since I’ve been active on LW, but while I was, Said was the source of a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site. Many other commenters leveraged serious criticisms of my writing, but only Said consistently ruined my day while doing so.
This would seem to be a highly dubious claim, at best.
I have looked through the entirety of @alkjash’s posting/commenting history and used the site search feature, and have found only the following interactions involving the two of us:
I am surprised there are so few—perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn’t directly participate in.
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).
It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.
I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you—this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.
I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy.
Some of them look positively cooperative to me, and do not look like Said thought ill of you in any way, nor that it would look bad if you replied or didn’t reply to those messages.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
That is at least how I feel when I try to simulate why I’d feel the way you claim to have felt. And I empathize with that feeling.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don’t think it’s really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them.
One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things.
1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that’s a little too cold for me.
In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror.
2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be hostile to the way I think out loud. I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate, and this mode of banter is absolutely not compatible with serious discussions of people’s long-term reputations with consequences on the level of multi-year banning. Let nobody ever give me moderator privileges beyond my personal blog. I am not using this frame at all to justify said banning. I am only using it to explain why I personally prefer it.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate
Well I would say the whole reason LW mods are banning Said is that we do, in fact, want LW to operate this way. (Or, directionally similarly to this). I do also want wrong ideas to get noticed and discarded, and I do want “good taste in generating ideas” (there are people who aren’t skilled enough at casual idea generation for me to feel excited about them generating such conversation on LW). But I think it’s an essential part of any real generative intellectual tradition.
I really appreciate your introspection on this, but suggest that status consciousness is probably still a large part of what’s going on, because if you weren’t worried about looking bad in front of an audience (i.e., looking like you didn’t have an answer to one of Said’s questions/objections), you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his “entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency”.
you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his “entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency”.
I wanna flag, your use of the word “simply” here is… like, idk, false.
I do think it’s good for people to learn the skill of not caring what other people think and being able to think out loud even when someone is being annoying. But, this is a pretty difficult skill for lots of people. I think it’s pretty common for people who are attempting to learn it to instead end up contorting their original thought process around what the anticipated social punishment.
I think it’s a coherent position to want LessWrong “price of entry” to be gaining that skill. I don’t think it’s a reasonable position to call it “simply...”. It’s asking for like 10-200 hours of pretty scary, painful work.
The way I feel about this reply is “I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer”? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at “this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying.”
Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.
sure, the prestige challenge seems to be relevant, but I feel like the problem is that said also makes dominance threats and those suck. (I feel like there’s something going on where a big enough prestige challenge spills into dominance, or something? stated in the spirit of exploratory ramblings that may or may not have an insight somewhere downstream of them)
edit: actually I don’t want to deal with this right now, bye. I resisted my urge to delete this comment’s contents
I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
Your model of my view bears very little resemblance to my actual view.
If you found the discussion fruitful in the end, why is that not the bottom line? (Especially if this fruitfulness involved “reasonable conclusions” being reached?)
(Here I am talking about “the bottom line” only with respect to your interaction with me directly, ignoring any effects like the benefit of a comment exchange to other commenters or to readers, etc.)
You say that you “had the feeling that to interact with [me] at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”. But as we can see from the linked examples, there generally was not, in fact, any “vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”.[1] So it would seem that the “feeling” you had was false-to-fact. Do you agree with this evaluation?
Indeed, in the exchange at the first link, the putative roles were reversed—you were questioning me about what I believe, etc. Of course, I have no objection to this! But it hardly serves as an example of me drawing anyone into any vortices of quibbling…
This is the mentioned comment thread under which Said can comment for the next two weeks. Anyone can ask questions here if you want Said to have the ability to respond.
Said, feel free to ask questions of commenters or of me here (and if you want to send me some statement of less than 3,000 words, I can add it to the body of the post, and link to it from the top).
(I will personally try to limit my engagement with the comments of this post to less than 10 hours, so please forgive if I stop engaging at some point, I just really have a lot of stuff to get to)
Edit: And the two weeks are over.[1]
I decided to not actually check the “ban” flag on Said’s account, on account of trusting him to not post and vote under his account, and this allowing him to keep accessing any drafts he has on his account, and other things that might benefit from being able to stay logged in.
I am, of course, ambivalent about harshly criticizing a post which is so laudatory toward me.[1] Nevertheless, I must say that, judging by the standards according to which LessWrong posts are (or, at any rate, ought to be) judged, this post is not a very good one.
The post is very long. The length may be justified by the subject matter; unfortunately, it also helps to hide the post’s shortcomings, as there is a tendency among readers to skim, and while skimming to assume that the skimmed-over parts say basically what they seem to, argue coherently for what they promise to argue for, do not commit any egregious offenses against good epistemics, etc. Regrettably, those assumptions fail to hold for many parts of the post, which contains a great deal of sloppy argumentation, tendentious characterizations, attempts to sneak in connotations via word choice and phrasing, and many other improprieties.
The problems begin in the very first paragraph:
This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (and which I do not understand), and something which I should wish to “learn” (and which I have failed, or have not tried, to learn). This, of course, begs the question. The unambiguous reality is that I have disagreements with the LW moderation team about various things (including, as is critical here, various questions about what are proper rules, norms, and practices for a discussion forum like this one).
Of course, phrasing it in this neutral way, although it would be unimpeachably accurate, would not afford @habryka the chance to take the moral high ground. In a disagreement, after all, one side may be right, or the other; or both could be wrong. One must argue for one’s own side.
But by describing the situation as one in which he has some (presumptively correct) understanding, which remains only for him to impart to me, and some (presumptively useful) skill, which remains only for me to learn, @habryka attempts to sidestep the need to make his case.
Please note that this is not a demand that said case be made in this post itself (nor even that it be summarized, if previously made… although a hyperlink would not be amiss here—if indeed there’s anything to link to!). I am simply saying that an honest account would only say: “I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness”. It would not try to sneak in the presumption that there’s some failure to understand on my part, and only on my part.
(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)
Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100? Less than 1,000? Still, intuitively it seems like an outlandish claim. If you ask a hundred people, randomly selected out of all those who are familiar with LessWrong, to name those people who have been important to the site’s culture, how many of them will even recall my name at all, to say nothing of naming me in answer to the question? If the number exceeded the single digits, I would be flattered… but it seems unlikely.
This claim has been made before. When investigated, it has turned out to be dubious, at best. (The linked comment describes two cases where some “top author” is described by @habryka as having this sort of view, and the reality turns out to be… not really that. I would add the case of @Benquo as well, where failing to mention this comment—which was written after the discussions cited later in this post—constitutes severe dishonesty.)
We have, to my knowledge, had zero examples of this sort of claim (“top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW”) turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
This is important on its own, but it’s also important for the purposes of evaluating any other claims, made by @habryka, that are based on purported information which is available to him (e.g. in his capacity as LW administrator), but which are not readily verifiable. For example:
I expect that whatever impression is formed in a typical reader’s mind upon reading this line, the reality is something far less impressive, where my comment(s) turn out to play a far less significant role. (Again, this supposition is not a vague denial, but rather is based on @habryka’s aforementioned record w.r.t. describing other people’s views about me.)
It seems remiss not to note that the ensuing discussion thread contained over a dozen more comments from me, which together come to almost 6,000 words, and in which I explain my reasoning at length (and several of which are highly upvoted). (This is counting only comments on the object level, i.e. elaborating on my top-level comment; I am not counting the comments in the “meta” subthread started by Ben Pace.) To say that I “refuse[d] to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread” is, quite frankly, implausible.
(Were I more inclined to play fast and loose with connotations, I could say that I was trying to get my interlocutors to understand my position, but failed…)
The passive voice is inappropriate here. Those 100+ comment threads are, invariably, started and kept going largely by the LW moderators. (If you doubt this, I invite you to check.)
(Emphasis mine.)
That’s the key, isn’t it? In your math-department scenario, the bad critic is asking questions that are easily answered. But is this the case for questions that I ask on Less Wrong?
Here’s an exercise: look up all of my comments that are some version of “Examples?”, and count how many of them were “easily answered” (i.e., by the post/comment author, or someone else, readily rattling off a list of examples of whatever it is).
Before trying this, what would you predict the percentage will be? 100%? 50%? 10%?
If it turns out that I’m not asking questions that are “easily answered”, then the analogy fails to hold, and the argument has no force.
You link this comment in a footnote, but that is not enough; the fact is that your characterization of my view here is deeply misleading. (Indeed, I have argued in favor of an ignore system for LessWrong—an argument to which you were entirely un-receptive!)
As far as I can tell, the linked comment does not, in fact, ask me to do or not do anything. Most of the comment lays out various bits of reasoning about discussion norms and such. Then there’s this bit:
That’s really the only concrete part of the comment. As you can see, it asks nothing of me—certainly nothing to do with “stop implying obligations to authors”.
How could I have refused the mod team’s request, when no request was made? (And if I did “reject… [something] as a thing [I] was doing or a coherent ask”, why not link to the comment or comments where this rejection was expressed?)
This is quite a tendentious characterization of a comment thread where I only express and argue for my views, without at any point calling for anyone to do anything, encouraging anyone to do anything, etc. If I called for “authors to face censure”, the obvious questions are—what censure? In what form, from whom, how? But if one tries to find the answers to these questions (by clicking on the link, perhaps), it turns out to be impossible, because… the alleged calls for “authors to face censure” never took place.
What option, indeed? Well, except for options like implementing a robust ignore system for LessWrong (the UX design of which I would be happy to help with); or creating “subreddits” with various degrees of expected rigor (akin to the “Main” vs. “Discussion” distinction on the old LessWrong—perhaps by expanding the role of the Shortform feature, and adding some UX affordances?); or making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments; or any number of other possibilities…[2]
There is, of course, a sense in which this entire comment is an exercise in pointlessness. After all, I hardly expect that @habryka might read my commentary, think “you know, he’s right; my arguments are bad”, and reverse his decision. (Given his position as LessWrong’s admin, it is not as if he needs to justify his banning decisions in the first place!)
Still, there was, presumably, some purpose to writing this post—some goal ostensibly served by it. Whatever that goal might be, to the extent that it is well-served by a post as deeply flawed as this one, I oppose it. And if the goal is a worthy one, then the inaccuracies, misleading statements, tendentious characterizations, and other epistemic and rhetorical misdeeds with which the post is rife, can only be detrimental to it.
Although I must note that I cannot, in good conscience, accept all of the praise which the post heaps on me. (More on that later.)
I leave off such obviously outlandish and improbable suggestions as “encouraging authors to reply to questions and criticisms of their posts by answering the questions and addressing the criticisms”.
FWIW, this seems to me like a totally fine sentence. The “by my lights” at the end is indeed communicating the exact thing you are asking for here, trying to distinguish between a claim of obvious correctness, and a personal judgement.
Feel free to summarize things like this in the future, I would not object.
It of course depends on how active someone on LessWrong is (you are not as widely known as Eliezer or Scott, of course). My modal guess would be that you would be around place 20 in how people would bring up your name. I think this would be an underestimate of your effect on the culture. If someone else thinks this is implausible, I would be happy to operationalize, find someone to arbitrate, and then bet on it.
You are here responding to a sentence from a previous draft of the post. My guess is you want to edit.
I mean, I have a whole section of this post where I am making explicit rules forbidding certain sorts of comments. That’s what the precedent section is about. Of course, you are likely to disagree that those qualify as appropriate rules, or good rules, but that’s what got us to this point.
Already edited by the time you posted the comment.
Quickly responding to this: The OP directly links to 2 authors who have made statements to this effect on LessWrong itself, and one author who while saying it wasn’t a major reason for leaving, still was obviously pretty upset (Benquo)[1]. I wouldn’t consider Gordon a “top author” but would consider Duncan and Benquo to be ones. There are more, though I have fewer links handy.
I wasn’t able to find an easily extractable quote from Duncan, though I am sure he would be happy to provide affirmation of his position on this when he reads this, and readers can form their own judgement reading this thread.
We also have someone like DirectedEvolution saying this:
I also don’t have a public quote by EVN handy, though I am sure she would also be happy to attest to something close to this.
I don’t have as many receipts as I would like to be able to share here, but saying there are “zero examples” is just really straightforwardly false. You were even involved in a big moderation dispute with one of them!
While you link to a comment where he says some more positive things about you 7 years ago, I quote from his most recent overall summary in the OP, where to be clear, he was not overall in favor of banning you, though really did not have a positive impression.
Who is “EVN”…?
Elizabeth (Van Nostrand).
I… actually can’t figure out what you’re referring to, here. Could you quote the part of the OP which you have in mind?
Duncan and Gordon.
…?
But you just said that you don’t consider Gordon a “top author”, and you can’t find a quote from Duncan saying anything like this?
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
If you get people to post new things, then this may change. But what I wrote seems to me to be entirely correct.
No, at the very least it’s Duncan? That’s literally the text of my comment (though slightly circuitously).
I didn’t say I couldn’t find any quote, I said I couldn’t find any easily extractable quote. The relevant thread contains plenty of multi-paragraph sections that make this position of his quite clear, just nothing that happened to be easy to easily removed from context.
Edit: Ok, fine, after spending 20 more minutes on reading through random old threads, here is a pretty clear and extractable comment from Duncan (it really was also otherwise very obvious from the link I provided, but due to some of the indirect nature of the discussion was hard to quote):
This sure seems like an example of a top author citing you directly as the reason for not wanting to post on LW.
Yep, that is definitely one example, so the count now stands at one example.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?
I’ve already explained this multiple times, but sure, I’ll explain it again:
If someone says “X has happened a bunch of times”, and you say “Examples please?”, and they say “here are examples A, B, and C”; and you look at A, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at B, and it turns out to not be X; and you look at C, and it turns out to not be X; and you say “… none of those things are X, though?”; and your intelocutor continues to insist that “X has happened a bunch of times”…
… what is the correct position for you to take, at that point?
It is, honestly, quite distressing, how many times I have had to explain this, not just in this context but in many others: if someone makes a claim, and when asked for examples of that claim provides things that turn out not to actually be examples, then not only does their claim remain totally unsupported at that point, but also, the fact that this person thought that the given things were examples of their claim, when they actually were not—the fact that they made this error—should cause you to doubt their ability to recognize what is and is not an example of their claim, in general.
As I have written before:
(The other possibility, of course, is that the claimant was simply lying, in which case you should integrate that into your assessment of them.)
Pretty high. If such a quote were available, it would have been produced already. That it has not been, is not for lack of trying, it seems to me.
I do not keep in my head the specifics of every comment written in every conversation on LessWrong that involves me. I recalled the conversation in vague terms, but given @habryka’s track record on this subject, I expected that there was a good chance that he was misrepresenting what Duncan had said, in the same way that he misrepresented what several other authors had said. That turned out not to have been the case, of course, but the expectation was valid, given the information available at that time.
I mean, I literally already provided a quote quite close to what you desire for DirectedEvolution (is his wording as perfectly of an exact match as Duncan’s, no, but I think it is close enough to count). To remind you, the quote is:
Now we can argue about DirectedEvolution as a “top author”. I personally think he is a pretty good commenter and potentially deserving of that title.
I really haven’t tried to produce many quotes, because those quotes have little bearing on my overall bottom-line on this situation. I have enough inside-view model of this situation to cause me to make the same decision even if no top author had complained about you, and you will find that I put little emphasis in the top post on something like “the number of complaints I have gotten about you”.
But sure, here is another one, if you really want to go out on a limb and predict that no such quotes exist (this time from Lukas Gloor who I do consider a top author):[1]
And here, though of course it’s another correlated piece of evidence, is Ray’s summary of his epistemic state two years ago, which I agree isn’t a direct quote, but at least shows that Ray would also have to be totally making things up for your accusations to check out:
If you want another piece of evidence, a quick look at the /moderation page reveals that you are by a wide margin the most frequently banned user on LessWrong:
Elizabeth writes in a deletion reason for one of your comments:
Is that maximally clear? No. But again nobody here ever claimed there are public receipts for all of this.
(I should have disengaged earlier, but since you seem to insist the history of complaints about you is made up, I figured I would comment with some more things that aren’t private communication and I can easily share)
Note that he importantly also says:
This also roughly aligns with the period where I thought Said was behaving somewhat better (until it got worse again in the past few months, precipitating this ban). Maybe Lukas agrees, or not. The comment itself nevertheless seems clear.
Indeed, we certainly can argue about that. If he’s a “top author” but Gordon isn’t (as you have said), then your concept of “top author” is incoherent.
Absolutely, hilariously false. Your own words, from the OP:
This emphasis is absolutely not something which you can credibly disclaim.
… surely you jest? I have nothing at all against the guy, but he’s written five posts, ever, in 13 years of being a LessWrong member. How does he qualify as a “top author”, but not Gordon?
By the standards implied by these categorizations, it would seem that I must also be a “top author”!
You know perfectly well how little this sort of thing is worth. Yes, it’s correlated evidence. And it’s another report of more alleged private communications. Any way to verify them? Nope. Any way to check whether some or most or all of them are being mis-remembered, mis-characterized, mis-summarized, etc.? Nope.
Of course Ray would not have to be “totally making things up”, just like you have not been “totally making things up”—that is obviously a strawman! You weren’t “totally making up” the examples of Jacob Falkovich, Scott Alexander, etc.—your reporting of the relevant facts was just severely skewed, filtered, etc. Why the same cannot be true for Ray, I really can’t see.
Whether I “want another piece of evidence” is immaterial to the question, which is whether the already-claimed evidence in fact exists and in fact is as described. Introducing more pieces of other evidence has no bearing on that.
Elizabeth is (was? I’m not sure where to even find the most up to date version of this info, actually) a LessWrong moderator. This obviously disqualifies her opinion about this from consideration.
Just want to note he has many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments, and I value good commenters highly as well as good posters.
Oh? But then I must be even more of a “top author”, yes? (I also have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”, after all; in approximately as many years of being an LW member, I’ve accumulated about five times as much karma as Lukas has!)
And what of Gordon, of whom @habryka has said that he is not a “top author”—but he, too, seems to have “many many long and thoughtful high-karma comments”?
This standard of who is and is not a “top author” seems awfully fluid, I must say…
I mean, you are not by my lights, as we have just banned you. But certainly not for lack of participation.
Lukas has written 700 comments, and has ~4,000 karma. I also happen to quite like a lot of his comments. Writing posts is not a requirement to be a top author on this site, by my lights.
No, I can credibly disclaim it, because what you are quoting is a single half-sentence, in a footnote of a 15,000 word post. That is of course absolutely compatible with it not being emphasized much!
How could it have been mentioned at all without being emphasized less? I guess it could have been in a parenthetical in addition to being in a footnote, but clearly you are not going to put the line there. By the same logic, our policy that we might delete content that doxxes people could not be characterized as having little emphasis in the post, given that I also mention that offhand in a footnote, and in that case it’s even a full sentence with its own footnote!
So a “top author” means… what exactly? Just your own personal opinion of someone?
I have written over 4,500 comments, and have ~17,000 karma. Gordon has written over 2,700 comments, and has ~10,000 karma.
And yet this is not enough to make either of us “top authors”, it seems. So why is Lukas’s much lower comment count and much lower karma total sufficient to make him a “top author”? It would seem that writing any particular number of posts, or comments, or having any particular amount of karma, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a “top author” on this site! Very strange!
Ah, yes, I almost forgot—you “happen to quite like a lot of his comments”. So it does seem to come down to just your own personal opinion. Hm.
Yes, of course it isn’t. Eugine Nier isnt’ a “top author”. Neither is David Gerard. Of course karma, or volume of comments or posts is not sufficient. This sounds about as deranged as showing up in court of law and saying “oh, so neither dollars in my bank account, nor my grades in high-school are sufficient to establish whether I am guilty of this crime you accuse me off? Very strange! Very suspicious!”. Of course they aren’t!
Then why did you cite Lukas’s comment count and karma value?
And I ask again: what qualifies someone as a “top author”? Is it just your own personal opinion of someone?
Yeah, approximately. Like, I could go into detail on my model of what I think would cause someone to be qualified as a “top author”, but that really doesn’t seem very helpful at this point. I didn’t have any particularly narrow or specific definition in mind when I used these very normal words that readers would not generally assume have hyper-specific definitions the same way I use all words. In this case, it means something roughly like “author I consider in the top 50 or 100 active authors on the site in terms of how much they contribute positively to the site”.
Oh, certainly readers wouldn’t assume any such thing. But you are (yet again!) strawmanning—who said anything about “hyper-specific” definitions?
But one thing that most readers would assume, I am quite sure, is that you have some objective characteristics in mind, something other than just whether you like someone (or even “how much they contribute positively to the site”, which is naught but meaningless “vibes”).
For example, they might assume that “top author” meant something like “top in post karma or popularity or being cited or being linked to or their posts being evaluated for quality somehow in some at least semi-legible way”. They might assume that “who are the top authors on LW” would be a question that would be answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere, even if it’s hard to collect or involves subjective judgments (such as reviews, ratings, upvotes, etc.). They might assume, in short, that “who are the top authors on LW” is a question with an intersubjectively meaningful answer.
I am quite sure that they would not assume the question to be one that is answerable only by the method of “literally just ask Oliver Habryka, because there is no other way of answering it and it is not meaningful in any other way whatsoever”.
I took “top author” to mean something like “person whose writing’s overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive”. I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes” but I would expect that Oliver’s judgement of who is and isn’t a “top author” to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants’ assessment of who is and who isn’t a “top author”.
There is a lot of space between “completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver’s opinion” and “answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere”. I would take “top author” to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are “quite sure most readers would assume”) is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
This is hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to match how people use words. If you asked 100 randomly selected people what the phrase “top authors” means, how many do you think would come up with something about “overall influence on [something] has been one of the most positive”? It’s a highly unnatural way of ranking such things.
And yet it clearly does mean exactly that.
No, I really don’t think that there is.
Well, right now my comment saying what I think “top author” means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on −18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean “person whom Oliver Habryka likes”. You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into “liking”. I do not make that assumption, and I don’t think you should either.
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it doesn’t give any indication. My comment is that low because of two LW mods strong-downvoting it. That’s literally, precisely the reason: two strength-10 downvotes, from the mods. This says nothing about what “LW readers” think.
Almost every single one of my comments under this post has been getting strong downvotes from at least one mod. Judging what “LW readers” think on this basis is obviously absurd.
(I didn’t agree-vote on either gjm’s comment or your comment, FWIW. I did downvote yours, because it does seem like a pretty bad comment, but it isn’t skewing any agreement votes)
I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase “case in point” is superior to what I originally drafted.
I confirm that my understanding of top author was close to what Said describes here.
You also provide an appendix of previous moderation decisions, which you offer as background and support for your decision. A quote from that appendix:
And, at the beginning of the post—not in an appendix, not in a footnote, but in the main post body:
This, again, is about users’ complaints, and the number and distribution thereof.
You seem unable to conceive that the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong, but merely a sign of it. In-principle, there could be a user on a web forum that generated many complaints, where Habryka and I thought the complaints baseless. The mere presence of complaints is not necessary or sufficient to want to ban someone; in this case it is relevant evidence that your energy-sucking and unproductive comments have become widespread, and it is a further concerning sign that you are the extremal source of complaints, well worth mentioning as context for the ban.
As has often been the case, you will not understand the position or perspective of the person you’re in a comment section with, and obtusely call their position ridiculous and laughable at length; I have come to anticipate that threads with you are an utter waste of my time as a commenter and other people’s time as readers, and this thread has served as another such example.
Uh… yeah, of course the complaints aren’t the primary thing going wrong.
Why would you think that I “seem unable to conceive” of this? This is really a very strange reply.
The OP uses the complaints as an illustration of the supposed problem, and as evidence for said supposed problem.
If the alleged evidence is poor, then the claim that the supposed problem exists is correspondingly undermined.
Is this not obvious?
That’s a thread you’re pulling on. But as part of it, you wrote:
Note you didn’t simply question Habryka, when he said he didn’t put a ton of emphasis on the number of complaints, rather you did a strong status-lowering move of claiming his claims were laughable and ‘absolutely’ false. Yet in the whole 15,000 word post he mentions it in a single footnote, and furthermore (as I just explained) it wasn’t central to why the ban is taking place, which is why this single mention is indeed ‘little emphasis’. So I expect you will of course be very embarrassed and acknowledge your mistake in attempting to lower his status through writing that his claim was laughable, when it was true.
Or, like, I would expect that from a person who could participate in productive discourse. Not you! And this is another example of why you won’t be around these parts no more, the combination of saying obviously false things and attempting to lower people’s status for saying obviously true things and embarrass them.
Yadda yadda, you don’t understand how I could possibly see this in anything you wrote, you claim there is no implicit status dimension in your comments, you ask a bunch of questions, say my perspective is worthy of no respect and perhaps even cast aspersions on my motivations, hurrah, another successful Said Achmiz thread. I hope to have saved you the need to write the next step of this boring dance.
What’s to question? The post is the post. We can all read it. On the subject of “what is actually in the post”, what question can there be?
This, as I have already pointed out, is not true.
This also does not seem like a credible claim, as I’ve argued. I have seen no good reasons to change this view.
It was not true.
It was true.
(I admit a slight imprecision when I wrote it was mentioned only once; Habryka also mentioned it once in an appendix and also mentioned that people had many complaints about the culture which he believes source from you. This was “little emphasis” relative to all the analysis of sneer culture and asymmetric effort ratios and so on.)
And praise! It was a setup and explanation symmetric in complaint and praise!
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.
No, the count already stood at at least one example. The citing had already been there, you just for some reason asked me to waste 20 minutes of my life finding a quote that was easier to extract than the reference to the discussion section that already sufficiently demonstrated this point (a quote which you very likely already knew about when you wrote this comment because you were literally the direct recipient of this comment and responded to it).
Neither of us for any second had any doubt that we could find a Duncan comment to this effect. What the point of the exercise of denying its existence was is beyond me.
I’ll explain, then.
In general, in matters of public interest, that take place in the public eye, claims that concern facts of relevance to the matter under discussion or dispute ought not to be taken on anyone’s word. “Just trust me, bro” is not an acceptable standard of evidence, in any serious matter. This is the case even if (a) the claim is true, (b) the one who demands the evidence personally knows that it’s true.
When the moderator or administrator of a forum/community makes some claim about some dispute or some individual member who has some connection to the dispute, that claim ought to be trusted even less than claims normally are, and held to a higher standard of evidence. (In general, those who wield authority must be held to a higher standard of evidence. Epistemic lenience toward those who have power is both epistemically irrational and ethically improper—the former, because in such situations, the powerful often have a great incentive to mislead; the latter, because lenience in such cases serves the interests of those who misuse their power.)
And you, personally, have shown a remarkable[1] willingness, on this subject, to
liewrite in deeply misleading ways, misrepresent and distort the facts, describe and characterize events and situations in ways that create inaccurate impressions in naïve readers, and otherwise communicate in unprincipled and deceptive ways. (Examples: one two three.)So when you—the administrator of LessWrong, writing about a purported fact which is highly relevant to a moderation dispute on LW—claim that a thing is true, the proper response is to say “prove it”. This is especially so, given that you, personally, have a singularly unimpressive track record of honesty when making claims like this.
P.S.: I will add that “denying its existence” is—as seems to be par for the course in this discussion—an inaccurate gloss.
And quite surprising, too, at least to me. I really would not have expected it. Perhaps this simply speaks ill of my ability to judge character.
Look, the relevant comment was literally a reply to you. You knew what Duncan thought on this topic.
Maybe you forgot, we don’t have perfect memory, but I don’t buy that what is going on is not that you saw an opportunity to object to a thing that you approximately knew was correct because maybe I would fail to find an easy-to-quote excerpt from Duncan, or maybe you literally hoped to just waste a bit more of my time, or successfully cause me to end up frustrated and embarrass myself in some way.
Like, yes, asking for receipts seems fine, but that’s different from insisting on receipts in a perfect format. The appropriate thing to do when you make a claim like this is to put in some amount of symmetric effort yourself in finding appropriate quotes, or providing your own reasonable summaries of the external evidence, instead of playing games where you claim that “there are no instances where X turns out to be straightforwardly true”, when like, you yourself were the direct recipient of a comment that said that exact thing, and I had already linked to the post where that comment was made, and where the overall point was obvious even without the specific quote I dug up.
I don’t know what “a perfect format” means here, but if by this you mean “something which is clearly the thing being claimed, and not plausibly some other thing, or a thing that maybe doesn’t exist but maybe does, etc.”, then yes, a “perfect format” is indeed the only acceptable format.
That is absolutely not the appropriate thing to do when one’s interlocutor is the administrator of a forum who is in the process of banning one from that forum. Some cases are more ambiguous, but this one’s not.
And, I repeat, all of this is especially true given your track record on this subject.
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned? I mean, I agree that ultimately you do not have that much more to lose, so IDK, you can make this choice, I can’t double-ban you, but it still seems like a dick move.
No, the thing I said is that people cite you as the reason for not wanting to post on LW. I didn’t make the claim that any such statement was easily extracted from context, or was somehow perfectly unambiguous, or any such thing. Even if Duncan had never made the specific comment I quoted, it would still be obvious to any informed reader that my summary (of Duncan’s take) was accurate. It would just require reading a bunch more comments to make an inference.
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
I never claimed that it would “no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs”, so this is a strawman. The relevance of the situation, and its effect on epistemic conduct, is explained in my earlier comment.
And if the claim you want to make is “Duncan never said X, but it’s obvious that he believes X”, then you should make that claim—which is a different claim from “Duncan said X”.
But that’s of course not what I said. I did not say “Duncan said X”. I said (paraphrased) “Duncan cited X in the context of Y” and “[Duncan] made a statement to this affect on LW”.
I am dropping out of this thread. It seems as productive as many of the threads have been with you.
Someone else should feel free to pick it up and I might respond more. I do think there are potentially valuable points to be made around the degree to which this decision was made as a result of author complaints, what actual authors on LW believe about your contributions, etc. But this specific subthread seems pretty evidently a waste of time.
He did not say that they made such claims on LessWrong, where he would be able to publicly cite them. (I have seen/heard those claims in other contexts.)
If someone (supposedly) says something to you in private, and you report this (alleged) conversation in public, then as far as public knowledge is concerned, is not correct to say that it has “turned out to be straightforwardly true” that that (alleged) conversation took place. Nothing has “turned out” in any way; there’s just a claim that’s been made—that is all.
This is also my sense of things.
To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. (Elsewhere, I claimed that I had no personal problem with Said’s comments and someone privately replied to me “shouldn’t you, if you believe he’s burning the commons?”. I’m still considering it, but I suspect “keep your identity small” reasons will end up dominating.)
What’s the virtue or consequence that you’re focused on, here?
A longer quote, for context and easier readability:
The virtue is simply that one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view. These things are bad, and objecting to them is good.
Just noting that
is a strong argument for objecting to the median and modal Said comment.
If you see me doing any such things, you should definitely object to them.
As I do not in fact make a habit of doing such things, I have no fear of my median and/or modal comments falling afoul of such objections.
EDIT: Well. I guess I should amend this reply somewhat. In the counterfactual scenario where I were not banned from LessWrong, I would say the above. In actuality, it would obviously be unfair for you to object to any of my comments (by means of replying to them, say), as I would not be able to respond (and, as far as I know, there is no UI indicator along the lines of “user A has been banned, and thus cannot reply to this reply by user B to his comment”).
However, I welcome objections, criticisms, etc., in any public venue where I can respond, such as on Data Secrets Lox.
I think this reply is rotated from the thing that I’m interested in—describing vice instead of virtue, and describing the rule that is being broken instead of the value from rule-following. As an analogy, consider Alice complaining about ‘lateness’ and Bob asking why Alice cares; Alice could describe the benefits of punctuality in enabling better coordination. If Alice instead just says “well it’s disrespectful to be late”, this is more like justifying the rule by the fact that it is a rule than it is explaining why the rule exists.
But my guess at what you would say, in the format I’m interested in, is something like “when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions.” Instead of tussling about whether the framing unfairly favors one side, we can focus on the object level. (I was tempted to write “irrelevant controversies”, but part of the issue here is that the controversies are about relevant features. If we accept the framing that habryka knows something that you don’t, that’s relevant to which side the audience should take in a disagreement about principles.)
That said, let us replace the symbol with the substance. Habryka could have written:
In my culture, I think the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar. The question of whether he or you is right about propriety for LessWrong is stored in the other words in the post, in the other discussion elsewhere, and in the legitimacy structures that have made habryka an admin of LW and how they react to this decision. I think very little of it is stored in the framing of whether this is an intractable disagreement or a failure of education.
I also don’t find the charge that it is “tendentious” all that compelling because of the phrase “by my lights”. Habryka has some reasons to think that his views on how to be a good commenter have more weight than just being his opinions, and shares some of those reasons in the rest of the post, but the sentence really is clear about that your comments are disappointing according to his standards (which could clearly be controversial).
In your culture, are the two highly different? What is the framework I could use to immediately spot the difference between the paragraphs?
Disagree. Of course it’s by his lights. How else could it be? It’s his standards, which he believes are the correct ones. That phrase adds nothing. It’s contentless boilerplate.
(This is a frequent feature of the sort of writing which, as I have said many times, is bad. If you say “X is true”, you are claiming to believe that X is true. There is no need to add a disclaimer that you believe that X is true. We know that you believe this, because you’re claiming it.)
(Now, sometimes one might say such a thing as a rhetorical flourish, or to highlight a certain aspect of the discussion, or for other such reasons. But the idea that it’s necessary to add such a disclaimer, or that such a disclaimer saves you from some charge, or whatever, because the disclaimer communicates some important difference between just claiming that X is true and claiming that you believe that X is true, is foolishness.)
FWIW, this guess is so far removed from being right that I have trouble even imagining how you could have generated it. (Yet another in a very long series of examples of why “interpretive labor” is bad, and trying to guess what one’s interlocutor thinks when you already know that you don’t understand their view is pointless.)
He could have written that, yes. But it would have been a strange, unnatural, and misleading thing to write, given the circumstances. The formulation you offer connotes a scenario where two parties enter into discussions and/or negotiations as equals, without presupposing that their own view is necessarily correct or that no compromises will need to be made, etc. But of course nothing remotely like that was the case. (The power relation in this case has always been massively asymmetric, for one thing.)
And, as I said, it’s also a strange thing to write. An admin is banning a member of a forum, because they can’t agree on proper rules/norms/practices…? Why should they need to agree? Doesn’t the admin just make rules, and if someone breaks the rules enough, ban them…? What’s all this business about “trying to reach agreement”? Why is that a goal? And why declare defeat on it now? And what does it have to do with banning?
So, in a certain sense, “the effect of those two paragraphs would be rather similar”, in that they would both be disingenuous, though in different ways (one weirder than the other).
One I like to use is “how would the other guy describe this?”. Another good one is “how would a reasonable, intelligent, but skeptical third party, who has no particular reason to trust or believe me, and is in fact mildly (but only mildly) suspicious of me and/or my motives and/or my ideas, read this?”.
What do you think, then? Why are those things bad and why is objecting to them good?
If you can’t answer those questions, then I’m not sure what arguments about propriety we could have. If we are to design functional site norms, we should be guided by goals, not merely following traditions.
(The point of interpretive labor, according to me, is to help defeat the Illusion of Transparency. If I read your perfectly clear sentence and returned back a gross misunderstanding—well, then a communication breakdown happened somewhere. By looking at what landed for me, we have a stacktrace of sorts for working backwards and figuring out what should have been said to transmit understanding.)
To be clear, we’re talking about:
And you want me to explain why these things are bad?
Well, the “sneaking in connotations” bit is a link to a Sequence post (titled, oddly enough, “Sneaking in Connotations”). I don’t think that I can explain the problem there any better than Eliezer did.
The other stuff really seems like it’s either self-explanatory or can be answered with a dictionary lookup (e.g., “begging the question”).
It’s not like we disagree that these things are bad, right? You’re doing, like, a Socratic thing; like, “why is murder bad?”—yeah, we all agree that murdering people is bad, but we should be able to explain why it’s bad, in order to write good laws. Yes?
If so, then—sure, I don’t in principle object to such exercises—on the contrary, I often find them to be useful—but why do this here, now, about these specific things? Why ask me, in particular? If we want to interrogate our beliefs about discussion norms in this sort of way, surely doing it systematically, and in a context other than a post like this, would make more sense…
On the other hand, if what you’re saying is that you disagree that the aforementioned things are bad, then… I guess I’m not sure how to respond to that, or what the point would even be…
Yes. Part of this is because my long experience is that sometimes our sense of communication or our preferences for norms have flipped signs. If you think something is bad, that’s moderate but not strong evidence that I think it’s bad, and we might be able to jump straight to our disagreement by trying to ground out in principles. I think in several previous threads I wish I had focused less on the leaves and more on the roots, and here was trying to focus on roots.
I mean, I am genuinely uncertain about several parts of this! I think that the audience might also be uncertain, and stating things clearly might help settle them (one way or the other). I think there is value in clear statements of differences of opinion (like that you have a low opinion of interpretative labor and I have a high opinion of it), and sometimes we can ground those opinions (like by following many conversations and tracking outcomes).
Like, I understand ‘tendentious’ to be a pejorative word, but I think the underlying facts of the word are actually appropriate for this situation. That doesn’t mean it’s generically good, just that criticizing it here seems inappropriate to me. Should we not invite controversy on ban announcements? Should we not explain the point of view that leads us to make the moderation decisions we make?
But perhaps you mean something narrower. If the charge is more “this is problem only a few users have, but unfortunately one of them is an admin, and thus it is the site rule”—well, we can figure out whether or not that’s the case, but I don’t actually think that’s a problem with the first paragraph, and I think it can be pointed at more cleanly.
As it happens, I reread that post thru your link. I thought that it didn’t quite apply to this situation; I didn’t see how habryka was implying things about you thru an argument via definition, rather than directly stating his view (and then attempting to back it up later in the post). I thought Frame Control would’ve been a better link for your complaint here (and reread our discussion of it to see whether or not I thought anything had changed since then).
I also didn’t quite buy that “begging the question” applied to the first paragraph. (For the audience, this is an argument that smuggles in its conclusion as a premise.) I understood that paragraph to be the conclusion of habryka’s argument, not the premise.
Overall, my impression was—desperation, or scrambling for anything that might stick? Like, I think it fits as a criticism of any post that states its conclusion and then steps thru the argument for that conclusion, instead of essaying out from a solid premise and discovering where it takes you. I think both styles have their virtues, and think the conclusion-first style is fine for posts about bans (I’ve used it for that before), and so I don’t find that criticism persuasive. (Like, it’s bad to write your bottom line and then construct the argument, but it’s not bad to construct an argument and then edit your introduction to include your conclusion!)
But maybe I missed the thing you’re trying to convey, since we often infer different things from the same text and attend to different parts of a situation. I tried to jump us to the inferences and the salient features, and quite possibly that’s not the best path to mutual understanding.
Some people realize that their position is a personal one; others assume that their position is standard or typical. Such phrases are often useful as evidence that the person realizes that fact; of course, since they can be easily copied, they are only weak evidence. “Strawberry is a better flavor, according to me” is a different sentence from “Strawberry is a better flavor”, and those two are yet again different from “Four is larger than two.” Adding ‘according to me’ to the last option would be a joke.
I think a frequent source of conflict has been differing judgments on what is usual and what is unusual, or what is normal and what is abnormal.
I understood us not to be discussing power relations (was anyone ever confused about who was the admin of LessWrong?) but something more like legitimacy relations (what should be the rules of LessWrong?). You’ve been here longer; you might know the Sequences better; you might have more insight into the true spirit of rationality than habryka. In order to adjudicate that, we consult arguments and reasons and experience, not the database.
Using the lens of power relations, your previous complaint (“This phrasing assumes”) seems nonsensical to me; of course the mod would talk about educating the problem user, of whether they understand and learn the models and behaviors as handed down from on high.
Here I would like to take a step outward and complain about what I perceive as a misstep in the conversational dance. Having criticized habryka’s paragraph, you describe its flaws and went so far as to propose a replacement:
My replacement differs from yours. But I claim this criticism of my replacement (that it connotes a discussion of equals) applies just as readily to yours, if not more readily because my version includes the ban. (A more fair comparison probably ends at ‘on that goal’ and drops the last phrase.) If not, it is for minor variations of style and I suspect any operationalization we come up with for measuring the difference (polling Turkers or LLMs or whatever) will identify differences between their connotations as minor (say, a split more even than 66-34 on which connotes more even power relations).
Here my thoughts turn to the story in The Crackpot Offer, and the lesson of looking for counterarguments to your own counterarguments.
Here is a demonstration that adding those sorts of disclaimers and caveats does absolutely nothing to prevent the LW moderators from judging my comments to be unacceptable, as though no such disclaimers were present.
Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” says:
This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!
I’ve said before that I don’t take such suggestions (to add the disclaimers) at all seriously; and here we have an unambiguous demonstration that I am right to take that stance.
You wrote:
But of course his standards can’t be controversial, because he’s the admin. If someone disagrees with his standards—irrelevant; he doesn’t have to care. There is no practical difference between his standards and “the correct” standards, because he does not have any need to distinguish between those things. Therefore the “by my lights” clause is noise.
I understood us to be discussing a thing that Habryka wrote in the post. If the thing he wrote involves power relations, or connotations about power relations, then how can we not be discussing power relations…?
Why “of course”? I completely disagree with this.
I have had this disagreement with the LW mods before. It’s what motivated me to write “Selective, Corrective, Structural”. And my view on this remains the same as it was in 2018: that attempting to behave as a “corrective authority”, in the context of a forum like this, is weird and bad.
A moderator talking about “educating the problem user” is extremely suspect.
I… disagree, mostly. But also…
At this point… I am also confused about what it is we’re even talking about. What’s the purpose of this line of inquiry? With each of your comments in this thread, I have ended up with less and less of an idea of what you’re trying to ask, or say, or argue, or… anything.
Perhaps you could summarize/rephrase/something?
There are several. The overarching goal is that I want LessWrong’s contribution to global cognition to be beneficial. As a subgoal to that, I want LessWrong’s mod team to behave with integrity and skill. As subgoals to that, I’m trying to figure out whether there were different ways of presenting these ideas that would have either worked better in this post, or worked better in our discussions over the years at grounding out our disagreement; I’m also interested in figuring out if you’re right and we’re wrong!
Related to the last subgoal, I think your typology of selective/corrective/structural is useful to think about. I view us as applying all three—we screen new users (a much more demanding task now that LLMs are directing people to post on LessWrong), we give warnings and feedback and invest some in rationality training projects, and we think about the karma system and UI changes and various programs and projects that can cause more of what we want to see in the world. I don’t think behaving as a corrective authority is weird and bad; I think the polite and detailed version of “read the sequences” is good.
But more narrowly—looking at this conversational chain—you made a criticism of habryka’s post, and I tried to take it seriously. Does it matter that the post expresses or promotes a particular point of view? Does it matter that it’s controversial? What would it look like to fix the problems in the first paragraph? I left comments on an earlier draft of this post, and I tried to apply a framework like “how would the other guy describe this?”, and I missed those problems in the first paragraph. Tsuyoku Naritai.
[I think that you deserve me giving this a real try, and that the other mods deserve me attempting to get to ground on something with you where we start off with a real disagreement, or where I don’t understand your position.]
Reductionism—the idea that things are made out of parts. We can focus on different parts of it at different times. To me this also relates to the idea of True Rejections. If what you are objecting to is that habryka is banning you and that he’s the mod and you aren’t, then—I feel sympathy for you, but there’s really not much to discuss. I think there is a lot to discuss about whether or not it’s right for LW to ban you, because I am pretty invested in pushing LW to do the right thing. And that one is not a power relations question, and seems like one that we can discuss without power relations.
Yes, even if we construct airtight arguments, habryka might still ignore them and go through with the ban anyway. Yes, some people will reflexively support the mods because they like the website existing and want to subsidize working on it. But some people are watching and thinking and deciding how to relate to LW moving forward based on how these arguments shake out. That is...
I think there are meaningful stakeholders whose disapproval would sink habryka’s ability to run LessWrong, and I think attempting to run LessWrong in an unethical or sloppy way would lead to the potential benefits of the site turning to ash.
(I also think this is a nonstandard usage of ‘controversial’. It just means ‘giving rise to public disagreement’, which moderation decisions and proposed norms and standards often do. Like, you’re controverting it right now!)
Returning to true rejections—suppose a fundamental issue here is that you have one vision for LW, where there’s no corrective authority, and we have a different vision for LW, where there is corrective authority. Then I think either we find out why we want those things and identify cruxes and try to learn more about the science of communication and moderation so that we can better achieve our shared goals, or we decide that our goals are sufficiently in conflict that we should pursue them separately. And, like, the value I see in habryka’s offer to edit in your text to the post is that you can make your pitch for your vision, and maybe people who prefer that vision will follow you to Data Secrets Lox, and the more clarity we can reach the more informative that pitch can be.
Ok, fair enough.
I also think this… I think? I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by “the polite and detailed version”.
But, uh, I must protest that I definitely have read the sequences. I have read them several times. If these attempts, by the mods, at “correction”, are intended to be any version (polite or otherwise) of “read the sequences”, then clearly someone here is very confused, and I don’t think that it’s me. (Indeed, it usually seems to me as though the people I am arguing with, e.g. Habryka, are the ones who need to be told to read the Sequences!)
Well, for one thing, I don’t actually think that the concept of “true rejections” is as useful as it’s been made out to be. I think that in practice, in many or maybe even most cases when someone opposes or rejects or dislikes something, there just is not any such thing as some single “true rejection”.
That aside—well, sure, obviously I object to being banned, that goes without saying; but no, that wasn’t at all the point that I was making in that comment.
As for whether it’s right for LW to ban me—again I think it’s pretty obvious what my position on that question is. But that, too, was not my point.
Eh?? What do you mean, “might”?! As far as I am aware, there is no “might” here, but only a decision already made!
Is this not the case? If so, then I think this should really be made clear. Otherwise, I must say that I do not at all appreciate you talking as if the decision isn’t final, when in fact it is.
Sure, in a very circumscribed way (I’m not even allowed to upvote or downvote comments outside of this top-level thread—Habryka made sure to send me a message about that!), and only until the ban proper takes effect.
Well, I’d certainly like to believe so. I find these vague references to “stakeholders” to be suspect at the best of times, though.
Everything else aside, let me address the Data Secrets Lox point first. While I would of course be delighted if people who have found my writing here on LW useful joined DSL, and of course everyone here who wants to join is welcome to do so, I must note that DSL is not really “LessWrong, done the way that Said thinks it should be done”; it wasn’t intended to be such a thing. I would call DSL a “rationalist-adjacent”, general-interest discussion forum. It’s not really aiming at anything like the same goals as LW is.
Anyhow, yes, sure, this is all fine, finding out why we want things, all of that is good. It seems rather “too little, too late”, though. I’ve been making my “pitch” for years; I’ve been explaining why I want things, what I think is the right way to run a forum like this and why I think those things, etc. The amount of uptake of those ideas, from the LW mods’ side, has been approximately zero. (Even when I have offered to provide free design and development work in the service of making those ideas happen—an offer which, as I expect you know, is not an idle one, when coming from me!—still, nothing.) Well, alright, obviously you have no obligation to find my views compelling and my arguments convincing, but my point is that this thing you propose has already been tried. At some length.
So… I am somewhat less than enthusiastic.
But! Despite all that, let’s give it a shot anyway. To the object level:
As I wrote earlier, an honest version of that paragraph would say:
“I have had disagreements with Said; we have discussed, debated, argued; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness.”
Obviously that’s an incomplete replacement, so let’s try to write the full one. It might look like this (we’ll leave the first sentence as it is):
“For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year discussing, debating, and arguing with Said about norms, rules, and practices of forum moderation. These discussions and arguments have often taken place in the context of moderation actions taken, or considered, against Said (whose comments, and interactions with other site members, I have often found to be problematic; although Said, of course, disagrees, for what he believes to be principled reasons). Despite those discussions and arguments, our disagreements remain; I remain convinced of my view’s correctness. Today I am declaring defeat on the goal of convincing Said that I am right and he is wrong (and to alter his behavior accordingly). I am thus giving him a 3 year ban.”
I wouldn’t call this perfect, exactly, but it would be a great improvement.
Note that the above passage is basically honest (though a bit oblique) in making explicit the relevant power relations. It is also honest about the relative “consensus value” of the opposing views (namely, that they’re equal in both being “I think this and he thinks that”, no more and no less, with no very strong reason to assume that one side is right). The formulation also prompts, from the reader, the obvious question (“well, maybe you aren’t right, eh? maybe the other guy’s right and you’re wrong?”), which is exactly as it should be.
Note, by the way, that—unlike with the text of the actual first paragraph as it stands in the post—an alert reader will come away from the passage above with a vague sense that the decision that’s been reached is a rather odd one, reached for rather odd reasons. This, too, is exactly as it should be. The text of the post does attempt to address the sorts of questions that such a vague sense might rightly be operationalized as (such as “eh, if this guy broke your rules, why didn’t you just ban him a long time ago? … he did break your rules, right? otherwise why would you ban him”), but it’s important that the reader should notice the problem—otherwise, they will not be able to effectively evaluate the attempt to resolve it.
Then perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by “corrective authority”? It seems to me like “read the Sequences” is an example of “apply such measures as will make the people in your system alter their behavior, to conform to relevant optimality criteria”. But then I find it difficult to square with:
Perhaps the difference is between “read the sequences” and “if you keep posting low-quality comments, we will ban you, and this part of the sequences explains the particular mistake you made here”? Or perhaps the difference is between the centralized moderator decision-making (“this comment is bad because Alice says so and her comments have a fancy border”) and decentralized opinion-aggregation and norm enforcement (“this comment is bad because its net karma is negative”)?
There is a different way to make things coherent, of course, which is that as part of the transition to LW 2.0 the mod team attempted to shift the culture, which involved shifting the optimality criteria, and the objection to us being corrective authorities in this way is not an objection to corrective authority as a method but instead an objection to our target. Which, that’s fair and not a surprise, but also it seems like the correct response to that sort of difference is for us to shake hands and have different websites with different target audiences (who are drawn to different targets). Otherwise we’ll just be locked in conflict forever (as happens when two control systems are trying to set the same variable to different reference values) and this doesn’t seem like a productive conflict to me. (I do think we’ve written about culture and Zack has written about culture downstream of this disagreement in a way that feels more productive than the moderation discussions about specific cases, but this feels way worse than, say, artists jockeying for status by creating new pieces of art.)
I think this is correct, in that many decisions are made by aggregating many factors, and it’s only rarely going to be the case that a single factor (rather than a combination of factors) will be decisive.
(I do note this is a situation where both of us ‘disagree with the Sequences’ by having a better, more nuanced view, while presumably retaining the insight that sometimes decisive factors are unspeakable, and so discussions that purport to be about relevant information exchange sometimes aren’t.)
Fair. I think it is challenging to express the position of “New information could persuade me, but I don’t expect to come across new information of sufficient strength to persuade me.”
(On the related stakeholders point: I agree that it is often vague, but in this specific case I’m on the board that can decide to fire habryka, and one of the people who is consulted about decisions like this before they’re made. I suspect that in the counterfactual where I left the mod team at the start of 2.0, you would have been banned several years earlier. This is, like, a weird paragraph to write without the context of the previous paragraph; I was in fact convinced this time around, and it is correspondingly challenging to convince me back the other direction, and it seems cruel to create false hope, and difficult to quantitatively express how much real hope there is.)
Indeed; I have appreciated a lot of the work that you’ve done over the years and am grateful for it.
Something about the “consensus value” phrasing feels off to me, but I can’t immediately propose a superior replacement. That is, it would be one thing if just Oli disagreed with you about moderation and another different thing if “the whole mod team disagrees with Said about moderation”. The mods don’t all agree with each other—and it took us years to reach sufficient agreement on this—but I do think this is less like “two people disagree” and more like “two cultures are clashing”.
That said, I do think I see the thing that I could have noticed if I were more alert, which is that I already had the view that we were optimizing for different targets, and making that the headline has more shared-reality nature to it. Like, I think the following framing is different from yours but hopefully still seems valid to you:
Sure; my point was just that it’s more like either “two people disagree” or “two cultures are clashing” than it is like “physicists are explaining Newtonian mechanics to the Time Cube guy”.
Yes, that would also be basically fine.
I started writing a reply to your other comment, when I noticed that my last comment in reply to you had been strong-downvoted.
(By a mod, obviously. Who else has a strength-10 vote and is following this discussion so closely?)
Indeed, I notice that the mods (yes, obviously it’s the mods) have been strong-downvoting pretty much all of my comments in this discussion with you.
So, before I continue engaging, I really do have to ask: this project of yours, where you are engaging in this apparently good-faith discussion with me, trying to hash out disagreement, etc.—what do the other mods think of it?
Is this just you on your own quixotic sidequest, with no buy-in from anyone else who matters?
If that’s the case, then that seems to make the whole thing rather farcical and pointless.
(Really, strong-downvoting a reply, to a moderator, written on that moderator’s request! If we want to talk about problems with voting behaviors, I’d suggest that the mods start by looking in the mirror.)
I asked in the sunshines channel on the LW slack and people there said that they were voting comments based on quality as a comment, and while one is downvoting many of your comments on the page overall, was not downvoting the majority of the comments in this thread.
There are more 10-strength users than just the mods; it may be the case that enough of them are downvoting comments that are at positive karma but leaving the −8 comments alone, which results in no one person downvoting more than a few comments in the thread, but the comments being underwater as a whole. But if there is a single mod who is trying to make this thread not happen, they’re not telling me (which seems worth doing because it would affect my behavior more than the downvoting would). [Edit: the person who did the database query clarified, and I now think that the votes are primarily coming from mods.]
I made the classic mistake of ‘asking two questions together’ and so primarily got responses on voting behavior and not what they think of the project, but I would (from their other writing) guess they are mostly out of hope about it.
I’m not sure if it was a mod, but the existence of high-strength votes and people willing to use them liberally seems like a problem to me. I also have a 10-strength vote but almost never use it because I don’t trust my own judgment enough to want to strongly influence the discourse in an unaccountable way. But others apparently do trust themselves this way, and I think it’s bad that LW gives such people disproportionate influence.
FWIW, my guess is the site would be in a better place if you voted more, and used your high vote-strength more. My guess is you would overall add a bunch of positive signal, much more than an average commenter, which is why it IMO makes sense for your votes to have a lot more weight.
I do think voting around the zero point tends to be more whack and have a bunch of more complicated consequences, and often a swing of 10 points feels disproportionate to what is going on when a comment is between 1 and 10 karma. I’ve considered making various changes to the vote system to reduce the effects of this, but haven’t found something worth the tradeoff in complexity.
A commenter writes:
This strikes me as either deeply confused, or else deliberately… let’s say “manipulative”[1].
Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.
Alright, but still, can’t such a claim be true? To some degree, yes; for example, suppose that someone constantly lodges complaints, makes accusations against others, etc., requiring an investigation each time. (On the other hand, if the complaints are valid and the accusations true, then it seems odd to say that it’s the complainant/accuser who’s responsible for the workload involved in dealing with the issues.) Of course, that doesn’t apply here; I don’t complain much, on LessWrong.
Well, but surely the LW mods spent all those hours on something, right? Writing comments. Talking to various people. Well, yes. But… LessWrong isn’t a government agency, or a court of law, or a corporation with contractual obligations to members, etc. The mods weren’t obligated to do any of those things. It would have been very easy for them to avoid spending all that effort. The following scenario illustrates how they might’ve done so:
Carol (a LessWronger): I wrote a post on LessWrong, and this one dude wrote a comment on it, where he criticized me unfairly!
Dave (a moderator of LessWrong): People write all sorts of comments
Carol: I found it very unpleasant!
Dave: Downvote it and move on with your life
Carol: But other people upvoted it!
Dave: They’re allowed to do that
Carol: Aren’t you going to do something about this?
Dave: No, why would we
Carol: Because that guy’s comment was wrong!
Dave: Feel free to reply saying that, I guess
Carol: Ugh! That would be even more unpleasant! I shouldn’t have to do that!
Dave: shrug
Carol: Well! I don’t think I’ll be using this website!
Dave: Sure, that’s your right
Pretty easy. Definitely doesn’t require hours, much less tens of hours, much less hundreds of hours.
Of course, Dave could choose to have a longer discussion with Carol, if he wants. He could join the conversation himself, to facilitate communication between Carol and the author of the offending comment. He could do all sorts of things. But he could also… not do any of those things.
And in almost all cases where the LW moderators did anything whatsoever that had anything to do with me, it was the wrong thing to do, and the far superior choice (not necessarily the best choice, but far better than what they in fact did) would have been, precisely, to do absolutely nothing. In pretty much all of the examples given in the OP, doing nothing at all would’ve been a huge improvement. Writing no long comments. Having no long conversations with anyone. Just… nothing.
So, indeed, it is right to question the wisdom of the moderators in the choices they’ve made! But to speak of their “restraint” is absurd. These problems, all of these terrible mountains of effort which they’ve supposedly had to expend—it’s all been self-inflicted.
And to use such self-inflicted problems to justify banning someone—well. It’s approximately as honest as a schoolyard bully saying “I bruised my hand when I was beating you up for your lunch money, so now you owe me, and I’m gonna take your jacket as payment!”.
Not quite right, but the closest I can get without a long digression.
Yep, I agree with this as a common and IMO very perverse dynamic. I don’t think someone being “difficult to moderate” is almost ever an appropriate justification for banning someone. At the very least they must also have some property that requires interfacing with them as a subject of moderation that isn’t located solely in the choice of the moderators. Otherwise this becomes a catch-22 with no grounding in reality.
In response to a comment by @clone of saturn, @habryka writes:
This is a thoroughly disingenuous response—so misleading as to be indistinguishable from a lie.
Consider the comment of mine to which Habryka refers. Here is its text in its entirety:
Why did I write this comment? Because the post began by asking:
In other words, the OP asked a question. And I answered it.
Note that:
I explicitly marked my answer to the OP as “my take”, said that Double Crux “seems like” a certain thing, that there “does not seem to be” a reason to pay attention to it, and that it not getting uptake is the default outcome “that I would expect”. Even my parenthetical about CFAR was explicitly and repeatedly noted to be my personal opinion.
There are all the disclaimers that people keep saying I should add! And yet, somehow, this turns out to make no difference at all, and still incurred a visit from the “Sunshine Regiment”.
My comment does not criticize the post at all. There is nothing in the comment that is at all critical of the post itself, or of its author (@Raemon) for writing it. On the contrary, I take the post at face value, and provide a good faith answer directly to the central question which the post asks.
In other words, this comment is the most cooperative possible engagement with the post, precisely as the post itself requests (“discussion-prompt”).
And yet, despite all that, it was heavily downvoted, and incurred a moderator warning.
I can conclude only that when the moderators talk about what behavior they would like to see, what is rewarded, and what is punished, they are simply lying.
Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” (i.e., the moderator judgment on the linked comment) says:
This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that Elizabeth meant you should have added “I think that...” or ”...for me” specifically to the line “Also, it comes from CFAR, which is an anti-endorsement.”
But regardless, it seems crazy that your comment was downvoted to −17 (-16 now, someone just upvoted it by 1) and got a negative mod judgment for this.
Crazy indeed. And—as in several other of these example cases—I will note that the author of the post himself evidently had no problem with my comment, and had no difficulty writing a perfectly reasonable reply, which resulted in an entirely civil and productive discussion.
Which makes this yet another example of the pattern where, if the mods had simply left it alone, it would’ve been fine. (Even better would’ve been for them to write something like “yes of course it’s ok to write polite, clearly cooperative, mildly critical comments like this, don’t be silly”, but we can’t expect miracles…)
Commenter @Gordon Seidoh Worley writes:
While of course you should not trust my self-report on this, I will nonetheless note for the record that I have made no special attempt to alter my commenting style or approach, recently or (to my recollection) ever.[1]
I am glad to hear that you’ve found my comments to be useful (assuming that this is what you meant by “positive”).
Excepting, of course, specific adjustments to conform to specific new rules, etc.
I have a question for you, Said.
If I understand correctly, a big part of the problem is that people perceive your comments as having a certain hostile-flavored subtext. You deny that this subtext is actually present and fault them for inferring things that you hadn’t stated explicitly.
I strongly suspect that you are capable of writing in such a way where people don’t perceive this hostile-flavored subtext. A softer, gentler type of writing.
Assuming that you are in fact capable of this type of writing, my question is why you choose to not write in this manner.
I’ve had this specific conversation, what feels like a dozen times now. This exact question has been asked, answered, discussed, argued, absolutely to death.
I can dig up links if you really want me to, but… should I? Are you asking because you’re unaware of the prior art? Or are you aware of the previous discussions, but find them unsatisfactory somehow? Or something else?
Why do people downvote such a comment, exactly?
That makes sense. I am not familiar with such previous conversations, haven’t really been following any of this, and didn’t read the OP too thoroughly. I am not motivated to dig up previous conversations. If you or someone else would like to I’d appreciate it, but no worries if not.
Alright. Well, here’s one starting point, I guess. (You can also Cmd-F in the comments on that post for “insult” and “social attack”; I think that should get you to most of the relevant subthreads.)
(There are many other examples, but this will do for now.)
I spent a few minutes trying to do so and feel overwhelmed. I’m not motivated to continue.
Edit:
If you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate a concise summary. No worries if you’d prefer not to though.
In particular, I’m wondering why you might think that your approach to commenting leads to more winning than the more gentle approach I referred to.
Is it something you enjoy? That brings you happiness? More than other hobbies or sources of entertainment? I suspect not.
Are your motivations altruistic? Maybe it’s that despite being not fun to you personally, you feel you are doing the community a service by defending certain norms. This seems somewhat plausible to me but also not too likely.
My best guess is that the approach to commenting you have taken is not actually a thoughtful strategy that you expect will lead to the most winning, but instead is the result of being unable to resist the impulse of someone being wrong on the internet. (I say this knowing that you are the type of person who appreciates candidness.)
Replying to the added-by-edit parts of the parent comment.
My approach to commenting is the correct one.
(Or so I claim! Obviously, others disagree. But you asked about my motivations, and that’s the answer.)
Part of the answer to your question is the “gentle approach” you refer to is not real. It’s a fantasy. In reality, there is my approach, and there are other approaches which don’t accomplish the same things. There is no such thing as “saying all the same things that Said says, but more nicely, and without any downsides”. Such an option simply does not exist.
Earlier, you wrote:
Well, setting aside the question of whether I can write in a “softer, gentler” way, it’s clear enough that many other people can write like that, and often do. One can see many examples of such writing on the EA Forum, for instance.
Of course, the EA forum is also almost entirely useless as a place to have any kind of serious, direct discussion of difficult questions. The cause of this is, largely, a very strong, and zealously moderator-enforced, norm for precisely that sort of “softer, gentler” writing.
Regardless of whether I can write like that, I certainly won’t. That would be wrong, and bad—for me, and for any intellectual community of which I am a member. To a first approximation, no one should ever write like that, on a forum like LessWrong.
Indeed I do appreciate candidness.
As far as “the most winning” goes, I can’t speak to that. But the “softer, gentler” path is the path of losing—of that, I am very sure.
As far as the xkcd comic goes… well. I must tell you that, while of course I cannot prove this, I suspect that that single comic is responsible for a large chunk of why the Internet, and by extension the world, is in the shape that it’s in, these days.[1] (Some commentary on my own views on the subject of arguing with people who are wrong on the internet can be found in this comment.)
I am not sure if it’s worse than the one about free speech as far as long-term harm goes, but xkcd #386 at least a strong contender for the title of “most destructive webcomic strip ever posted”.
Thank you for the response.
Given your beliefs, I understand why you won’t apply this “softer, gentler” writing style. You would find it off-putting and you think it would do harm to the community.
There is something that I don’t understand and would like to understand though. Simplifying, we can say that some people enjoy your engagement style and others don’t. What I don’t understand is why you choose to engage with people who clearly don’t enjoy your engagement style.
I suspect that your thinking is that the responsibility falls on them to disengage if they so desire. But clearly some people struggle with that (and I would pose the same question to them as well: why continue engaging). So from your perspective, if you’re aiming to win, why continue to engage with such people?
Does it make you happy? Does it make them happy? Is it an altruistic attempt to enforce community norms?
Or is it just that duty calls and you are not in fact making a conscious attempt to win? I suspect this is what is happening.
(And I apologize if this is too “gentle”, but hey, zooming out, being agent-y, and thinking strategically about whether what you’re doing is the best way to win is not easy. I certainly fail at it the large majority of the time. I think pretty much everyone does.)
None of the above.
The answer is that thinking of commenting on a public discussion forum simply as “engaging with” some specific single person is just entirely the wrong model.
It’s not like I’m having a private conversation with someone, they say “Um I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore” and run away, and I chase after them, yelling “Come back here and respond to my critique! You’re not getting away from me that easily! I have several more points to make!!”, while my hapless victim frantically looks for an alley to hide in.
LessWrong is a public discussion forum. The point of commenting is for the benefit of everyone—yourself, the person you’re replying to, any other participants in the discussion, any readers of the discussion, any future readers of the discussion…
Frankly, the view where someone finding your comments aversive is a general reason to not reply to their comments or post under their posts, strikes me as bizarre. Why would someone who only considered the impact of their comments on the specific user they were replying to, even bother commenting on LessWrong? It seems like a monstrously inefficient use of one’s time and energy…
EDIT: See this comment thread for more on this subject.
Let me make this more concrete. Suppose you are going back and forth with a single user in a comments thread—call them Bob—and there have been nine exchanges. Bob wrote the ninth comment. You get the sense that Bob is finding the conversation unpleasant, but he continues to respond anyway.
You have the option of just not responding. Not writing that tenth comment. Not continuing to respond in that comment thread at all. (I don’t think you’d dispute this.)
And so my question is: why write the tenth comment? You point out that, as a public discussion forum, when you write that tenth comment in response to Bob, it is not just for Bob, but for anyone who might read or end up contributing to the conversation.
But that observation itself is, I think you’d agree, insufficient to explain why it’d make sense to write the tenth comment. To the extent your goals are altruistic, you’d have to posit that this tenth comment is having a net benefit to the general public. Is that your position? That despite potentially causing harm to Bob, it is worth writing the tenth comment because you expect there to be enough benefit to the general public?
Why not write the tenth comment…? I mean, presumably, in this scenario, I have some reason why I am posting any comments on this hypothetical thread at all, right? Some argument that I am making, some point that I am explaining, some confusion that I am attempting to correct (whether that means “a confusion on Bob’s part, which I am correcting by explaining whatever it is”, or “a confusion on my part, which I think that the discussion with Bob may help me resolve”), something I am trying to learn or understand, etc. Well, why should that reason not still apply to the tenth comment, just as it did to the first…?
I don’t accept this “causing harm to Bob” stipulation. It’s basically impossible for that to happen (excepting certain scenarios such as “I post Bob’s private contact info” or “I reveal an important secret of Bob’s” or something like that; presumably, this is not what we’re talking about).
That aside: yes, the purpose of participating in a public discussion on a public discussion forum is (or should be!) public benefit. That is how I think about commenting on LessWrong, at any rate.
I will again note that I find it perplexing to have to explain this. The alternative view (where one views a discussion in the comments on a LessWrong post as merely an interaction between two individuals, with no greater import or impact) seems nigh-incomprehensible to me.
Thank you for clarifying that your motivation in writing the tenth comment is to altriusitically benefit the general public at large. That you are making a conscious attempt to win in this scenario by writing the tenth comment.
I suspect that this is belief in belief. Suppose that we were able to measure the impact of your tenth comment. If someone offered you a bet that this tenth comment would have a net negative overall impact on the general public, at 1-to-1 odds, for a large sum of money, I don’t think you would take it because I don’t think you actually predict the tenth comment to have this net positive impact.
Because you have more information after the first nine comments. You have reason to believe that Bob finds the discussion to be unpleasant, that you are unlikely to update his beliefs, and that he is unlikely to update yours.
Hm. “Cause” might be oversimplifying. In the situation I’m describing let’s suppose that Bob is worse off in the world where you write the tenth comment than he is in the counterfactual world where you don’t. What word/phrase would you use to describe this?
My belief here is that impact beyond the two individuals varies. Sometimes lots of other people are following the conversation. Sometimes they get value out of it, sometimes it has a net negative impact on them. Sometimes few other people follow the conversation. Sometimes zero other people follow it.
I expect that you share this set of beliefs and that basically everyone else shares this set of beliefs.
This is not an accurate summary.
It seems like you’re trying very hard to twist my words so as to make my views fit into your framework. But they don’t.
None of that is either particularly relevant to the considerations described, that affect my decision to write a comment.
I would describe it like you just did there, I guess, if I were inclined to describe it at all. But I generally wouldn’t be. (I say more about this in the thread I linked earlier.)
This seems to be some combination of “true but basically irrelevant” (of course more people read some comment threads than others, but so what?) and “basically not true” (a net negative impact? seems unlikely unless I lie or otherwise behave unethically, which I do not). None of this has any bearing on the fact that comments on a public forum aren’t just written for one person.
I usually find that I get negative value out of “said posts many comments drilling into an author to get a specific concern resolved”. usually, if I get value from a Said comment thread, it’s one where said leaves quickly, either dissatisfied or satisfied; when Said makes many comments, it feels more like polluting the commons by inducing compute for me to figure out whether the thread is worth reading (and I usually don’t think so). if I were going to make one change to how said comments, it’s to finish threads with “okay, well, I’m done then” almost all the time after only a few comments.
(if I get to make two, the second would be to delete the part of his principles that is totalizing, that asserts that his principles are correct and should be applied to everyone until proven otherwise, and replace it with a relaxation of that belief into an ensemble of his-choice-in-0.0001<x<0.9999-prior-probability context-specific “principle is applicable?” models, and thus can update away from the principles ever, rather than assuming anyone who isn’t following the principles is necessarily in error.)
What specific practical difference do you envision between the thing that you’re describing as what you want me to believe, and the thing that you think I currently believe? Like, what actual, concrete things do you imagine I would do differently, if your wish came true?
(EDIT: I ask this because I do not recognize, in your description, anything that seems like it accurately describes my beliefs. But maybe I’m misunderstanding you—hence the question.)
well, in this example, you are applying a pattern of “What specific practical difference do you envision”, and so I would consider you to be putting high probability on that being a good question. I would prefer you simply guess, describe your best guess, and if it’s wrong, I can then describe the correction. you having an internal autocomplete for me would lower the ratio of wasted communication between us for straightforward shannon reasons, and my intuitive model of human brains predicts you have it already. and so in the original claim, I was saying that you seem to have frameworks that prescribe behaviors like “what practical difference”, which are things like—at a guess—“if a suggestion isn’t specific enough to be sure I’ve interpreted correctly, ask for clarification”. I do that sometimes, but you do it more. and there are many more things like this, the more general pattern is my point.
anyway gonna follow my own instructions and cut this off here. if you aren’t able to extract useful bits from it, such as by guessing how I’d have answered if we kept going, then oh well.
I see… well, maybe it will not surprise you to learn that, based on long and much-repeated experience, I consider that approach to be vastly inferior. In my experience, it is impossible for me to guess what anyone means, and also it is impossible for anyone else to guess what I mean. (Perhaps it is possible for other people to guess what other people mean, but what I have observed leads me to strongly doubt that, too.) Trying to do this impossible thing reliably leads to much more wasted communication. Asking is far, far superior.
In short, it is not that I haven’t considered doing things in the way that you suggest. I have considered it, and tried it, and had it tried on me, many times. My conclusion has been that it’s impossible to succeed and a very bad idea to try.
Hm. I’m realizing that I’ve been presuming that you are at least roughly consequentialist and are trying to take actions that lead to good consequences for affected parties. Maybe that’s not true though.
But if it is true, here is how I am thinking about it. We can divide affected parties into 1) you, 2) Bob, and 3) others. We’ve stipulated that with the tenth comment you expect it to negatively affect Bob. So then, I’d think that’d mean that your reason for posting the tenth comment is that you expect the desirable consequences for you and others to outweigh the undesirable consequences for Bob.
Furthermore, you’ve emphasized “public benefit” and the fact that this is a public forum. You also haven’t indicated that you have particularly selfish motives that would make you want to do things that benefit you at the expense of others, at least not to an unusual degree. So then, I presume that the expected benefit to the third group—others—is the bulk of your reason for posting the tenth comment.
I’m sorry that it came across that way. I promise that I am not trying to twist your words. I just would like to understand where you are coming from.
“Roughly consequentialist” is a basically apt label. But as I have written a few times, act consequentialism is pretty obviously non-viable; the only reasonable way to be a consequentialist is rule consequentialism.
This makes your the reasoning you outline in your second paragraph inapplicable and inappropriate.
I describe my views on this a bit in the thread I linked earlier. Some more relevant commentary can be found in this comment (Cmd-F “I say and write things” for the relevant ~3 paragraphs, although that entire comment thread is at least partly relevant to this discussion, as it talks about consequentialism and how to implement it, etc.).
Thanks for clarifying, Said. That is helpful.
I skimmed each of the threads you linked to.
One thing I want to note is that I hear you and agree with you about how these comments are taking place in public forums and that we need to consider their effects beyond the commenter and the person being replied to.
I’m interested in hearing more about why you expect your hypothetical tenth comment in this scenario we’ve been discussing to have a net positive effect. I will outline some things about my model of the world and would love to hear about how it meshes with your model.
Components of my model:
People generally don’t dig too deeply into long exchanges on comment threads. And so the audience is small. To the extent this is true, the effects on Bob should be weighed more heavily.
This hypothetical exchange is likely to be perceived as hostile and adversarial.
When perceived that way, people tend to enter a soldier-like mindset.
People are rather bad at updating their believes when they have such a mindset.
Being in a soldier mindset might cause them to, I’m not sure how to phrase this, but something along the lines of practicing bad epidemics, and this leading to them being weaker epistemically moving forward, not stronger.
I guess this doesn’t mesh well with the hypothetical I’ve outlined, but I feel like a lot of times the argument you’re making is about a relatively tangential and non-central point. To the extent this is true, there is less benefit to discussing it.
The people who do read through the comment thread, the audience, often experience frustration and unhappiness. Furthermore, they often get sucked in, spending more time than they endorse.
(I’m at the gym on my phone and was a little loose with my language and thinking.)
One possibility I anticipate is that you think that modeling things this way and trying to predict such consequences of writing the tenth comment is a futile act consequentialist approach and one should not attempt this. Instead they should find rules roughly similar to “speak the truth” and follow them. If so, I would be interested in hearing about what rules you are following and why you have chosen to follow those rules.
… I get the sense that you haven’t been reading my comments at all.
I didn’t claim that I “expect [my] hypothetical tenth comment in this scenario we’ve been discussing to have a net positive effect”. I explicitly disclaimed the view (act consequentialism) which involves evaluation of this question at all. The last time you tried to summarize my view in this way, I specifically said that this is not the right summary. But now you’re just repeating that same thing again. What the heck?
… ok, I take it back, it seems like you are reading my comments and apparently (sort of, mostly) understanding them… but then where the heck did the above-quoted totally erroneous summary of my view come from?!
Anyhow, to answer your question… uh… I already answered your question. I explain some relevant “rules” in the thread that I linked to.
That having been said, I do want to comment on your outlined model a bit:
First of all, “the effects on Bob” of my comments are Bob’s own business, not mine.
Let’s be clear about what it is that we’re not discussing. We’re not talking about “effects on Bob” that are of the form “other people read my comment and then do things that are bad for Bob” (which would happen if e.g. I doxxed Bob, or posted defamatory claims, etc.). We’re not talking about “effects on Bob” that come from the comment just existing, regardless of whether Bob ever read it (e.g., erroneous and misleading descriptions of Bob’s ideas). And we’re definitely not talking about some sort of “basilisk hack” where my comment hijacks Bob’s brain in some weird way and causes him to have seizures (perhaps due to some unfortunate font rendering bug).
No, the sorts of “effects” being referred to, here, are specifically and exclusively the effects, directly on Bob, of Bob reading my comments (and understanding them, and thinking about them, etc.), in the normal way that humans read ordinary text.
Well, for one thing, if Bob doesn’t want to experience those effects, he can just not read the comment. That’s a choice that Bob can make! “Don’t like, don’t read” applies more to some things than others… but it definitely applies to some obscure sub-sub-sub-thread of some discussion deep in the weeds of the comment section of a post on Less Wrong dot com.
But also, and more generally, each person is responsible for what effects reading some text has on them. (We are, again, not talking about some sort of weird sci-fi infohazard, but just normal reading of ordinary text written by humans.) Part of being an adult is that you take this sort of very basic responsibility for how things affect your feelings, and if you don’t like doing something, you stop doing it. Or not! Maybe you do it anyway, for any number of reasons. That’s your call! But the effects on you are your business, not anyone else’s.
So in this hypothetical calculation which you allude to, “the effects on Bob” (in the sense that we are discussing) should be weighted at exactly zero.
If that perception is correct, then it is right and proper to perceive it thus. If it is incorrect, then the one who mis-perceives it thus should endeavor to correct their error.
Maintaining good epistemics in the face of pressure is an important rationality skill—one which it benefits everyone to develop. And the “pressure” involved in arguing with some random nobody on LessWrong is one of the mildest, most consequence-free forms of pressure imaginable—the perfect situation for practicing those skills.
If our hypothetical Bob thinks this, then he should have no problem at all disengaging from the discussion, and ignoring all further replies in the given thread. “I think that this is not important enough for me to continue spending my time on it, so thank you for the discussion thus far, but I won’t be replying further” is a very easy to thing to say.
Then perhaps these hypothetical readers should develop and practice the skill of “not continuing to waste their time reading things which they can see is a waste of their time”. “Somehow finding yourself doing something which you don’t endorse” is a general problem, and thus admits of general solutions. It is pointless to try to take responsibility for the dysfunctional internet-forum-reading habits of anyone who might ever read one’s comments on LessWrong.
I don’t have the strongest grasp of what rule consequentialism actually means. I’m also very prone to thinking about things in terms of expected value. I apologize if either of these things has lead to confusion or misattribution.
My understanding of rule consequentialism is that you choose rules that you think will lead to the best consequences and then try to follow those rules. But it is also my understanding that it is often a little difficult to figure out what rules apply to what situations, and so in practice some object level thinking about expected consequences bleeds in.
It sounds like that is not the case here though. It sounds like here you have rules you are following that clearly apply to this decision to post the tenth comment and you are not thinking about expected consequences. Is that correct? If not would you mind clarifying what is true?
I would appreciate it if you could outline 1) what the rules are and 2) why you have selected them.
Hm. I’d like to clarify something here. This seems important.
It’s one thing to say that 1) “tough love” is good because despite being painful in the short term, it is what most benefits the person in the long term. But it is another thing to say 2) that if someone is “soft” then their experiences don’t matter.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think that it is gesturing at something that is important and in the ballpark of what we’re talking about. I’m having trouble putting my finger on it. Do you think there is something useful here, perhaps with some amendments? Would you like to comment on where you stand on (1) vs (2)?
I’ll also try to ask a more concrete question here. Are you saying a) by taking the effects on Bob into account it will lead to less good consequences for society as a whole (ie. Bob + everyone else), and thus we shouldn’t take the effects of Bob into account? Or are you saying b), that the effects on Bob simply don’t matter at all?
Sure, that’s basically true. Let’s say, provisionally, that this is a reasonable description.
I’m talking about stuff like this:
Now, is that the only rule that applies to situations like this (i.e., “writing comments on a discussion forum”)? No, of course not. Many other rules apply. It’s not really reasonable to expect me to enumerate the entirety of my moral and practical views in a comment.
As for why I’ve selected the rules… it’s because I think that they’re the right ones, of course.
Like, at this point we’ve moved into “list and explain all of your opinions about morality and also about everything else”. And, man, that is definitely a “we’re gonna be here all day or possibly all year or maybe twelve years” sort of conversation.
Well, yes, those are indeed two different things. But also, neither of them are things that I’ve said, so neither of them seems relevant…?
I think that you’re reading things into my comments that are not the things that I wrote in those comments. I’m not sure what the source of the confusion is.
Well, things don’t just “matter” in the abstract, they only matter to specific people. I’m sure that the effects on Bob of Bob reading my comments matter to Bob. This is fine! Indeed, it’s perfect: the effects matter to Bob, and Bob is the one who knows best what the effects are, and Bob is the one best capable of controlling the effects, so a policy of “the effects on Bob of Bob reading my comments are Bob’s to take care of” is absolutely ideal in every way.
And, yes indeed, it would be very bad for society as a whole (and relevant subsets thereof, such as “the participants in this discussion forum”) if we were to adopt the opposite policy. (Indeed, we can see that it is very bad for society, almost every time we do adopt the opposite policy.)
Like, very straightforwardly, a society that takes the position that I have described is just better than a society that takes the opposite position. That’s the rule consequentialist reasoning here.
This is starting to feel satisfying, like I understand where you are coming from. I have a relatively strong curiosity here; I want to understand where you’re coming from.
It sounds like there are rules such as “saying things that are true, relevant and at least somewhat important” that you strongly believe will lead to the best outcomes for society. These rules apply to the decision to post the tenth comment, and so you follow the rule and post the comment.
So to be clear would it be accurate to say that you would choose (a) rather than (b) in my previous question? Perhaps with some amendments or caveats?
I’m trying to ask what you value.
And as for listing out your entire moral philosophy, I am certainly not asking for that. I was thinking that there might be 3-5 rules that are most relevant and that would be easy to rattle off. Is that not the case?
Right.
I guess I’d have to think about it. The “rules” that are relevant to this sort of situation have always seemed to me to be both very obvious and also continuous with general principles of how to live and act, so separating them out is not easy.
I think your comment here epitomizes what I value about your posting. I’m not here to feel good about myself, I want to learn stuff correctly the first time. If I want to be coddled I can go to my therapist.
I also think that there’s a belief in personal agency that we share. No one is required to read or comment, and I view even negative comments as a valuable gift of the writer’s time and energy.
I wish I could write as sharply and itintelligently as you do. Most people waste too many words not saying anything with any redeeming factor except social signaling. (At least when I waste words i try to make it funny and interesting, which is not much better but intended as sort of an unspoken apology)
Yep, makes sense.
I hope that, at least, you now have some idea of why I view such suggestions as “why can’t you just write more nicely” as something less than an obviously winning play.
EDIT: The parent comment was heavily edited after I posted this reply; originally it contained only the first paragraph. The text above is a reply to that. I will reply to the edited-in parts in a sibling comment.
(Sorry about the edit Said, and thank you for calling it out and stating your intent. I was going to DM you but figured you might not receive it due to some sort of moderation action, which is unfortunate. I figured there’d be a good chance that you’d see the edit and so I’d wait a few hours before replying to let you know I had edited the comment.)
In response to a comment, moderator @Ben Pace describes me as:
I consider this to be a libelous characterization. To say that it is false is an understatement.
Ben Pace should either support this accusation with cited quotes from me (which he will be unable to do, of course), or else retract it and apologize.
Here’s the comment where you say it’s normatively correct to “stick one’s heels in and be unwilling to budge on a position regardless of reason or argument”.
My best guess is that you just wrote that in order to write something that reads as a definitive slap-down, but regardless it is a pretty silly thing to write (and made me respect you less!).
It would seem that you didn’t follow the link in that text. My best guess is that you just wanted to score a point against me, and didn’t bother to check or figure out what it was that I was actually saying.
If you had, you would have read the comment that I linked to, the key section of which I will now quote:
As you can see, this is very much not “epistemically committed to not changing his mind in the face of evidence and argument”.
I’ll take that retraction and apology now, please.
Once again I think you kind of don’t understand good communication and are being silly. That comment is recommending people not change their minds in comment threads. Like, you go on in that comment to say:
And yet here you demand I immediately change my mind in response to reason and evidence.
You go on to praise Schopenhauer when he writes about how to have discourse, including (for example) this line:
That comment of mine you’re responding to is one where I describe talking to you often as similar to “an LLM in whose system prompt it was written that it should not be able to either agree with or understand your point”. Zack Davis describes that position as “laughable, obviously wrong, and deeply corrosive” but then you go on to link to yourself repeatedly endorsing not changing your mind in comment sections and say that such behavior is “normatively correct”. You guys have got to decide whether the position is laughable or obviously correct! These are consequentially different! There may be some light between your position and my description but they’re quite close.
I’m not invested in more litigation of your behavior and so on. We’ve made our call.
I think this is an improperly narrow interpretation of the word now in the grandparent’s “I’ll take that retraction and apology now.” A retraction and apology in a few days after you’ve taken some time to cool down and reflect would be entirely in line with Schopenhauer’s advice. I await the possibility with cautious optimism.
I mean, I do think that (recall that I actually did the experiment with an LLM to demonstrate), but do you understand the rhetorical device I was invoking by using those exact words in the comment in question?
You had just disparagingly characterized Achmiz as “describing [interlocutors’] positions as laughable, obviously wrong, deeply corrosive, etc”. I was deliberately “biting the bullet” by choosing to express my literal disagreement with your hyperbolic insult using those same words verbatim, in order to stick up for the right to express disagreement using strong language when appropriate.
Just checking that you “got the joke.”
Please note that I had put a Disagree react on the phrase “normatively correct” on the comment in question. (The react was subsequently upvoted by Drake Morrison and Habryka.)
My actual position is subtler: I think Schopenhauer is correct to point out that it’s possible to concede an argument too early and that good outcomes often result from being obstinate in the heat of an argument and then reflecting at leisure later, but I think describing the obstinacy behavior as “normatively correct” is taking it way too far; that’s not what the word normative means.
I looked over the comment, while I think it was a reasonable stab at what I was trying to say, it didn’t quite meet my standards for expressing my opinion versus stating a verifiable fact, so I’ve edited it.
I’m happy that my comment is more accurate and I’m grateful to Said’s comment for that effect; I do think his comment about not-changing-your-mind-in-response-to-reason-or-argument being ‘normatively correct’ was misleading about his epistemic state (e.g. this also communicated the wrong thing to Zack).
I endorse this interpretation.
Who could possibly be disagree-voting with this comment? What does it even mean to disagree with me saying that I endorse someone’s interpretation of my own words?
I think that this position is reasonable, but wrong. On the other hand, perhaps we do not actually disagree on this point, as such, because of the next point:
I disagree. Elaborating:
Suppose that we are considering some class of situations, and two possible behaviors, A and B, in such a situation; and we are discussing which is the correct behavior in a situation of the given class. It may be the case (and we may claim) that any of the following hold:
Behavior A is always correct; behavior B is never correct.
Behavior B is always correct; behavior A is never correct.
In all cases, either A or B is fine; both are acceptable, neither is wrong.
In certain situations of the given class, A is correct and B is wrong; in other situations of the given class, B is correct and A is wrong.
In certain situations of the given class, A is correct and B is wrong; in other situations of the given class, B is correct and A is wrong; in yet other situations of the given class, either A or B is fine.
In certain situations of the given class, A is correct and B is wrong; in other situations of the given class, either A or B is fine.
In certain situations of the given class, B is correct and A is wrong; in other situations of the given class, either A or B is fine.
In which of these scenarios would you assent to the claim that “A is normatively correct”?
My own position is that the answer is “all of the above except #2 and possibly #7”. (I can see a definitional argument based on #7, but I am not strongly committed to including it in the definition of “normative”.)
When discussing rationality, I typically use the word normative to refer to what idealized Bayesian reasoners would do, often in contrast to what humans do.
(Example usage, bolding added: “Normatively, theories are preferred to the quantitative extent that they are simple and predict the observed data [...] For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer ‘their own’ ideas, and in that context, a ‘principle of charity’ can be useful as a corrective heuristic—but the corrective heuristic only works by colliding the non-normative bias with a fairness instinct [...]”)
As Schopenhauer observes, the entire concept of adversarial debate is non-normative!
“[N]ot demand[ing] [...] that a compelling argument be immediately accepted” is normatively correct insofar as even pretty idealized Bayesian reasoners would face computational constraints, but a “stubborn defense of one’s starting position—combined with a willingness [...] to change one’s mind later” isn’t normatively correct, because the stubbornness part comes from humans’ innate vanity rather than serving any functional purpose. You could just say, “Let me think about that and get back to you later.”
Understood. However, I am not sure that I approve of this usage; and it is certainly not how I use the word (or, to a first approximation, any words) myself. My comments are, unless specified otherwise, generally intended to refer to actually-existing humans.[1]
Indeed, so either we take this to mean that any normative claims about how to conduct such debates are necessarily meaningless, or else we allow for a concept of normativity that is not restricted to idealized Bayesian reasoners (which, I must remind you, are not actually real things that exist). Now, I am not saying that we should not identify an ideal and try to approach it asymptotically, but surely it makes no sense to behave as if we have already reached that ideal. And until we have (which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon or possibly ever), adversarial debate is a form of epistemic inquiry we will always have with us. So there must be right and wrong ways to go about doing it.
“Stubbornness” is just the refusal to immediately update. Whether it makes sense to continue defending a point, or whether it makes more sense to say “let me think about it and get back to you”, is contingent on various circumstantial aspects of the situation, the course of the discussion, etc. It does not seem to me like this point can make any substantive difference.
Perhaps not necessarily endorsing the actually existing distributions of certain traits in humans, perhaps generalizing slightly to “actually-existing humans but also very similar entities, humans under small plausible modifications, etc.”, but essentially still “actual humans”, and definitely not “hypothetical idealized Bayesian reasoners, which don’t exist and who maybe (probably?) can’t exist at all”.
We are not talking, here, about some subtle point of philosophy, or some complicated position on the facts of some difficult and specialized subject. You made a claim about my views. I disclaimed it. Either you have some support for your claim, or it is unsubstantiated. It would seem that you have no support for your claim.
When one makes objectionable factual claims about another person, and is unable to substantiate those claims, the correct thing to do is to retract it and apologize. (This does not preclude making the claim again in the future, should it so happen that you acquire previously unavailable support for the claim! But currently, you have nothing—and indeed, less than nothing—namely, a statement from me disclaiming your characterization, and nothing from you to support it.)
If you refuse to do so, the only appropriate conclusion is that you are someone who knowingly lies about other people’s views.
Schopenhauer was here describing human behavior, having just two sentences prior (in a section which I bolded for emphasis) characterized said behavior as “the weakness of our intellect and the perversity of our will”. To say of this merely that it is “Schopenhauer when he writes about how to have discourse” is disingenuous.
I am not a “you guys” and I reject the notion that I have to decide anything for anyone else. Zack is perfectly capable of speaking for himself, as I am capable of speaking for myself. If I endorse someone’s point, I’ll say so.
What is “normatively correct” is what I described in the section I quoted in the grandparent. I have been completely clear about this view, never wavering from it in the slightest. The idea that there is some sort of ambiguity or vaccilation here is entirely of your own false invention.
Your characterization of me as “an LLM in whose system prompt it was written that it should not be able to either agree with or understand your point” is obviously insulting and, more importantly, unambiguously and verifiably false.[1], insofar as I have agreed with people often.
This again is an erroneous and deceptive characterization.
The bottom line is that, once again, your claim about my views is demonstrably false, and you have no support for it whatsoever. You should retract it and apologize to me.
And not just in the trivial “actually I am a biological human and not a large language model” sense.
I mean, I disagree, but doesn’t seem like further conversation will be productive.
In another comment thread, you write:
This is quite deceptive, as in this very post, you cite something I wrote on my own Shortform as contributing to your decision to ban me.
I was talking about making top-level posts or shortforms with object-level objections. Calling an author a “coward” for banning you from their post, is of course not what I was talking about as something that is fine to do on your shortform.
Your conduct on the site matters, and the conduct you displayed in that thread seemed bad, independently of where it occurred. I didn’t mean to imply that just because something is a top-level post or shortform that it’s OK to write whatever you want there, we still have standards here. But it’s the site-moderators job to enforce those standards, not the original post author’s, which is what this whole post is about.
Or to state it a different way: No, there is nothing deceptive here. The fact that you can make a shortform or top-level post does indeed help lower the cost of authors deleting comments from their posts. It doesn’t change what we do in terms of site-wide moderation.
FYI, that link goes to a very weird URL, which I doubt is what you intended.
The link you had in mind, I am sure, is to this thread. And your description of that thread, in this comment and in the OP, is quite dishonest. You wrote:
In ordinary conversation between normal people, I wouldn’t hesitate to call this a lie. Here on LessWrong, of course, we like to have long, nuanced discussions about how something can be not technically a lie, what even is “lying”, etc., so—maybe this is a “lie” and maybe not. But here’s the truth: the first use of the word “coward” in that thread was on Gordon’s part. He wrote:[1]
And I replied:
To describe this in the way that you did, has the obvious connotation to any reasonable reader that I, unprompted, went and wrote something like “Gordon is a coward for banning me from his posts!”. That’s the picture that someone would come away with, after reading your characterization. And, of course, it would be completely inaccurate.
You have, again and again in this post and the comments here, relied on this sort of tendentious description and mischaracterization. This is yet another example.
I think that you know perfectly well how dishonest this sort of thing is. The fact that you have to rely on such underhanded tactics to make your case should give you pause.
P.S.: I must note that I am currently rate-limited in my ability to comment (a result of the LW mods strong-downvoting my comments in this thread, e.g. this one). How does this square with “Said, feel free to ask questions of commenters or of me here”?
FWIW, I do not think that Gordon’s part in that particular exchange was problematic or blameworthy in any way.
I’m not sure the more accurate picture is flawless behavior or anything, but I do think I definitely had an inaccurate picture in the way Said describes.
That… is an unfortunate application of the auto rate-limiting system. I’ll see whether I can disable it easily for you. I’ll figure out something in the next few hours, but it might require shipping some new code and disentangling the surrounding systems a bit. Sorry about that. Definitely not intended.
I just enabled “ignore rate limits” for this post (which I assumed we’d want for this post to avoid this issue but I think I’m the only one that remembered that feature existed)
Yep, I did indeed not remember that feature. Thank you!
Ooops, sorry, fixed.
I agree that the context is helpful and importantly makes the “coward” aspect more understandable. I also omitted other context that I think makes the thing I intended to communicate with “you called him a coward” a more reasonable summary[1]. I think I am sold that it would have been better for me to give a bit more context and to summarize things a bit differently. I don’t overall agree that it was substantially misleading, but I agree I could have done better.
For example this paragraph:
Which I also consider to follow the same unhelpful patterns described in the OP.
Commenter @Lukas_Gloor writes:
This impression is mistaken. I have no such “distaste”.
On the contrary, my comments are often aimed at helping to “pin down” those bits. Asking probing questions, asking for examples, asking authors to explain how they are using certain words, etc., is precisely the correct way to do such “pinning down”.
@Lukas_Gloor continues by saying:
The unacknowledged possibility here, for any given post in this category, is that the post had no coherent point, and was in fact confused, nonsensical, simply wrong, or some combination thereof. In such a case, it is entirely correct that I should not “get closer to seeing the point”, and anyone who did “get closer to seeing the point” of such a post would be making a mistake—becoming more wrong instead of less wrong. In other words: if “there is no there there”, then “getting there” is wrong, and “not getting there” is correct.
The way that we can distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that there is something there but it’s difficult to verbalize or to characterize coherently, is precisely via discussion, conceptual analysis, examination of intent behind word choices, examination of examples (or trying to think of examples), etc. And if we find “something there”, the same methods are the means by which we can develop and refine it.
It’s not worth making most posts where implied central points are not coherently understood by the author. But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they’ve written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn’t of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already.
The incentives should carve out a niche for this kind of communication, acknowledging practical impossibility to distinguish. The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment, so any incentives should actually want to point the other way, possibly on orthogonal or correlated considerations that can actually be resolved in practice.
Of course. I wholly agree with this.
Empirically, this is clearly false. The track record of LW in the past ~8 years makes this very clear.
That seems hard to judge from anything empirical, you’d need to compare with the counterfactual where there is little difficulty in distinguishing and so good tentative takes don’t need to live in squalor among piles of worthless nonsense (especially well-presented “high effort” worthless nonsense). So I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly false, and similarly I don’t see how it can possibly be clearly true, since it has to rely on low-legibility intuitive takes about unobservable counterfactuals.
Also, the problems from the difficulty to distinguish are both on the side of the authors (in the form of incentives) and on the side of the readers (in the form of low availability of good content of this type, and having to endure the worthless nonsense without even being able to know if it actually is worthless nonsense).
Commenter @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel writes:
@habryka replies:
This seems to me to be spectacularly disingenuous, given the discussion in this subthread, where @habryka writes:
(See the linked subthread for more details.)
My guess is this is clear to most readers, but to clarify, I said “but there is basically no engagement [of Said] with Duncan that played any kind of substantial role in any of this”. I.e. I don’t think your comments in any threads with Duncan played much into this decision.
Duncan’s complaints about you also preceded his direct conflict with you, as far as I can remember. The quote I dug up for you just happened to have been made in that context (which shouldn’t be very surprising, as people rarely publicly complain about other users on LessWrong in the precise way you were asking about).
This just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I don’t understand how you can say this and expect to be believed, when you cite Duncan as one of your examples of “many top authors citing [Said] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site” (and indeed as the only example for which you’ve been able to provide any kind of unambiguous proof)—and that, in turn, is your explanation for what “the stakes” of this decision are!
I only asked about it because you made the claim in the first place! These are your words! You wrote: “many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here”. For you to now pretend that I am making some weird demand for some weird form of evidence for some weird reason, is yet another example of disingenuousness.
Come on, please, you can figure out what I mean with those sentences.
Yes, many top authors cite you as a reason for why they do not want to post on the site. This does not mean that your specific interactions with the one specific author we are talking about are the reason why many top authors are doing so. These are two at most weakly correlated points. It’s really not hard to imagine how they could come apart. Those interactions are not even the reason why Duncan said the same thing, as his complaints started substantially before the relevant thread where he said it more explicitly.
I literally clarified this two comments ago, and in like 4 other comment threads you are involved in. Most of these authors cite you, in private communication. This is not a particularly complicated thing to understand. Separately, at least some top authors have publicly complained about you, but that isn’t the load-bearing part of why I wrote the above, or why I believe what I believe. We’ve already discussed this a bunch. I don’t know what you are trying to say here.
… nor did I claim this, nor do I think that you have claimed this…? What in the world would make you think that this is what we’re talking about? This just seems like a non sequitur.
I am not sure how this confusion came about, but let me try to clarify. When you say—in a public statement, the purpose of which is to stake out a publicly known, “official” position, supported by publicly made arguments—that “many top authors” cite me as “a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site”, you have two (non-mutually-exclusive) options:
Point to public statements by relevant authors
Allude to private communications from relevant authors
If you just do #2, this is basically worthless. “People have said these-and-such things to me in private”, offered with no corroboration of any kind, may be hold some small weight, in explaining and justifying your actions, if you’ve built up a large amount of trust and good will. But no more.
And so, understandably, you have not relied only on #2, but have also attempted to do a lot of #1. You have attempted to point to several examples of authors who’ve supposedly made such statements, either in public, or in a way that’s verifiable. This, again, would be an entirely understandable thing to do, given your aforementioned purpose.
Naturally, when you cite such evidence, you should expect that you will be expected to actually provide it, and that it will be examined, to verify that it is what you say it is!
And in fact, much of this purported publicly available or verifiable evidence, which you have attempted to provide, has, upon examination, turned out to be flimsy at best.
Importantly, this also means that your word about the existence of the private evidence (which cannot be publicly verified) is cast into doubt.
Commenter @alkjash writes:
This would seem to be a highly dubious claim, at best.
I have looked through the entirety of @alkjash’s posting/commenting history and used the site search feature, and have found only the following interactions involving the two of us:
Discussion of a “multiple agent” model, in comments on post “Internal Double Crux”
Obviously nothing day-ruining or even unpleasant here.
Brief discussion of input device effectiveness, in comments on post “Design 2”
Ditto.
A couple of interactions in comments on post “New moderation tools and moderation guidelines” (concerning UX of records/traces of moderation actions)
Not really “criticism of writing”, but rather a discussion of costs/benefits of certain aspects of site design.
Comment (just one; no discussion) on dialogue “Originality vs. Correctness”
Technically “criticism”, I guess, but more like “agreeing with part of what was said, disagreeing with another part”. Nothing unpleasant here either.
These four cases seem to be the totality of all my interactions with @alkjash, throughout the entirety of my tenure here on Less Wrong.
So where are these “unpleasant interactions” that “ruined [your] day”…?
I am surprised there are so few—perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn’t directly participate in.
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).
It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.
I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you—this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.
I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].
Some of them look positively cooperative to me, and do not look like Said thought ill of you in any way, nor that it would look bad if you replied or didn’t reply to those messages.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
That is at least how I feel when I try to simulate why I’d feel the way you claim to have felt. And I empathize with that feeling.
This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don’t think it’s really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them.
One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things.
1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that’s a little too cold for me.
In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror.
2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be hostile to the way I think out loud. I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate, and this mode of banter is absolutely not compatible with serious discussions of people’s long-term reputations with consequences on the level of multi-year banning. Let nobody ever give me moderator privileges beyond my personal blog. I am not using this frame at all to justify said banning. I am only using it to explain why I personally prefer it.
Well I would say the whole reason LW mods are banning Said is that we do, in fact, want LW to operate this way. (Or, directionally similarly to this). I do also want wrong ideas to get noticed and discarded, and I do want “good taste in generating ideas” (there are people who aren’t skilled enough at casual idea generation for me to feel excited about them generating such conversation on LW). But I think it’s an essential part of any real generative intellectual tradition.
I really appreciate your introspection on this, but suggest that status consciousness is probably still a large part of what’s going on, because if you weren’t worried about looking bad in front of an audience (i.e., looking like you didn’t have an answer to one of Said’s questions/objections), you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his “entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency”.
I wanna flag, your use of the word “simply” here is… like, idk, false.
I do think it’s good for people to learn the skill of not caring what other people think and being able to think out loud even when someone is being annoying. But, this is a pretty difficult skill for lots of people. I think it’s pretty common for people who are attempting to learn it to instead end up contorting their original thought process around what the anticipated social punishment.
I think it’s a coherent position to want LessWrong “price of entry” to be gaining that skill. I don’t think it’s a reasonable position to call it “simply...”. It’s asking for like 10-200 hours of pretty scary, painful work.
The way I feel about this reply is “I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer”? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at “this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying.”
Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.
sure, the prestige challenge seems to be relevant, but I feel like the problem is that said also makes dominance threats and those suck. (I feel like there’s something going on where a big enough prestige challenge spills into dominance, or something? stated in the spirit of exploratory ramblings that may or may not have an insight somewhere downstream of them)
edit: actually I don’t want to deal with this right now, bye. I resisted my urge to delete this comment’s contents
What in the world is this about…?
Your model of my view bears very little resemblance to my actual view.
I have two questions:
If you found the discussion fruitful in the end, why is that not the bottom line? (Especially if this fruitfulness involved “reasonable conclusions” being reached?)
(Here I am talking about “the bottom line” only with respect to your interaction with me directly, ignoring any effects like the benefit of a comment exchange to other commenters or to readers, etc.)
You say that you “had the feeling that to interact with [me] at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”. But as we can see from the linked examples, there generally was not, in fact, any “vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”.[1] So it would seem that the “feeling” you had was false-to-fact. Do you agree with this evaluation?
Indeed, in the exchange at the first link, the putative roles were reversed—you were questioning me about what I believe, etc. Of course, I have no objection to this! But it hardly serves as an example of me drawing anyone into any vortices of quibbling…
This is another comment where I do not understand the downvoting.