Said is a sufficiently mixed case that arguing with moderators on object level seems like a lost cause. My impression is that Said feeds both good and bad (but not terrible) norms, while making some positive object level contributions in a way that strongly annoys some people for essentially superficial reasons. And he’s being either persistently oblivious or illegibly principled in how that keeps happening, in ways that seem eminently avoidable by adjusting how he’s talking at a superficial level, without impacting any substantive points he’s making. (This is apart from the purely positive and important LW-related infrastructure contributions.) So the decision feels somewhat unjust, but not legibly unjust, and illegibly-possibly-unjust decisions must remain legitimate for practical reasons, so that the site admin retains steering superpowers.
In the Said/Duncan debacle, Duncan was making significant positive object level contributions while also feeding some catastrophically terrible norms (in my subjective opinion that’s hard to make legible; I applaud Zack for making some progress at the time, though that also didn’t gain much traction). So in terms of long term impact, the Said/Duncan case seemed much clearer to me, than the case of Said on his own, but also in both cases it’s not black and white and hard to argue.
Another salient example of a different kind is the whole class of cases of borderline domestic abuse (at sufficiently low levels of terribleness where it’s hard to make any calls, including the cases where the damage is purely psychological), where similarly there are often two kinds of impact with opposite signs that can’t be meaningfully directly compared to each other. (I’m bringing this up as a well-known example that illustrates the inherent complexities of any legible/illegible good/bad impact mixture, rather than as suggesting any further analogousness.)
And also anything about norms is not particularly legible in general, for example my intermittent discussion of norms and their feeding doesn’t seem to spark any meaningful engagement (even though it’s something I’ve been talking about for years), so until and unless it does, or I discover better anchors for framing it that someone else planted, it also feels like a lost cause to argue any specific policy proposals based in this kind of thinking.
Funnily enough I think I kind of feel about Duncan the same way Oli feels about Said. I detect a sinister and disquieting pattern in his writing that I cannot prove in a court of law or anything that is slightly larping as one. But I’m not trying to moderate any space he’s in.
(Maybe you misread what I intended about the Said/Duncan conflict? The wording in your comment seems a bit incongruous under the reading where you didn’t, sorry if I’m overthinking this. My point was that the outcome where Duncan mostly left was favorable in its longer term impact, at least so far, due to the norm influence that’s not necessarily even intended by Duncan himself, and so would be hard to argue or even know how to correctly attribute responsibility for. This is the largely illegible thing where Zack made a bit of a headway elucidating some aspects of it. But the impact of Said leaving seems unclear either way, while at the same time any issues seem more like the kind of thing he should’ve been able to fix and that’s therefore easier to attribute to his own decisions...)
Said is a sufficiently mixed case that arguing with moderators on object level seems like a lost cause. My impression is that Said feeds both good and bad (but not terrible) norms, while making some positive object level contributions in a way that strongly annoys some people for essentially superficial reasons. And he’s being either persistently oblivious or illegibly principled in how that keeps happening, in ways that seem eminently avoidable by adjusting how he’s talking at a superficial level, without impacting any substantive points he’s making. (This is apart from the purely positive and important LW-related infrastructure contributions.) So the decision feels somewhat unjust, but not legibly unjust, and illegibly-possibly-unjust decisions must remain legitimate for practical reasons, so that the site admin retains steering superpowers.
In the Said/Duncan debacle, Duncan was making significant positive object level contributions while also feeding some catastrophically terrible norms (in my subjective opinion that’s hard to make legible; I applaud Zack for making some progress at the time, though that also didn’t gain much traction). So in terms of long term impact, the Said/Duncan case seemed much clearer to me, than the case of Said on his own, but also in both cases it’s not black and white and hard to argue.
Another salient example of a different kind is the whole class of cases of borderline domestic abuse (at sufficiently low levels of terribleness where it’s hard to make any calls, including the cases where the damage is purely psychological), where similarly there are often two kinds of impact with opposite signs that can’t be meaningfully directly compared to each other. (I’m bringing this up as a well-known example that illustrates the inherent complexities of any legible/illegible good/bad impact mixture, rather than as suggesting any further analogousness.)
And also anything about norms is not particularly legible in general, for example my intermittent discussion of norms and their feeding doesn’t seem to spark any meaningful engagement (even though it’s something I’ve been talking about for years), so until and unless it does, or I discover better anchors for framing it that someone else planted, it also feels like a lost cause to argue any specific policy proposals based in this kind of thinking.
Funnily enough I think I kind of feel about Duncan the same way Oli feels about Said. I detect a sinister and disquieting pattern in his writing that I cannot prove in a court of law or anything that is slightly larping as one. But I’m not trying to moderate any space he’s in.
(Maybe you misread what I intended about the Said/Duncan conflict? The wording in your comment seems a bit incongruous under the reading where you didn’t, sorry if I’m overthinking this. My point was that the outcome where Duncan mostly left was favorable in its longer term impact, at least so far, due to the norm influence that’s not necessarily even intended by Duncan himself, and so would be hard to argue or even know how to correctly attribute responsibility for. This is the largely illegible thing where Zack made a bit of a headway elucidating some aspects of it. But the impact of Said leaving seems unclear either way, while at the same time any issues seem more like the kind of thing he should’ve been able to fix and that’s therefore easier to attribute to his own decisions...)