No, that’s not what I’m saying. Let me try again. I’m saying that that belief is contradicted by Falkovich’s October 2018 comment.
Look, you said the words:
if the thing Habryka claimed about Alexander and Falkovich was not true when I actually checked
And:
Habryka with Alexander and Falkovich’s statements, rather than apologizing for having made false claims about other people’s stances on Achmiz
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
The thing you link to that I said was that “these people complained about Said”. They have! You did try to check whether that happened and got some inconclusive evidence. Report your evidence as inconclusive on that claim. Don’t go around saying that I reported false evidence.
And this isn’t the first time you are doing this. A year ago in the previous thread on this you said “You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.”
I agree that this is compatible with you having had an earlier conversation with Falkovich in which he made some sort of complaint about Achmiz. If you think the wording in my post is unclear, I’m happy to consider suggested edits.
IMO you are pretty unambiguously claiming I am misreporting what people have said to me. Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy. Are you going to tell me this isn’t what this is about? I am responding to those statements.
Yes, whether those people at other times said contradictory things is relevant evidence for assessing whether I lied. But indeed, that is why I am repeatedly saying “you can see how Falkovich’s comment is complicated”. In the discussion of whether I am lying about what people have reported to me, Falkovich’s comment is if anything confirmation that he did at some point find Said, specifically, really annoying, and so it really shouldn’t be surprising that he reported such to me.
You are welcome and encouraged to evaluate whether I am lying to people. But please at least be clear and open to counter-evidence when you are doing that, and don’t retreat to the much weaker statement that I argued for a (by your lights) wrong conclusion. Clearly you are arguing here that I have misrepresented evidence and am an untrustworthy reporter of evidence. If you didn’t intend to say that, then I feel so confused about what we are doing here that and I recommend changing something drastic about your commenting style.
On my understanding of the meaning of that question, if someone is correctly named as an example of such an author, and I go ask them, “Did that commenter’s presence discourage you from posting on Less Wrong?”, I anticipate the experience that they’ll say “Yes.” (Here I’m making an assumption, which you seem to disagree with, that the author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them.)
I furthermore do not anticipate the experience of finding a comment by a correctly named example telling the commenter in question that their opinion of them has “flipped entirely to become positive” and encouraging them to “Do your own thing.” Even though the author is reporting that they used to have a negative opinion of the commenter at an earlier point in time (before it “flipped entirely to become positive”), that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
The reason I think those things are very different is because they’re very different in my own case, and I imagined that other people would be similar. I have some negative opinions (or one could as well use the word “complaints”) about lots of users of this website, but there’s no one I find so unpleasant that it’s enough to discourage me from posting on the website altogether. For example, I’ve complained about, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky (often, actually). If someone said, “Davis complained about Yudkowsky,” that would be a true claim. If someone said, “Davis finds Yudkowsky’s presence so unpleasant that it discourages him from using the website,” that would be a false claim. The claim would still be false even if someone erroneously thought the former implies the latter (and therefore wasn’t lying when they said it). I think it’s epistemically sloppy to collapse those two things (and that epistemically sloppy people are less trustworthy), even if epistemic sloppiness isn’t lying.
Regarding the assumption that an author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them, part of the reason that that seems like a reasonable assumption to me is that the central and uncontroversial case of an author finding Achmiz so unpleasant that it discourages them from using the website is Duncan Sabien, who is on the record saying as much. Sabien definitely remembers Achmiz, and has a direct negative opinion of him! I think it would be weird to put someone who says they have “no direct opinion” on Achmiz on the same list of discouraged authors as Sabien.
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
I see. In retrospect, I wish I had gone with “misleading claims” rather than “false claims.” (Or maybe better, asked a clarifying question, as Richard Ngo suggests.) When a typical reader of my words walks away with a wrong belief, then the thing I said was “misleading” (independently of my conscious intent), even if it might not have been unambiguously “false” (because there exists a construal of my words that would make them true: for example, because my understanding of the question I was being asked differed from how typical readers interpreted the question).
I regret my word choice—by which I mean: I think that this experience will make me more likely to think carefully about whether I should say “misleading” rather than “false” in analogous future situations.
Importantly, both “misleading claims” and “false claims” need not entail lying. If I tell people “Munich is in Russia”, then I made a false claim, because actually, Munich is in Germany. It doesn’t matter whether I thought I was telling the truth (for example, because I misremembered something I read). Claims about “false claims” are about the claim, not the speaker’s private intent. People who see me making that mistake should regard me as less trustworthy about geography.
Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy.
Yes, this whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which you are trustworthy. However—
whether I lied [...] the discussion of whether I am lying [...] evaluate whether I am lying to people
I think there are ways to be (somewhat, quantitatively, in a topic-dependent way) untrustworthy without consciously lying, but simply by being biased: for example, by overestimating the degree to which other people share your dislike of Achmiz and interpreting ambiguous statements from them in the light of that prior without being clear in your reports to others about the interpretive lens that you’re adding. (I’ve been writing about this kind of phenomenon for years.)
I think I’ve been very careful to not sloppily misuse the l-word. That’s why I made sure to explain above (and in my post) that “the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports” because “[w]hat matters is the likelihood ratio”. If it helps, think about a machine learning classifer rather than a human: if a classifer assigns positive labels to data points that are confirmed to be negative, that does make the classifier less trustworthy.
I don’t think I’m holding you to standards that I wouldn’t hold myself. If someone asked me, “Who dislikes Alice?” and I replied, “Bob dislikes Alice,” on the basis of my fuzzy memories of a conversation that I had with Bob seven years ago (in which Bob said something negative about someone whose name he didn’t know, and I supplied Alice’s name, which seemed to match the description Bob gave) and then Dave came to me and said, “You are making false claims; I talked to Bob, and he said he has no direct opinion of Alice”, I think I would be embarrassed! In addition to giving my side of the story about why I said what I did (about what I remembered about that conversation with Bob seven years ago), I think I would apologize for having replied to the literal question “Who dislikes Alice?” with the literal answer “Bob dislikes Alice” when Bob isn’t corroborating that. I think if I stood by my original answer and insisted I had done nothing wrong, people would be right to (quantitatively) distrust me more because of that!
Oh, maybe this is the whole problem with this issue? This is the sentence I wrote:
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
This is the sentence I am pretty sure I meant to write (and is as far as I can tell the only way to make the sentence work out grammatically):
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, [have complained along these lines] about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
It’s now been long enough that I am not 100% confident this is what I meant to write, but it’s certainly how I remember that thread.
That said, even granting that I had instead written something more like “My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on have been discouraged from posting on this site because of you, in-particular”, then I absolutely stand by that as well! “Being discouraged” from something does not mean “they have completely stopped the relevant behavior”.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”. I do not hear about the vast vast majority of things that cause people to be discouraged from posting on LW. By the time I hear about them it’s a much bigger deal than the vast majority of things in that class.
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, given that I myself was in the list, and I am of course still posting on the site!
I think upon rereading it’s plausible Said did intend to only refer to people who completely stopped posting on the site. I think I extended the category of person in a somewhat rude way, and I think that was not ideal. But I also think I did so in a way that was pretty obvious and not actually misleading, as again I included myself in the category which really feels like it makes it hard to interpret my statement that way. I also think the fact that Said asked Ben “(Are you one of them?)” clearly implies he is just talking about a general kind of “discouragement” since of course Ben has not been driven off site by Said.
Yeah, thinking more about this, I stand behind my initial reaction. The fact that Said asked Ben “Are you one of them” clearly implies Said is not talking about authors that were literally driven off the site, but just talking about authors who were generally (non-trivially) discouraged by posting on the site by Said. This makes this interpretation of yours seem highly tenuous:
that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
I think it’s quite clear from context that Said and Ben and I were talking about “authors discouraged by Said from posting on LW”. Not in a way that implies they completely stopped posting, but in a way that it played some non-trivial impediment, and I continue to think this true of everyone I listed, and this is of course a much lower bar than “complaining about a commenter”. By the time someone directly complains about a commenter the discouragement is quite intense.
I intended to report specific complaints that provide evidence of people being discouraged (in some non-trivial way), but did sure produce a non-grammatical sentence that made it sound more like I am making a statement of general fact about the net-discouragement of those people.
I do also stand behind that broader statement, and would find your responses frustrating and exaggerated and ungrounded even if I had intended to say that, and unambiguously done so. But, if I had understood your read of my sentence better, would have reacted with somewhat less frustration (because saying that someone is misleading about a statement of difficult interpretation in the presence of contravening evidence, even if that seems unsubstantiated, is still much less frustrating than having someone go around and say that you are lying about directly observable facts).
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.
In my model of the conversation you kept directly indicating that I was misreporting evidence, but I now see how my sentence was more ambiguous than I thought. That said, 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 (indeed, I continue to believe the same and would continue to write that same statement today, though in the case of Jacob would link to his 2018 comment as some countervailing evidence).
As an outsider to all of this, from my perspective I don’t know why you keep letting him bait you into continuing this argument. It doesn’t appear productive and it’s just dragging everyone through the mud as everyone tries to get the last word in?
I wrote a bit more here.
Look, you said the words:
And:
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
The thing you link to that I said was that “these people complained about Said”. They have! You did try to check whether that happened and got some inconclusive evidence. Report your evidence as inconclusive on that claim. Don’t go around saying that I reported false evidence.
And this isn’t the first time you are doing this. A year ago in the previous thread on this you said “You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.”
IMO you are pretty unambiguously claiming I am misreporting what people have said to me. Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy. Are you going to tell me this isn’t what this is about? I am responding to those statements.
Yes, whether those people at other times said contradictory things is relevant evidence for assessing whether I lied. But indeed, that is why I am repeatedly saying “you can see how Falkovich’s comment is complicated”. In the discussion of whether I am lying about what people have reported to me, Falkovich’s comment is if anything confirmation that he did at some point find Said, specifically, really annoying, and so it really shouldn’t be surprising that he reported such to me.
You are welcome and encouraged to evaluate whether I am lying to people. But please at least be clear and open to counter-evidence when you are doing that, and don’t retreat to the much weaker statement that I argued for a (by your lights) wrong conclusion. Clearly you are arguing here that I have misrepresented evidence and am an untrustworthy reporter of evidence. If you didn’t intend to say that, then I feel so confused about what we are doing here that and I recommend changing something drastic about your commenting style.
That’s not my understanding of what you were being asked. You were asked a question 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 you answered with a list of names.
On my understanding of the meaning of that question, if someone is correctly named as an example of such an author, and I go ask them, “Did that commenter’s presence discourage you from posting on Less Wrong?”, I anticipate the experience that they’ll say “Yes.” (Here I’m making an assumption, which you seem to disagree with, that the author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them.)
I furthermore do not anticipate the experience of finding a comment by a correctly named example telling the commenter in question that their opinion of them has “flipped entirely to become positive” and encouraging them to “Do your own thing.” Even though the author is reporting that they used to have a negative opinion of the commenter at an earlier point in time (before it “flipped entirely to become positive”), that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
The reason I think those things are very different is because they’re very different in my own case, and I imagined that other people would be similar. I have some negative opinions (or one could as well use the word “complaints”) about lots of users of this website, but there’s no one I find so unpleasant that it’s enough to discourage me from posting on the website altogether. For example, I’ve complained about, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky (often, actually). If someone said, “Davis complained about Yudkowsky,” that would be a true claim. If someone said, “Davis finds Yudkowsky’s presence so unpleasant that it discourages him from using the website,” that would be a false claim. The claim would still be false even if someone erroneously thought the former implies the latter (and therefore wasn’t lying when they said it). I think it’s epistemically sloppy to collapse those two things (and that epistemically sloppy people are less trustworthy), even if epistemic sloppiness isn’t lying.
Regarding the assumption that an author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them, part of the reason that that seems like a reasonable assumption to me is that the central and uncontroversial case of an author finding Achmiz so unpleasant that it discourages them from using the website is Duncan Sabien, who is on the record saying as much. Sabien definitely remembers Achmiz, and has a direct negative opinion of him! I think it would be weird to put someone who says they have “no direct opinion” on Achmiz on the same list of discouraged authors as Sabien.
I see. In retrospect, I wish I had gone with “misleading claims” rather than “false claims.” (Or maybe better, asked a clarifying question, as Richard Ngo suggests.) When a typical reader of my words walks away with a wrong belief, then the thing I said was “misleading” (independently of my conscious intent), even if it might not have been unambiguously “false” (because there exists a construal of my words that would make them true: for example, because my understanding of the question I was being asked differed from how typical readers interpreted the question).
I regret my word choice—by which I mean: I think that this experience will make me more likely to think carefully about whether I should say “misleading” rather than “false” in analogous future situations.
Importantly, both “misleading claims” and “false claims” need not entail lying. If I tell people “Munich is in Russia”, then I made a false claim, because actually, Munich is in Germany. It doesn’t matter whether I thought I was telling the truth (for example, because I misremembered something I read). Claims about “false claims” are about the claim, not the speaker’s private intent. People who see me making that mistake should regard me as less trustworthy about geography.
Yes, this whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which you are trustworthy. However—
I think there are ways to be (somewhat, quantitatively, in a topic-dependent way) untrustworthy without consciously lying, but simply by being biased: for example, by overestimating the degree to which other people share your dislike of Achmiz and interpreting ambiguous statements from them in the light of that prior without being clear in your reports to others about the interpretive lens that you’re adding. (I’ve been writing about this kind of phenomenon for years.)
I think I’ve been very careful to not sloppily misuse the l-word. That’s why I made sure to explain above (and in my post) that “the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports” because “[w]hat matters is the likelihood ratio”. If it helps, think about a machine learning classifer rather than a human: if a classifer assigns positive labels to data points that are confirmed to be negative, that does make the classifier less trustworthy.
I don’t think I’m holding you to standards that I wouldn’t hold myself. If someone asked me, “Who dislikes Alice?” and I replied, “Bob dislikes Alice,” on the basis of my fuzzy memories of a conversation that I had with Bob seven years ago (in which Bob said something negative about someone whose name he didn’t know, and I supplied Alice’s name, which seemed to match the description Bob gave) and then Dave came to me and said, “You are making false claims; I talked to Bob, and he said he has no direct opinion of Alice”, I think I would be embarrassed! In addition to giving my side of the story about why I said what I did (about what I remembered about that conversation with Bob seven years ago), I think I would apologize for having replied to the literal question “Who dislikes Alice?” with the literal answer “Bob dislikes Alice” when Bob isn’t corroborating that. I think if I stood by my original answer and insisted I had done nothing wrong, people would be right to (quantitatively) distrust me more because of that!
Oh, maybe this is the whole problem with this issue? This is the sentence I wrote:
This is the sentence I am pretty sure I meant to write (and is as far as I can tell the only way to make the sentence work out grammatically):
It’s now been long enough that I am not 100% confident this is what I meant to write, but it’s certainly how I remember that thread.
That said, even granting that I had instead written something more like “My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on have been discouraged from posting on this site because of you, in-particular”, then I absolutely stand by that as well! “Being discouraged” from something does not mean “they have completely stopped the relevant behavior”.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”. I do not hear about the vast vast majority of things that cause people to be discouraged from posting on LW. By the time I hear about them it’s a much bigger deal than the vast majority of things in that class.
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, given that I myself was in the list, and I am of course still posting on the site!
I think upon rereading it’s plausible Said did intend to only refer to people who completely stopped posting on the site. I think I extended the category of person in a somewhat rude way, and I think that was not ideal. But I also think I did so in a way that was pretty obvious and not actually misleading, as again I included myself in the category which really feels like it makes it hard to interpret my statement that way. I also think the fact that Said asked Ben “(Are you one of them?)” clearly implies he is just talking about a general kind of “discouragement” since of course Ben has not been driven off site by Said.
Yeah, thinking more about this, I stand behind my initial reaction. The fact that Said asked Ben “Are you one of them” clearly implies Said is not talking about authors that were literally driven off the site, but just talking about authors who were generally (non-trivially) discouraged by posting on the site by Said. This makes this interpretation of yours seem highly tenuous:
I think it’s quite clear from context that Said and Ben and I were talking about “authors discouraged by Said from posting on LW”. Not in a way that implies they completely stopped posting, but in a way that it played some non-trivial impediment, and I continue to think this true of everyone I listed, and this is of course a much lower bar than “complaining about a commenter”. By the time someone directly complains about a commenter the discouragement is quite intense.
I intended to report specific complaints that provide evidence of people being discouraged (in some non-trivial way), but did sure produce a non-grammatical sentence that made it sound more like I am making a statement of general fact about the net-discouragement of those people.
I do also stand behind that broader statement, and would find your responses frustrating and exaggerated and ungrounded even if I had intended to say that, and unambiguously done so. But, if I had understood your read of my sentence better, would have reacted with somewhat less frustration (because saying that someone is misleading about a statement of difficult interpretation in the presence of contravening evidence, even if that seems unsubstantiated, is still much less frustrating than having someone go around and say that you are lying about directly observable facts).
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.
In my model of the conversation you kept directly indicating that I was misreporting evidence, but I now see how my sentence was more ambiguous than I thought. That said, 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 (indeed, I continue to believe the same and would continue to write that same statement today, though in the case of Jacob would link to his 2018 comment as some countervailing evidence).
As an outsider to all of this, from my perspective I don’t know why you keep letting him bait you into continuing this argument. It doesn’t appear productive and it’s just dragging everyone through the mud as everyone tries to get the last word in?