For the fraction of our conversation that was frustrating due to my grammatical error, and unclear communication in that comment, as well as further frustration caused by me not noticing that what I wrote was unclear earlier in this conversation, I apologize.
Thanks, and I appreciate it, but unfortunately, this does not fully resolve my concerns about the degree to which you are trustworthy. Let me explain—and thanks for your patience. (I thought the present comment would benefit from some focused, cool-headed care and attention, which it took me some days to get around to.)
How I’m Thinking About Discouragement Claims
I agree that in as much you interpreted my statement as “these authors have all stopped posting on the site because of you”, then of course my statement is obviously blatantly wrong. But I don’t understand how that hypothesis would even be available
Indeed, I didn’t interpret it that way; I agree that it’s possible to be discouraged but still use the site.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”
Is it? I think “discouraged from using the site in some non-trivial way” and “annoyed by” are different things, because a lot of annoyances are trivial. The question was expressing skepticism (which I share) that finding a commenter annoying would be a legitimately non-trivial barrier to participating; it’s normal and expected that not everyone on a public forum is going to be your best friend.[1]
I’m worried about a potential motte-and-bailey pattern where the reality in the motte is “Habryka has a vague memory that someone either made or agreed to some sort of negative-valence statement about Achmiz, at some time, in some context” and what gets reported in the bailey—without any details of what the person allegedly said—is that that person was discouraged from using the site by Achmiz specifically, such that they get cited as an example of “authors who find [a commenter’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”.
(All three of those users havepostedcomments within the last 70 days, so you can see I’m not using the “stopped posting on the site” criterion.)
I think it really matters that in these cases, we have the specific, first-party statements about discouragement and not just vague hearsay (that you remember the user making some sort of complaint, without telling us what the complaint was). If it’s not already obvious why I’m so distrustful of hearsay, see the next section.
How My Distrust Is Paying Rent in Anticipated Experiences
I continue to strongly disagree that in the world where I did make an unambiguous statement of general inference (that these authors were discouraged from posting on LW) that you finding the kind of comment that Jacob made, or the kind of statement that Scott made, that this would be any substantial evidence against my integrity
The issue is that my distrust of you keeps paying rent in anticipated experiences: I made better predictions because I distrusted you. (I’m writing about “trustworthiness” rather than “integrity” here, but I doubt that’s a crux. If necessary, see the section below on what I mean by “trustworthiness” in this context.)
Consider how your sequence of statements about Alexander would look to observers who don’t have access to your private memories and who believe that memories about what other people said can be unreliable. You were asked about “authors who find [a commenter’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, and responded with a list including Scott Alexander.
Even if there had been no grammatical ambiguity (and the comment had read “have complained along these lines” per your revision in the parent), I would have still been motivated to contact Alexander. I think that someone who trusted you would have predicted that I was wasting my time, that Alexander would corroborate your story by reporting that he had a negative firsthand impression of Achmiz. In fact, I wasn’t wasting my time: Alexander didn’t remember complaining and said he had “no direct opinion” on Achmiz. (He did say that he “deferred” to you about “what [you two] might have talked about in 2019″, but that’s not a corroboration.)
If there had been no grammatical error, I don’t think I would have used the phrase “false claims” (because it would have been clearer that you were only reporting what you remember being told, which isn’t directly contradicted by Alexander not remembering telling you that, because he could have forgotten), but I don’t think that would have changed the subsequent sequence of events very much; I still would have posted a comment in an accusatory register (whereas I wouldn’t have if Alexander had told me that he was discouraged by Achmiz).
In our actual timeline, you then clarified that “It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” but that you “were talking about what makes LW comment sections good or bad, and [Achmiz] was a commenter we discussed in that conversation in 2019 or so.”
I think that someone who trusted you would infer that you meant that Alexander had mentioned Achmiz’s name. Because I didn’t trust you, I noted in §III.2 of my post that “it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name, only that the ‘name came up’ and that Achmiz ‘was a commenter we discussed.’”
As it happened, my suspicion that Alexander did not name Achmiz at all seems to have been well-founded: in your 9 July comment above, you write that to the best of your knowledge, “Scott brought up Said, not by name but indirectly (referring to a specific commenter whose exact name he didn’t remember)” and only then did you “provide[ ] the name, which seemed to match.” (Seemed to match how? What did Alexander actually say, such that you could confidently infer who he meant?)
I notice a pattern in these events: twice I doubted the interpretation of your words that I think would come most naturally to someone who trusted you, and both times my distrust was vindicated (first by Alexander’s “no direct opinion”, then by your admission that you were the one who supplied Achmiz’s name, not Alexander): every time I’ve poked at the claim, it’s become less compelling as a justification for the ban.[3]
And after all that, I still don’t know what you’re alleging that Alexander said (which he has no memory of), only that you recall that there was some sort of “complaint”—and you’re still telling me (with respect to the claim about Alexander)[4] that you “would continue to write that same statement today.”
I hope you can see why this sort of behavior (where details that weaken the claim have to be extracted under adversarial questioning rather than volunteered up front) should (quantitatively) decrease people’s trust in you (such that they assign less credence when you make non-auditable claims on the basis of private evidence), even if every sentence you said permitted a true interpretation. (Because in the absence of someone distrustful and motivated enough to do the audit, the details would never surface, and people would have less accurate beliefs.) I think that a trustworthy speaker in this situation would be telling me that they wished the original 15 June 2025 comment had mentioned the “wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” part and that they were the one who supplied Achmiz’s name (such that Alexander turning out not to remember it would be less surprising to readers who trusted the original comment) and what they remembered Alexander having said more specifically than “complaints along these lines”.[5]
Appendix: What I Mean By “Trustworthiness” in This Context
If a speaker is trustworthy, then the beliefs I adopt when I interpret their words as being motivated by an intent to inform me should be approximately the same as the beliefs I would adopt after sending an auditor to check up on their claims. If someone is trustworthy, the auditor won’t predictably turn up counterevidence that lowers my credence in the beliefs the speaker is trying to get me to adopt (because a trustworthy speaker would have told me the counterevidence up front, without me needing to hire an auditor to get it).
I would even argue that not finding anyone annoying would be a red flag that the forum is suffering from the kind of failure mode I discuss in “Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information”. As an umeshism: if you don’t have any annoying critics, then you don’t have enough critics. For example, I’ve found some of gjm’s criticisms of my posts to be subjectively annoying, but for that very reason, I think it’s important that I’ve often replied to them (although notalways due to time constraints). If I didn’t have strong replies to my most annoying critics (or worse, didn’t have any annoying critics at all), then I couldn’t be so confident that I’m right.
Gloor updated his comment in May 2024 to say that in the subsequent year and change, he “liked a couple of comments by Said and I don’t remember any particular ones that I thought exhibited the above pattern.”
If Alexander felt as Sabien did, that would be a big deal in the minds of a lot of stakeholders; if, as is actually the case, Alexander doesn’t remember the complaint he allegedly made about someone whose name he couldn’t remember, that’s barely anything.
I appreciate the statement that you would link Falkovich’s 2018 comment. I do consider the “some countervailing evidence” characterization a significant understatement (because the comment in Falkovich’s own words evidentially outweighs mere hearsay and is quite explicit in his support for Achmiz “bring[ing] a new flavor to the community” despite the previous impression of “disagreeableness [...] colored negatively in [his] mind”), but this is already a very long comment deep into a very long discussion and it’s not worth spending any more wordcount on this.
I furthermore maintain that a trustworthy speaker wouldn’t suppress visibility of audits of the evidence for their claims on the grounds that it would incentivize them to spend time replying, “which [they] do not want to do”, as you did when you delisted Sting’s question post in contradiction of your claim in the OP that users can “make a post about how you disagree with some decision we made”, as I discuss in §VI.4.
I think that someone who trusted you would infer that you meant that Alexander had mentioned Achmiz’s name. Because I didn’t trust you, I noted in §III.2 of my post that “it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name, only that the ‘name came up’ and that Achmiz ‘was a commenter we discussed.’”
IDK man it’s really not complicated. We were discussing experiences with the LW comment section. Scott said some generic things that have historically discouraged him, plus some vague references to one or two specific commenters. One of them seemed to me to match Said, so I said “could it be the guy who goes by Said?” plus some context on who Said is, and he said (something like) “yes, that sounds right, or at least the profile you are describing matches my memory of some of the people I remember”.
This feels like a pretty normal interaction that is well-captured by the thing I said (namely that Scott complained about Said).
This is all a decade ago. I don’t really know what else you want me to do here, or have any idea about a different algorithm I should run by your lights. It’s even plausible me and Scott miscommunicated, or I am misremembering, or any of a dozen things. All I did was list Scott in a list of people who complained about Said to me, which, to my memory, happened and I stand behind and I would say the same thing again (though Scott not remembering makes me more hesitant to say it, since that is evidence that I am misremembering, but that isn’t really any kind of process level update).
Thanks, and I appreciate it, but unfortunately, this does not fully resolve my concerns about the degree to which you are trustworthy. Let me explain—and thanks for your patience. (I thought the present comment would benefit from some focused, cool-headed care and attention, which it took me some days to get around to.)
How I’m Thinking About Discouragement Claims
Indeed, I didn’t interpret it that way; I agree that it’s possible to be discouraged but still use the site.
Is it? I think “discouraged from using the site in some non-trivial way” and “annoyed by” are different things, because a lot of annoyances are trivial. The question was expressing skepticism (which I share) that finding a commenter annoying would be a legitimately non-trivial barrier to participating; it’s normal and expected that not everyone on a public forum is going to be your best friend. [1]
I’m worried about a potential motte-and-bailey pattern where the reality in the motte is “Habryka has a vague memory that someone either made or agreed to some sort of negative-valence statement about Achmiz, at some time, in some context” and what gets reported in the bailey—without any details of what the person allegedly said—is that that person was discouraged from using the site by Achmiz specifically, such that they get cited as an example of “authors who find [a commenter’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”.
To be clear, I think we do have better examples of “authors who find [Achmiz’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, because we have direct statements from them in their own words (which I of course quoted in §III.2 of my post): for instance, Duncan Sabien (“It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically”), DirectedEvolution (“one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience”), and Lucas-Gloor-as-of-2023 [2] (“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”).
(All three of those users have posted comments within the last 70 days, so you can see I’m not using the “stopped posting on the site” criterion.)
I think it really matters that in these cases, we have the specific, first-party statements about discouragement and not just vague hearsay (that you remember the user making some sort of complaint, without telling us what the complaint was). If it’s not already obvious why I’m so distrustful of hearsay, see the next section.
How My Distrust Is Paying Rent in Anticipated Experiences
The issue is that my distrust of you keeps paying rent in anticipated experiences: I made better predictions because I distrusted you. (I’m writing about “trustworthiness” rather than “integrity” here, but I doubt that’s a crux. If necessary, see the section below on what I mean by “trustworthiness” in this context.)
Consider how your sequence of statements about Alexander would look to observers who don’t have access to your private memories and who believe that memories about what other people said can be unreliable. You were asked about “authors who find [a commenter’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, and responded with a list including Scott Alexander.
Even if there had been no grammatical ambiguity (and the comment had read “have complained along these lines” per your revision in the parent), I would have still been motivated to contact Alexander. I think that someone who trusted you would have predicted that I was wasting my time, that Alexander would corroborate your story by reporting that he had a negative firsthand impression of Achmiz. In fact, I wasn’t wasting my time: Alexander didn’t remember complaining and said he had “no direct opinion” on Achmiz. (He did say that he “deferred” to you about “what [you two] might have talked about in 2019″, but that’s not a corroboration.)
If there had been no grammatical error, I don’t think I would have used the phrase “false claims” (because it would have been clearer that you were only reporting what you remember being told, which isn’t directly contradicted by Alexander not remembering telling you that, because he could have forgotten), but I don’t think that would have changed the subsequent sequence of events very much; I still would have posted a comment in an accusatory register (whereas I wouldn’t have if Alexander had told me that he was discouraged by Achmiz).
In our actual timeline, you then clarified that “It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” but that you “were talking about what makes LW comment sections good or bad, and [Achmiz] was a commenter we discussed in that conversation in 2019 or so.”
I think that someone who trusted you would infer that you meant that Alexander had mentioned Achmiz’s name. Because I didn’t trust you, I noted in §III.2 of my post that “it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name, only that the ‘name came up’ and that Achmiz ‘was a commenter we discussed.’”
As it happened, my suspicion that Alexander did not name Achmiz at all seems to have been well-founded: in your 9 July comment above, you write that to the best of your knowledge, “Scott brought up Said, not by name but indirectly (referring to a specific commenter whose exact name he didn’t remember)” and only then did you “provide[ ] the name, which seemed to match.” (Seemed to match how? What did Alexander actually say, such that you could confidently infer who he meant?)
I notice a pattern in these events: twice I doubted the interpretation of your words that I think would come most naturally to someone who trusted you, and both times my distrust was vindicated (first by Alexander’s “no direct opinion”, then by your admission that you were the one who supplied Achmiz’s name, not Alexander): every time I’ve poked at the claim, it’s become less compelling as a justification for the ban. [3]
And after all that, I still don’t know what you’re alleging that Alexander said (which he has no memory of), only that you recall that there was some sort of “complaint”—and you’re still telling me (with respect to the claim about Alexander) [4] that you “would continue to write that same statement today.”
I hope you can see why this sort of behavior (where details that weaken the claim have to be extracted under adversarial questioning rather than volunteered up front) should (quantitatively) decrease people’s trust in you (such that they assign less credence when you make non-auditable claims on the basis of private evidence), even if every sentence you said permitted a true interpretation. (Because in the absence of someone distrustful and motivated enough to do the audit, the details would never surface, and people would have less accurate beliefs.) I think that a trustworthy speaker in this situation would be telling me that they wished the original 15 June 2025 comment had mentioned the “wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” part and that they were the one who supplied Achmiz’s name (such that Alexander turning out not to remember it would be less surprising to readers who trusted the original comment) and what they remembered Alexander having said more specifically than “complaints along these lines”. [5]
Appendix: What I Mean By “Trustworthiness” in This Context
If a speaker is trustworthy, then the beliefs I adopt when I interpret their words as being motivated by an intent to inform me should be approximately the same as the beliefs I would adopt after sending an auditor to check up on their claims. If someone is trustworthy, the auditor won’t predictably turn up counterevidence that lowers my credence in the beliefs the speaker is trying to get me to adopt (because a trustworthy speaker would have told me the counterevidence up front, without me needing to hire an auditor to get it).
Notably, this sense of “trustworthiness” is stronger than merely trusting the speaker to not tell explicit lies, because it’s possible for a speaker to induce false beliefs in a trusting audience while only using sentences that permit a true interpretation (as I wrote about in the Curated post “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think”): for example, by selectively presenting evidence that supports their preferred conclusion (as I wrote about in the Best of Less Wrong 2019 post “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists”). Furthermore, this sense of trustworthiness isn’t about the speaker’s subjective conscious intent, because I think behavior can be functionally optimized to mislead in the absence of such subjective conscious intent (as I wrote about in “Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle”).
I would even argue that not finding anyone annoying would be a red flag that the forum is suffering from the kind of failure mode I discuss in “Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information”. As an umeshism: if you don’t have any annoying critics, then you don’t have enough critics. For example, I’ve found some of gjm’s criticisms of my posts to be subjectively annoying, but for that very reason, I think it’s important that I’ve often replied to them (although not always due to time constraints). If I didn’t have strong replies to my most annoying critics (or worse, didn’t have any annoying critics at all), then I couldn’t be so confident that I’m right.
Gloor updated his comment in May 2024 to say that in the subsequent year and change, he “liked a couple of comments by Said and I don’t remember any particular ones that I thought exhibited the above pattern.”
If Alexander felt as Sabien did, that would be a big deal in the minds of a lot of stakeholders; if, as is actually the case, Alexander doesn’t remember the complaint he allegedly made about someone whose name he couldn’t remember, that’s barely anything.
I appreciate the statement that you would link Falkovich’s 2018 comment. I do consider the “some countervailing evidence” characterization a significant understatement (because the comment in Falkovich’s own words evidentially outweighs mere hearsay and is quite explicit in his support for Achmiz “bring[ing] a new flavor to the community” despite the previous impression of “disagreeableness [...] colored negatively in [his] mind”), but this is already a very long comment deep into a very long discussion and it’s not worth spending any more wordcount on this.
I furthermore maintain that a trustworthy speaker wouldn’t suppress visibility of audits of the evidence for their claims on the grounds that it would incentivize them to spend time replying, “which [they] do not want to do”, as you did when you delisted Sting’s question post in contradiction of your claim in the OP that users can “make a post about how you disagree with some decision we made”, as I discuss in §VI.4.
A quick response:
IDK man it’s really not complicated. We were discussing experiences with the LW comment section. Scott said some generic things that have historically discouraged him, plus some vague references to one or two specific commenters. One of them seemed to me to match Said, so I said “could it be the guy who goes by Said?” plus some context on who Said is, and he said (something like) “yes, that sounds right, or at least the profile you are describing matches my memory of some of the people I remember”.
This feels like a pretty normal interaction that is well-captured by the thing I said (namely that Scott complained about Said).
This is all a decade ago. I don’t really know what else you want me to do here, or have any idea about a different algorithm I should run by your lights. It’s even plausible me and Scott miscommunicated, or I am misremembering, or any of a dozen things. All I did was list Scott in a list of people who complained about Said to me, which, to my memory, happened and I stand behind and I would say the same thing again (though Scott not remembering makes me more hesitant to say it, since that is evidence that I am misremembering, but that isn’t really any kind of process level update).