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
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.