Comment on “Banning Said Achmiz”

[Zack_M_Davis]

I. Prologue

“If I Can’t Explain It to Said Achmiz, I Probably Don’t Understand It”

This post isn’t really about him, but I’d like to begin with a tribute to my friend Said Achmiz, the wisest person I know.

The choice of adjective is deliberately chosen as term of art. Achmiz is not the most quick-witted, nor the most knowledgable, nor the most creative, nor the most savvy. I say wise because the nature of his peculiar talent is the same one ascribed to Socrates: he knows what he doesn’t know.

Most people don’t. At least, I don’t. All too often, when asked, “Do you get what I’m saying?”, I reply, “I think so,” with perfect sincerity, only realizing later that I was lying—that I could not have paraphrased my interlocutor’s ideas, let alone explained where I agreed or disagreed with them. In retrospect (and only in retrospect), it’s clear that I didn’t want to disrupt the harmonious give-and-take flow of social exchange, that I feared being seen as foolish or obstinate for having the temerity to say, “No, I don’t understand”—and to continue standing by that No should understanding not be forthcoming.

The unique genius of Achmiz is simply that he’s not afraid to be seen as foolish or obstinate. If he doesn’t understand how you’re using a term, he’ll ask for a definition. If he doesn’t see how to apply your abstract claim, he’ll ask for an example. If your offered definition or example doesn’t make sense to him, he’ll say so. Bluffing doesn’t work on him.

Occasionally it strikes me as a little odd when Said asks about some detail that I think he should have been able to fill in by himself, but it’s no trouble: if I can spare the time (and it’s worth it), I’m usually happy to type up the requested additional explanation. And if I can spare the time but can’t come up with an explanation that will satisfy him, that’s an alarming warning sign that my grasp of the topic wasn’t as firm as I thought: I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

A few years ago, I was disappointed when the conclusion of a post that I had labored over for months didn’t land in the comment section the way I wanted it to: what my words had meant in my head, wasn’t the same as what the commenters took them to mean.

To help me figure out how to revise it, I emailed Said, explaining what I meant. He had some criticisms. I proposed a rewrite. He said the rewrite was still confusing. I wrote some additional explanation, particularly of an analogy in the passage in question which I was quite fond of. Said was unmoved and pointed out some relevant disanalogies. I cut the analogy from the rewrite entirely, which met with Said’s tentative approval.

The revised passage is less engaging writing than the original. (It was a really clever analogy.) But it’s clear, and for that I have Said to thank—not just for his generosity with his time, but for his steadfastness. A lot of people in that situation wouldn’t have stuck to their position over such a long back-and-forth (and back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth): their acute social perception would have noticed that I was fond of the analogy and “mercifully” told me what I wanted to hear—at the cost of making the post worse. ^[1] In contrast, Said, no less socially perceptive, has the strength of will to not make sociality his master. The plea of a friend and the threat of an enemy are equally ineffective at budging him from calling it as he sees it.

I’ve been blessed with many friends and collaborators in this life, each with their own unique skillset. Some of them are prolifically generative, gushing with a dozen theories and metaphors and frames at the slightest prompt. Some of them know extremely advanced mathematics and can prove in minutes what would take me hours just to understand the theorem statement. Some of them are kind and compassionate, ready to lend a sympathetic ear to anyone when the world’s cruelties seem too much to bear.

Said is none of these things. But when what I need is a critic’s discrimination—when I’m worried that I might be fooling myself via lack of rigor—I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have by my side. If I can’t explain it to Said Achmiz, I probably don’t understand it.

II. The Ban Contradicts Less Wrong’s Stated Values

An Inversion of Values

Less Wrong chief moderator Oliver Habryka begins what I can only describe as an astonishing document by contrasting two frequently voiced perspectives on the culture of Less Wrong.

On the one hand, it is said that “LessWrong is a place that really forces you to get your arguments together”, that its straight-shooting culture is “one of the things that makes it one of the most valuable forums on the internet.”

On the other hand, it is said that using the website “seems really unrewarding” because:

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.

Habryka opines that “both of these perspectives are right.”

I would go further. It’s not just that both of these perspectives are right. It’s that you can’t have one without the other. By what means can a web forum “really force you to get your arguments together”?

There is only one means: by commenters pointing out all the places where a post says something wrong—anything wrong. If the error wasn’t “load-bearing for your argument”, it’s still worth pointing out in the comment section, for the benefit of readers who might otherwise be deceived. (We’re not going to run out of paper.) It doesn’t matter if it “isn’t something you consider particularly important.” If it’s so unimportant that you don’t even want to receive corrections, then what was it doing in the post?

If the “discussion doesn’t illuminate what you are trying to communicate,” it’s worth asking: why is that? If it were because the commenters were for some perverse reason pretending en masse to not understand your clear and correct explanations, then that would be bad. But if it’s because your explanations are not, in fact, clear and correct, then disappointment was inevitable: commenters can’t illuminate what you’re trying to communicate if you didn’t successfully communicate it.

As a perennial Less Wrong author of over 100 posts—including some nine Curated posts, including four voted Best of Less Wrong in 2019 (#9), 2021 (#31), 2023 (#14), and 2024 (#33)—I have the experience to testify on this matter. Yes, it is disappointing when a post doesn’t land in the comment section the way I wanted it to, but it’s obviously not because commenters are culpably withholding their illumination of my precious ideas. It’s because writing about ideas is hard and I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I’m wrong, sometimes I’m confused, sometimes I don’t write clearly—and it shows in the comment section and the karma score. I certainly prefer it when the discussion illuminates what I was trying to communicate, but the only real way to accomplish that is by me writing something that commenters as individuals find illuminating—and there’s always the possibility of that not happening when people are being honest, rather than colluding to flatter the author’s ego. “Yes, and—” requires the possibility of “No, because—”.

(As for “implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas”, I suppose it’s true that when someone rejects an idea, that creates a logical implication that the rejecter thinks they’re more rational than the idea-proposer on that topic. It’s a weirdly petty implication to focus on, though. Who cares?)

What is most striking about the second perspective’s list of reasons that critical commenters make Less Wrong unrewarding to interact with is what it does not say.

It doesn’t say the commenters are wrong! If the second perspective had claimed that commenters mischaracterize posts (rather than merely criticizing non-”load-bearing” aspects of the posts or failing to “illuminate what [authors] are trying to communicate”), that would be a serious problem that would warrant corrective actions by moderators. We can infer that bad arguments and strawmanning are not seen by user reports as a pervasive problem on Less Wrong. (If they were, the second perspective would have mentioned it.)

Thus, it would seem that the two complementary perspectives described by Habryka are describing a success story of a vibrant intellectual forum with a culture of excellence that cares fanatically about getting things right via the power of vigorous and rigorous discussion. It’s true that posting on Less Wrong can be “unrewarding”—but that’s because the rewards are real and therefore have to be earned.

Habryka states that “few people have done as much to shape the culture of LessWrong” than Said Achmiz, and in the comments guesses that a survey would place Achmiz around #20 on a list of such figures (and that “this would be an underestimate of [Achmiz’s] effect on the culture”).

At this point, some inattentive readers who missed the title of Habryka’s post might be under the impression that Achmiz is being honored with some kind of award. (Why else would Habryka be writing a post describing what’s good about the website’s culture, and then naming Achmiz as a cornerstone of that culture? What else would the post be announcing?)

Upon realizing that the post is announcing a ban of Achmiz, such a reader is at a loss at how to react: the decision would seem to represent a complete inversion of the stated values that purportedly justify it. The fact that Habryka has written a 9000-word post explaining his reasoning offers hope that some clarification will be provided, but upon reading it, the mystery only deepens. It’s hard to even know where to begin. The intimidating task of dissecting the post’s errors and omissions is one that would rightly demand the talents of a discriminating critic of the highest order, someone like …

Well, I guess that’s my job now.

If “Every Individual Owns Their Own Judgment of You”, Then the Ban Rationale Is Untenable

Habryka goes on to articulate two alleged failure modes of online communities. In the sneer attractor, people tear others down with nonspecific criticism; in the LinkedIn attractor, people build each other up with nonspecific praise. Habryka goes on to say that many users see Achmiz as serving a vital function of preventing Less Wrong from falling into the LinkedIn attractor. He identifies Achmiz as the “bearer of a flag” which is worth quoting in full:

“Just because you are hurt by, and anxious about others criticizing you or your ideas, doesn’t mean we are going to accommodate you. It is the responsibility of your audience to determine what they think of you and your contributions.

You do not own your reputation. Every individual owns their own judgment of you.

You can shape it by doing good or bad things, but you do not get to shape it by preventing me and others from openly discussing you and your contributions.”

Well spoken! Habryka reports that he “really care[s] about this flag too” and that “much of the decisions [he has] made around LessWrong have been to foster a culture that understands and rallies behind this flag.” He expresses hope that his acknowledgement of the risks of LinkedIn-like sycophancy will give supporters of the culture of excellence “a bit more trust that [he is] tracking some things they care about.”

However, it is difficult to reconcile this claim with the remainder of the post, which persistently construes intellectually substantive criticism as “punishments” or as claims to have “violated some social norm”, and ultimately announces a ban of Achmiz on the grounds that the judgments Achmiz expresses have deleterious social effects (bringing the site closer to the alleged sneer attractor). ^[2] The entire point of the post is to announce that the moderators are preventing Achmiz from openly discussing Less Wrong authors and their contributions!

After a discussion of Achmiz’s alleged commenting patterns, Habryka speculates that users will “ultimately give up feeling dejected and like a lot of people on LessWrong hate you.” Setting aside the obvious irrationality of this inference—there’s no good reason to think that one user’s persistent questioning of your ideas implies that “a lot” of people “hate” you—it’s hard to see the relevance given Habryka’s supposed fostering of a culture that understands and rallies behind the aforementioned flag. Habryka just told us 900 words earlier that just because you’re anxious about others criticizing you or your ideas doesn’t mean the website is going to accommodate you! Anyone can scroll up and read it. And yet when people are hurt by and anxious about Said Achmiz in particular criticizing their ideas, the response is to ban Achmiz? The disconnect is glaring.

The Ban Reneges on LessWrong 2.0′s Single Locus of Discussion Mandate and Archipelago Doctrine

In the ban announcement, Habryka writes that “the foundation of why [he] feel[s] comfortable governing LessWrong with relatively few checks and balances” is because people have the option of just not using the site: “[t]here are many other places on the internet to read interesting ideas, to discuss with others, to participate in a community,” he writes.

In contrast, in September 2017, Habryka’s “LW 2.0 Strategic Overview” cited Anna Salamon’s “On the Importance of Less Wrong, or Another Single Conversational Locus” as something “very important to [him].” Habryka quotes Salamon (bolding mine):

1. One feature that is pretty helpful here, is if we somehow maintain a single “conversation”, rather than a bunch of people separately having thoughts and sometimes taking inspiration from one another. By “a conversation”, I mean a space where people can e.g. reply to one another; rely on shared jargon/​shorthand/​concepts; build on arguments that have been established in common as probably-valid; point out apparent errors and then have that pointing-out be actually taken into account or else replied-to).

2. One feature that really helps things be “a conversation” in this way, is if there is a single Schelling set of posts/​etc. that people (in the relevant community/​conversation) are supposed to read, and can be assumed to have read. Less Wrong used to be a such place; right now there is no such place; it seems to me highly desirable to form a new such place if we can.

3. We have lately ceased to have a “single conversation” in this way. Good content is still being produced across these communities, but there is no single locus of conversation, such that if you’re in a gathering of e.g. five aspiring rationalists, you can take for granted that of course everyone has read posts such-and-such. There is no one place you can post to, where, if enough people upvote your writing, people will reliably read and respond (rather than ignore), and where others will call them out if they later post reasoning that ignores your evidence. Without such a locus, it is hard for conversation to build in the correct way. (And hard for it to turn into arguments and replies, rather than a series of non sequiturs.)

That is, in Salamon’s telling, apparently endorsed by Habryka in 2017, the reason to reboot Less Wrong was not just to be a place on the internet to read interesting ideas, discuss with others, or participate in a community, but specifically to reverse the “diaspora” that occurred when the original implementation of the site fell into disrepair—to be the place to read interesting ideas building off the legacy of the Sequences.

Reversing a diaspora only works if the diverse elements of the diaspora are allowed to participate in the repatriation. For example, the State of Israel’s legitimacy as a homeland for the Jewish people depends on its including all Jews as the concept has been historically and publicly understood. If a faction of Ashkenazi Jews seized power and arbitrarily decided that Sephardic Jews can’t be Israeli, that would seriously undermine the foundations of why many people supported the Zionist project in the first place. ^[3]

Said Achmiz and his collaborators (such as the present author) are undisputedly part of the rationalist tradition. Anyone reading a collection of Achmiz’s best comments would recognize them as a central example of high-quality rationalist thought, even if they happened to disagree with any given comment. In 2023, Less Wrong moderator Ben Pace wrote, and moderator Raymond Arnold concurred, that “Said is the person independent of MIRI (including Vaniver) and Lightcone who contributes the most counterfactual bits to the sequences and LW still being alive in the world.” In 2023, Arnold told me that “there’s an important spirit of early LessWrong that [I] keep alive[.]” In fact, we were here first: as far as I can tell, Achmiz and I were part of the community before any of the current moderators. ^[4]

The relevance of seniority is that, insofar as Habryka agrees that Less Wrong is “less straightforwardly [his] personal fiefdom” because he “inherited what [he] consider[s] a really important cultural institution,” one would expect him to agree that we’re rationalists just as much as he is—that the cultural institution he’s inherited stewardship over was supposed to serve us just as much as people who dislike our writing styles, much as Israel is supposed to be a home for all Jews, even if some Ashkenazi find Sephardic accents annoying. As such, insofar as some people would prefer a Said Achmiz–free Less Wrong experience, one would expect that desire to be met by tools like the existing functionality for authors to ban users from their own posts, which have the great boon of impartiality ^[5] —not by kicking us off the website we’ve been using for seventeen years. ^[6] It is my firm belief that it’s possible to share a website with people you disagree with.

The moderation team also used to believe in sharing the website, in the form of an “archipelago” model. It would appear that that era is over. ^[7] In his self-report, Habryka claims to “care about archipelagos” and that he thinks it’s “hard and bad to try to have centralized control about culture”, but when I look at his behavior—his comments (four days later, in the same thread!) about the need for “culture to be driven by someone with taste, who trusts their own judgments on matters of culture”, his site-wide ban of Achmiz despite the existence of user-level ban functionality as a sufficient and less intrusive remedy, ^[8] the way he casually threatened banning a user for disagreeing with him—I find the disavowal of centralized control-seeking hard to credit.

One could argue that it’s ungrateful nonsense to complain about influence someone obtains via administering a website that they created. The LessWrong 2.0 team led by Habryka built and maintains the current version of the website (albeit seeded with the database of posts and comments from its predecessor), and it was a lot of hard work at great personal expense: of course they’re going to run it as they see fit. This “our website, our rules” view may have merit, but it’s important to notice that it’s a different view than the “inherited [...] a really important cultural institution” view. This section is only arguing that the Achmiz ban is unjustified with respect to the cultural institution view, which may not hold—but if it doesn’t, it would be dishonest to motte-and-bailey between the two views, claiming when convenient that LessWrong 2.0 is the fulfillment of Salamon’s call for a single locus of discussion for the rationalist community, but insisting when challenged that it’s just Habryka’s personally curated forum, one of many in the diaspora. ^[9]

In an insightful post about the perils of delegation, Habryka warns that when you delegate work to someone, that puts them in “a position of leverage over you and the rest of the organization.” In retrospect, this would appear to be the devil’s bargain the community made when it voted to hand the lesswrong.com domain name to the LessWrong 2.0 reboot. We got a shiny new website as a single locus of discussion—at the cost of the website maintainers usurping cultural authority on the basis of database creds rather than persuasive writing. Was the trade worth it, or would it have better to accept the diaspora as a fait accompli and convert lesswrong.com into a static archive? Given that I’m still here, I can’t say with a straight face that it would have been better for LessWrong 2.0 never to have existed. What I can say is that policy debates should not appear one-sided.

III. The Case for the Ban Rests on Misrepresentations

Misrepresentations in Habryka’s Analysis of Achmiz’s Comments

Habryka presents “a breakdown of the core dynamics that make comment threads with Said rarely worth it” with examples.

As an example of a comment that “read[s] like an implicit claim that you have violated some social norm [...] for which you deserve to be punished (though this will not be said explicitly), or if not that, make you look negligent by not answering an innocuous open-seeming question”, Habryka presents a 2018 comment by Achmiz on Benjamin Hoffman’s “Zetetic Explanation”. In the comment, Achmiz juxtaposes quotes of Hoffman criticizing conventional pedagogy as both lacking “connection to the ordinary means by which [students] navigate their lives” and failing to resemble “the sorts of skills used in time-travel or Robinson Crusoe stories.” Achmiz then comments, “Hm.”

It’s expressed rather elliptically, but what Achmiz is doing with this comment (as he clarified in followup discussion) is implying that Hoffman is in error to present portrayals of skill in fantasy fiction as representative of good holistic pedagogy of real-world skills. Whether you agree or disagree, this is clearly an on-topic, intellectually substantive contribution. ^[10] The only way I can read it as “an implicit claim that [Hoffman] violated some social norm” “for which he deserves to be punished” is if there’s a social norm against making posts that can be criticized, for which the punishment is criticism—but that would be absurd and contrary to the nature of a discussion forum. Arguing is not a punishment!

Habryka cites another response from Achmiz to Hoffman as an instance of Achmiz “dismiss[ing] your response as being totally insufficient, confused, or proving the very point he was trying to make”. This is a fair description—but Habryka doesn’t address whether the dismissal is justified! Is it not conceivable that someone might write a response that’s insufficient, confused, or proving the very point the critic was trying to make?

In the comment in question, Achmiz is disputing Hoffman’s claim that the explanation of yeast in the post was adequate for being “competent to interact with the thing, and with its precursors, or at least have an idea of how you’d learn to do so.” ^[11] When Hoffman claimed the post empowers the reader to make hard cider from apples, Achmiz disputed this by pointing to cider-making instructions that claim that naïve methods produce poor results, which Habryka cites as Achmiz “continu[ing] to make insinuations that your failure to respond properly validates whatever judgment he is invoking”—again without addressing the merits of Achmiz’s claim.

But the merits matter! If someone believes that Achmiz is applying the wrong standard when he expects that an explanation of yeast adequate to make one competent at interacting with it should allow one to make good bread or cider, that could at least be argued, but Habryka shows no interest in arguing it. He concludes his summary of alleged commenting dynamics by noting that when other commenters ask by what standard Achmiz is invoking a negative judgment, Achmiz explains that he’s talking on the object-level and not trying to assign someone low status.

But the comments about the pedagogy of yeast are in fact on the object level about the pedagogy of yeast. One could perhaps infer that when Achmiz doesn’t find an interlocutor’s replies to be satisfactory, Achmiz is privately making a negative character judgment about the interlocutor as a person, even if Achmiz didn’t say that. Such an inference might well be correct, but it’s hard to see why it’s a moderation issue. On a discussion forum that attempts to grapple with difficult topics at the frontiers of human knowledge, it should not be unusual for commenters to disagree with an author in a multi-comment exchange and not be convinced by the author’s replies. (Bayesian reasoners would never agree to disagree, but humans are known to be far from the theoretical ideal.) Part of disagreeing is not finding the other’s replies adequate. (If you did find them adequate, that would resolve the disagreement.) Punishing Achmiz and only Achmiz for frequently finding authors’ replies insufficient (because people suspect, rightly or wrongly, that Achmiz is privately judging them) would be incoherent, and being coherent about it would amount to plunging full speed into the LinkedIn attractor. Avoiding the possibility that strangers on the internet might be judging you is simply not a realistic or desirable goal for a public discussion forum.

Habryka also claims (in the previous section) that as far as he can tell, Achmiz “refuse[d] to do much cognitive labor in the rest of the thread” on “Zetetic Explanation”, but this is at odds with Habryka’s own comment in that thread praising a 750-word comment from Achmiz as “a great comment” and saying that Habryka “would maybe like to see this broken out into its own post.” Presumably one could not write such a comment while “refus[ing] to do much cognitive labor”! The discrepancy is again glaring.

Misrepresentations in Habryka’s Claims of Alleged Author Complaints About Achmiz

Footnote 1 of the ban announcement claims that “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here.” This is a surprising claim. ^[12] Is it true? In some sense, it depends on what’s meant by “many” and “top”, but we can investigate what is known about author sentiments towards Achmiz without immediately pinning down an operationalization.

We do have some direct testimony from some authors. Most prominently, Duncan Sabien (14K+ karma, 16 Curated posts) reported in 2023 that he withheld a post from Less Wrong because of Achmiz, and has written a post denouncing Achmiz’s ^[13] commenting style as amounting to “the willful destruction of gardens of collaborative inquiry.” Elizabeth van Nostrand (22.8K karma, 12 Curated posts) said she thought “it would be good if Said left LessWrong.” Trinley Goldenberg (5.7K karma, 2 Curated posts) reported “a strong sense of sneer on mine and others[’] posts that I find unpleasant” and thanked the moderators for the ban. DirectedEvolution (12.5K karma, 144 total posts, zero Curated) wrote in 2023 that Achmiz is “one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience”—but, notably, that “personally I do not favor banning people sitewide for making me feel uncomfortable.” Lucas Gloor (4K karma, 5 total posts, zero Curated) wrote in 2023 that Achmiz’s questions are “one of the most off-putting things [he] associate[s] with LW”—but, notably, that the user-level ban functionality “seems like a good solution to [him]”, and in 2024 added that in the subsequent year he had liked several of Achmiz’s comments and didn’t remember any that bothered him.

Beyond direct testimony from authors, we have reports from the mod team about private complaints—but, troublingly, as I explain below, previous investigation has shown such reports to be false in their claims about the opinions of at least two authors, which casts some doubt on their overall veracity.

In a June 2025 moderation discussion, Achmiz expressed doubt that authors “capable of making useful contributions to the site” would be discouraged from using the site by the presence of a commenter deemed “‘unpleasant’” despite not posting “vulgarity, or personal insults, or anything bad or crazy like that.” Achmiz asked for examples of such discouraged authors.

Habryka gave a list of allegedly discouraged authors (bolding added):

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.

I reached out to Scott Alexander via Discord in July 2025 to ask if he had “any specific feelings about Said Achmiz and whether he should be allowed to post on Less Wrong.” Alexander issued this statement:

I have no direct opinion on him. I have heard his name as someone who’s very confrontational, and I agree that this can make a website less pleasant, but I can’t remember having any personal experience.

In response to being presented with Alexander’s statement contradicting his claim about Alexander’s opinion, Habryka replied:

I talked with Scott about LW moderation a long time ago (my guess is around 2019) and Said’s name came up then. My guess is he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention, but we were talking about what makes LW comment sections good or bad, and he was a commenter we discussed in that conversation in 2019 or so.

I followed up with Alexander via Discord in May 2026. Alexander said, “I defer to Oli about what we might have talked about in 2019.” When asked what defer to meant in that context, Alexander said, “I don’t remember and basically trust Oli.”

Notably, this is not a corroboration of Habryka’s original claim that Achmiz “in particular” discouraged Alexander from using Less Wrong: if Achmiz’s comments were so noxious as to drive Alexander off the website, one would have expected Alexander to have at least some memory of it. Indeed, 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.” Given that neither party can recall the details of a conversation that might have happened in 2019 or possibly some other year, which participant is more likely to have first brought up Achmiz: the one who now has “no direct opinion” on Achmiz, or the one who writes 1800-word comments about how he “do[es] just think [it’s] false” that Achmiz “does not carry enmity in his heart” “after almost a decade of thinking about it on and off”?

Separately, the inclusion of Jacob Falkovich in the list of authors allegedly discouraged by Achmiz is contradicted by an October 2018 comment by Falkovich (bolding added):

Said, I hope [you] take [the] comment below as positive, because that is how I mean it. I am trying to honestly communicate my own experience, not pass judgment. This is 100% sincere and unironic.

Said, I have seen a lot of your comments on LW, on my posts and the posts of others. They are, by my standards, high on criticism and low on niceness. I personally formed an impression of you as disagreeable. Even though I have argued myself that LW should optimize for honesty over niceness, still the impression of you disagreeableness was colored negatively in my mind.

But now that you’ve stated that you’re disagreeable on purpose, the negative [a]ffect flipped entirely to become positive. Instead of you being disagreeable by accident, it’s intentional. I like diversity, and I support people who are on a mission to bring a new flavor to the community. Knowing this also makes it easier to take criticism from you—it’s not that you hate me or what I write, it’s just that you don’t care if someone thinks you hate them and their writing. The Bayesian update in the two cases is very different!

This isn’t to say that Kaj is wrong in being more cautious, or that you are wrong in not being cautious. Do your own thing, and own it.

In response to being presented with Falkovich’s comment contradicting his claim about Falkovich’s opinion, Habryka replied:

I think you can clearly see how the Jacob Falkovich one is complicated. He basically says “I used to be frustrated by you, but this thing made that a lot better”. I don’t remember the exact time I talked to Jacob about it, but it had come up sometime some context where we discussed LW comment sections. It’s plausible to me it was before he made this comment, though it would be a bit surprising to me, since that’s pretty early into LW’s history. ^[14]

In fact, I do not see how the Jacob Falkovich one is “clearly” complicated. Indeed, I dispute Habryka’s characterization of what Falkovich “basically says”: it is tendentious to paraphrase “negative [...] flipped entirely to become positive” as “made that a lot better.” The latter is compatible with Habryka’s original claim that Falkovich is discouraged from using the website by Achmiz, but the former directly contradicts it: if something that’s bothering you is “made [...] a lot better”, the implication is that it’s still bothering you a little bit (although not as much as before); if your attitude towards something “become[s] positive”, that implies that it’s not bothering you.

The significance of Alexander and Falkovich turning out (in their own accounts) not to have been discouraged by Achmiz extends beyond removing them from our list of discouraged authors. It also calls into question the veracity of Habryka’s reports of discouraged authors: if two of the names Habryka gave as examples turned out to be non-examples when checked, ^[15] that, along with other peculiarities in Habryka’s claims, ^[16] suggests that Habryka’s reports do not reliably distinguish examples from non-examples and therefore that his claim that there exist unnamed “dozens of others” cannot be taken as reliable. ^[17]

Overall, while it’s clear that some users have some negative sentiment about Achmiz (as we can see from the testimony from Sabien, van Nostrand, Goldenberg, DirectedEvolution, and Gloor quoted above), the support for the more specific and much stronger claim that “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here” seems questionable: the only unambiguous example I’m aware of is Sabien.

Habryka claims that “no author complaints were load-bearing for this banning decision” and that he “would make the same decision even if no prominent authors had complained” because he “had much more than enough direct engagement with Said, and seen many more than enough comments of [Achmiz’s] on [his] own to understand the consequences of [Achmiz’s] commenting style first-hand.” That’s why the announcement doesn’t emphasize author complaints and “instead give[s] detailed models for 10,000+ words[.]”

This position has strange tensions which highlight the dangers of declaring part of a post to be exempt from productive criticism on the grounds of being allegedly “non-load-bearing.” Models—especially “detailed models”—are supposed to make predictions! If your model says that the consequences of Achmiz’s commenting style are site-threateningly bad, one would naïvely expect that model to predict that prominent authors would complain—such that if authors hadn’t complained, or if reports of author complaints turned out to be bogus, that would be probabilistic evidence against the model. If evidence from user complaints is excluded, it’s hard to see what consequences of Achmiz’s comments Habryka could have observed “first-hand”, other than his own personal feelings towards Achmiz.

Misrepresentations in Habryka’s Characterization of Achmiz on Obligations to Reply

Habryka claims that “Said himself does not think [ignoring his comments is] a valid option”, citing a 2020 comment by Achmiz on obligations to reply to comments asking for definitions or examples, but it’s not clear what this adds to the case against users simply banning Achmiz from their own posts: it’s weird to cite Achmiz’s stance on obligations to reply to support the claim that ignoring him is not an option given that you don’t agree with him about obligations to reply.

Moreover, quoting the 2020 comment out of context conveys a mistaken impression of Achmiz’s views, which Achmiz clarified in a subsequent comment the same day. ^[18] In the clarifying comment from the 2020 thread, Achmiz states, “I’m not saying that there’s a specific obligation for a post author to post a reply comment, using the Less Wrong forum software, directly to any given comment.” Rather, Achmiz explains, the need for a clarifying question to be answered could be met in any number of other ways, such as being addressed in future work by the author, or by someone else other than the author answering the question or linking to an answer elsewhere. The point is not to impose a legalistic burden on the author, but for the question to actually get answered. The “obligation” to reply is meant in the same sense that one has an “obligation” to provide evidence, cite sources, or correct factual errors: it derives its normative force from its truth-tracking function, not mere social convention. ^[19]

The normativity of truth-tracking is likewise key to understanding the motivation for the 2020 comment’s controversial claim that an author who ignores simple requests for clarification “should be interpreted as ignorant.” To be sure, there are any number of reasons why an author might not engage with a question other than being unable to answer it (maybe it wasn’t worth their time, maybe they missed the notification, maybe they died, &c.), but the relative likelihood of the “can’t answer” and “could answer if they wanted to” hypotheses as an explanation for the observed non-response represents predictions about the real world and can’t be changed on a whim. A norm that forbid commenters from interpreting the absence of an answer as probabilistic evidence of inability to answer would be requiring them to believe something false. ^[20]

The enduring misunderstanding of Achmiz’s position may owe in part to Achmiz’s 2020 comments taking it as an implied premise that the question that demands an answer is a good or legitimate one. In a 2023 moderation discussion, Achmiz clarified that he doesn’t believe all comments must be answered regardless of merit:

I think that people should feel comfortable ignoring and/​or downvoting anyone’s comments if they don’t think engagement will be productive! Certainly I should not be any sort of exception to this. (Why in the world would I be? Of course you should engage only if you have some expectation that engaging will be productive, and not otherwise!)

If I write a comment and you think it is a bad comment (useless, obviously wrong, etc.), by all means downvote and ignore. Why not? And if I write another comment that says “you have an obligation to reply!”—I wouldn’t say that, because I don’t think that, but let’s say that I did—downvote and ignore that comment, too! Do this no matter who the commenter is!

The reason this 2023 comment is compatible with the controversial 2020 remarks is because Achmiz believes that (what he considers) simple requests for definitions and examples are productive, even if not all comments are productive. According to this view, a request for examples of a phenomenon should not be hard to satisfy if the phenomenon is real; a request for a definition of an niche term should not be hard to satisfy if term means anything. Ideally, the answers should have already been in the post; the fact that commenters have to ask is a manifestation of the post not being complete.

Elsewhere, Achmiz wrote in 2023 that “it’s not necessarily (and, indeed, not likely to be) worth your time to engage with all of your critics”, and in June 2025, proposed “ignore” functionality (which already exists on the third-party GreaterWrong reader) as an alternative to user bans. ^[21]

It is troubling that the announcement that Achmiz is being banned in part for his views on discourse norms mischaracterizes those views, despite clarifications in the weeks leading up to the ban: Achmiz explained his position to Habryka in June 2025 (linking to the clarifying followup comment in the 2020 thread), and I highlighted the 2023 “by all means downvote and ignore” comment in a July 2025 message to Less Wrong moderator Ben Pace.

IV. The Ban Was Unnecessary

User-Level Bans Are a Sufficient and Less Intrusive Remedy

Attempting to forestall the objection that people who don’t like Achmiz’s comments could simply ignore them, Habryka claims that ignoring Achmiz’s comments is “not usually a socially viable option.” However, since 2018, existing site functionality already permits users with 50 karma to ban commenters from their own Personal Blog posts, and users with 2000 karma to ban users from their own Frontpage posts. If, arguendo, a minority of authors have a legitimate interest in preventing Achmiz from commenting on their own posts, then those authors ^[22] could already get what they want using existing site functionality, and indeed, were already doing so: we’re told that 8 users had banned Achmiz from their posts. Why doesn’t that solve the problem without the need for a site-wide ban?

The ban announcement claims that the moderators have told Achmiz “to please let authors moderate as they desire”, but this is a curious usage of the word let, relative to how people think about blocking or banning functionality on other websites. Blocks work by the software preventing the blocked user from sending messages. The consent of the blocked user is neither required nor relevant nor expected. ^[23]

The complaint about not “let[ting] authors moderate” seems to not be about attempts to evade the ban (e.g., by creating sockpuppet accounts), which have not occurred, but simply that Achmiz’s comments elsewhere on the website (e.g., on his own shortform) may make users feel less comfortable banning him from their posts. Whether this constitutes not “let[ting] authors moderate” can’t be assessed based on authors’ feelings alone; the nature of the comments matters.

The offending comments seem to be that Achmiz has argued in moderation threads that the existence of the user-ban functionality enables authors to abuse moderation tools to suppress their critics, noted on his own shortform that he couldn’t add further replies to a discussion that he had already participated in before being banned, published on his own shortform a comment that had failed to post because he didn’t realize he had been banned, responded on his own shortform to a comment about him, and responded on his own shortform to a comment stating that the author “was honestly curious what you [Achmiz] could mean here”.

These are all reasonable comments. It makes sense for users of a website to have opinions about the features that the website supports—and the complaint that the ban feature enables suppression of criticism is just straightforwardly true (even if one might think that it has benefits that outweigh that cost). It makes sense to want to state for the record that one is no longer able to reply to a discussion that one had been participating in, lest someone infer the weakness of one’s position from one’s non-response. (Indeed, as we’ve seen, Habryka shares this concern deeply.) Having gone to the trouble of writing a comment and finding that it couldn’t be posted, it makes sense to want to post it somewhere, for the effort to have not been a complete waste. If other people are talking about you and your positions in a venue where you can’t make corrections (as contrasted to them silently ignoring your existence), it makes sense to want to post the corrections somewhere else.

If Achmiz were using his shortform to harass authors simply for not wanting to talk to him, that would be a matter for moderator concern, but as I’ve just detailed, the record doesn’t support that: every instance I can find of Achmiz supposedly not “let[tting] authors moderate as they desire” is a situation where a reasonable person would have an interest in speaking up. In the case where Achmiz scrutinized another user’s ban history, it was contextually relevant to the discussion of how the ban functionality is used in practice; when instructed by a moderator to stop, Achmiz complied.

The user ban functionality works to prevent authors from receiving unwanted comments on their own posts. It’s not desirable to prevent banned users from writing on their own shortforms about things that a reasonable person would have an interest in writing about. No further moderator action was warranted.

Effort Ratios Are Logically Irrelevant

In a subsection on “Asymmetric Effort Ratios and Isolated Demands for Rigor”, Habryka points out that critics often have an easier job than the authors they critique: asking a question is usually easier than answering it. This is true, because verification is often easier than generation. Anyone trying to make sense of others’ writing is going to end up asking questions that are easier to ask than answer. The relevance is not obvious, however. What is the problem here supposed to be, exactly?

Habryka acknowledges that there’s no problem “in an environment with lots of mutual trust and trade”, but contends that “in an adversarial context it means that it’s easily possible to run a DDOS attack on basically any author whose contributions you do not like by just asking lots of questions, insinuating holes or potential missing considerations and demanding a response approximately independently of the quality of their writing.”

It would seem that some dubious implicit assumptions are being made about participants’ motives. The DDoS attack analogy would carry if we construe intellectual discourse as a zero-sum game in which every unanswered criticism results in the critic winning and the author losing the same number of “points”.

But that construal fails on two counts. Firstly, it shouldn’t be an adversarial situation. An intellectually honest author (who wants the truth to prevail, rather than wanting their own ideas to prevail regardless of whether they’re true) should welcome probing questions. If any of the questions reveals a real flaw in the author’s thesis, an honest author would count that as a benefit (because they learned something), not a cost. At the same time, dumb questions that aren’t worth answering or reading can simply be downvoted. That is, to the extent that the community can distinguish between good and bad criticisms on the merits, ^[24] determined critics of a particular author are just providing free verification labor, not conducting a DDoS attack: as it is written of the fifth virtue, “Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favor is to you.” (And to the extent that the community can’t distinguish between good and bad criticisms on the merits, we have bigger problems.)

Secondly, even if we suppose that authors are not intellectually honest and just want their own ideas to win, no one should be thinking that an unanswered criticism represents a zero-sum transfer of status from author to critic. Insofar as we model people’s discursive behavior as being governed by implied status rewards, clearly the reward for asking a probing question should be less than the reward for answering it (because the answer is more expensive and therefore requires a larger reward to elicit it). Moreover, people are pretty smart about status games and can figure this out. Probing questions rarely get high karma; thorough answers often do. No one thinks that a famous author must be worse than an unknown one because the former attracts many critics and the latter few or none. The market clears.

And given that the market clears, there’s no good reason to censor probing questions: whether the questions get answered or not, discerning users will make up their own minds and vote accordingly. The only reason you would want to censor probing questions is to prevent people from noticing flaws in need of probing.

V. The Founding Values Have Not Been Refuted

Lightcone Infrastructure board member and Less Wrong BDFL Vaniver commented on the ban announcement. Vaniver characterizes the dispute over Achmiz as a cultural clash between the values of an older culture of Less Wrong (as represented by Achmiz and the present author) and a newer one (as represented by the mod team). Vaniver concedes that by the standards of the old culture, “pointing out that something is impeding the flow of information is almost enough to end the conversation on its own.” He makes an analogy to the development of evidential, causal, and functional decision theories (henceforth EDT, CDT, and FDT, respectively): CDT improves on EDT by ruling out non-causal decision influences that CDT considers illegitimate, while FDT further improves on CDT by ruling in some kinds of non-causal influences as legitimate after all.

Ideological Turing Test–Passing Is Not an Argument

Vaniver then claims that the new culture is the more sophisticated one (analogous to FDT), but the justification he offers is fundamentally lacking if not absent. Vaniver writes:

I operationalize this by something like [Ideological Turing Test]-passing; I think it’s generally the case that I can see the thing Said or Zack is pointing out, and in the reverse direction I mostly get the sense that they rarely see the criticism, and if they do, it’s only as something that seems fundamentally illegitimate to them.

But that’s not what the Ideological Turing Test (henceforth ITT) is for. You can’t declare victory in a debate by citing your purportedly superior ITT results: a professor of comparative religion who thinks that all faith traditions are true in their own way would probably do better on an ITT for Islam than most atheists, but this does not imply that atheism is false!

If Vaniver could actually pass old Less Wrong’s ITT test and is not just pretending to be wise, he would understand why his purported ability to paraphrase both sides’ arguments is not itself an argument, because your strength as a rationalist lies in your ability to argue for a belief being constrained by whether that belief is actually true. As Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote in 2008 (before the term “Ideological Turing Test” was coined): “I cannot argue effectively for that, because I do not believe it. Or if you prefer, I do not believe it, because I cannot argue effectively for it.”

Vaniver cites my “Critic Contributions are Logically Irrelevant” as a “crisp” example of the old Less Wrong ethos conflicting with the new. (As many readers inferred at the time, that post was written as a generalized reply to claims that Achmiz’s alleged lack of positive contributions justifies censoring his critical comments.) “[P]eople often raise objections about commenters that don’t make sense as logical criticisms. But if they aren’t intended as logical criticisms, that seems irrelevant to me,” Vaniver writes, with a suggestion to reread Yudkowsky’s 2007 post “Feeling Rational”.

I have to question whether Vaniver read past the title of “Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant”: I think I adequately handled the case of objections not intended as logical criticisms in the final section, “A Caveat: Critic Contributions Can Be Relevant If You Don’t Care About Maximizing Correctness”. The relevance of people having objections about commenters that don’t make sense as logical criticisms is that if the objectors have their way, that establishes a precedent of the forum being a place where logical criticism is dismissed in favor of other concerns, which might be desirable for a social or hobby group whose only mission is for its members to have a fun time, but is contrary to the mission of an intellectual forum like Less Wrong purports to be.

Vaniver’s suggestion that I reread “Feeling Rational” is a non sequitur. In that post, Yudkowsky argues against the popular misconception that rationality demands suppression of emotions; on the contrary, Yudkowsky argues, it’s rational to fully feel the emotion that fits the facts. But I don’t argue for the suppression of emotions. Rather, I advocate specifically against the weaponization of emotional harm as a pretext to censor intellectually substantive criticism in a purportedly intellectual venue. If those who find Achmiz’s comments hurtful agreed that their pain was not cause for moderator action, there would be no dispute.

Fortitude Is a Rationalist Skill

Vaniver cites Duncan Sabien’s concept of “emotional tallness”, saying that he used to think of his own psychological fortitude as a rationalist virtue, but now considers it an incidental fact about himself: similarly, IQ is relevant to rationality, but isn’t a virtue per se.

But what counts as a virtue is not relevant in the present context. Let us grant without question that no one is morally responsible for their IQ. Regardless, it would clearly be grossly detrimental to the site’s mission to ban high-IQ users (or force them write more like low-IQ users) in order to make low-IQ users more comfortable. Or at least, while it’s not literally impossible that some sort of special accommodation for low-IQ users might pass a cost–benefit analysis, a detailed case would have to be made for the surprising claim that such an intervention would benefit the site’s mission.

The same goes for “emotional tallness.” It’s a trait relevant to rationality. (Limits on what kind of information you can process without being psychologically impaired imply limits on your ability to make rational decisions in situations where that information is relevant.) A site dedicated to advancing the art of rationality shouldn’t go out of its way to silence people with high values of the trait in order to accommodate people with low values of the trait.

It’s not clear why Vaniver (or Sabien) uses a height metaphor instead of a word like fortitude or resilience—or if a metaphor for bodily attributes was desired, strength would be the standard one. The strength metaphor would be more fitting insofar as it comports with the reality that it’s possible and desirable to increase one’s psychological fortitude. It’s possible to want to become stronger, and succeed at training it—notably unlike height or IQ, which are largely immutable given current technology. One has to wonder whether the choice of height as the metaphor for mental fortitude is intentional in some sense, meant to protect the self-image of those who don’t want to become stronger by making it look like they don’t have a choice. ^[25]

Vaniver concludes by linking to a 2013 comment thread in which he criticizes Yudkowsky’s advocacy of deleting comments that negatively reinforce contributor efforts. The present-day Vaniver writes that he “was missing the concept of emotional tallness, then” and that he “can see the younger me levelling a similar criticism at the mod team now.”

But the mere observation that present-day Vaniver possesses “the concept of emotional tallness” doesn’t explain what the younger Vaniver was allegedly wrong about! ^[26] In the 2013 thread, the younger Vaniver testifies that “responding appropriately to criticism is a skill that takes development” and that he was “pleased with how far [he had] gotten.” Adopting the novel metaphor of “emotional tallness” rather than just saying fortitude doesn’t refute the younger Vaniver’s claim that it’s possible and desirable to learn to respond appropriately to criticism. (Alternatively, if the claim is that it was possible for the younger Vaniver to learn because he was “emotionally tall”, but that “emotionally short” people can’t learn, it remains to be argued for why Less Wrong should accommodate emotionally short people more than it currently accommodates low-IQ people.)

I, too, have grown and changed a lot over years of life experience, but in the many, many cases where I now disagree with something I used to believe strongly, I expect to be able to explain what arguments and evidence changed my mind in words that my younger self would find at least somewhat compelling. I think that if I couldn’t, that would be a troubling warning sign that my current belief was a product of corrupting social pressures rather than wisdom.

In terms of Vaniver’s decision theory metaphor, as a convert from CDT to FDT, I expect to be able to give my CDT-adhering ex-comrades a hard time by challenging them to explain why they don’t get the big money in Newcomb’s problem. If I just said, well, the culture has moved on, people used to believe in CDT, but everyone who’s anyone is into FDT now, that would not be compelling.

The fact that Vaniver, while claiming to have transcended the childish concerns of the old culture of Less Wrong, shows so little interest in arguing his views to those who do not already share them is not to his credit, nor to the new culture’s.

VI. What I Think Is Actually Going On

In the preceding sections, I have argued that the site-wide ban of Achmiz was unnecessary, contradicts the stated and founding values of Less Wrong, and rests on a slew of factual misrepresentations. The persecution of Achmiz is so bizarre, so indefensible on the intellectual merits, that it seems insufficient to merely argue that it was wrong: the fact that it happened at all cries out for an explanation. Habryka, Vaniver, and the rest of the LessWrong 2.0 team are not stupid people. What could possess them to behave like this—to expect to get away with it, and actually get away with it? Here I am less confident, but a post on the topic would not be complete without at least an attempt to theorize. ^[27]

Achmiz’s Detractors Accuse Him of Passive-Aggression

A recurring theme in the accusations against Achmiz is that Achmiz is allegedly being deceptive, passive-aggressive, or potentially even “gaslighting” ^[28] by disrespecting other users and then denying that disrespect was intended. Pace, for example, characterizes Achmiz as “holding extreme disdain and disrespect for interlocutors while being committed to never saying anything explicitly or even denying that it is the case.”

I can’t speak for Said (and he is no longer permitted to speak for himself), but if I may be permitted to speculate, I think what’s going on here is that Said is polite. He’s a polite person! The reason he’s “committed to never saying anything explicitly” is because he believes that personal insults would be contrary to the etiquette of a civilized discussion forum.

What he does do, and what provokes the accusations of dishonesty, is ask pointed questions such that some people will (rightly or wrongly) infer that he’s thinking negatively of someone. The complaint seems to be that this is worse, because passive-aggression is purportedly worse than overt aggression. Habryka writes in the comments that he “think[s] [he] could handle disdain fine, if it was carried openly, and could be argued with.”

… But It’s Hard to Believe That Open Disdain Would Be Better

I really have to question whether openly carried disdain would be better. For myself, I often have negative judgments of people on this forum, but I usually don’t articulate them in my comments, partially because that would be rude, but more fundamentally because it would be off-topic. This is a website for discussing topics like probability theory, the philosophy of science, the psychology of decisionmaking, or artificial intelligence. “Which users of this website does Zack M. Davis think are phonies” doesn’t make the cut. That’s not what people are here to read.

Am I … somehow wrong about that? Have I been deceiving and gaslighting people this whole time by engaging with the substance of their ideas and trying to keep my thoughts about how stupid and dishonest they are to myself?

Well, unlike my friend Said, I am not a polite person and am not committed to never saying anything explicitly nor denying that it is the case, so if it would help, I’m happy to clarify that I hold extreme disdain and disrespect for the entirety of the Less Wrong moderation team and a decent fraction of the userbase for general reasons that are neatly exemplified by the concrete case of their relentless persecution of Said Achmiz. If it would help, I could elaborate on this for some time using much stronger language.

But I don’t think it would help. In June 2025 moderation discussion, Habryka claimed that “[i]t is indeed not a norm on LessWrong to not express negative feelings and judgments” and that “the issue of contention” with Achmiz was “passive-aggression, not straightforward aggression.” He then refused to explain what forms of “straightforward aggression” would be permissible, claiming that the question was unmotivated.

But the motivation is obvious: if Achmiz’s on-topic, intellectually substantive criticism is not permitted on the grounds that he’s allegedly cloaking negative judgments in passive aggression, the implication would appear to be either that such judgments should be made with “straightforward aggression”, or that negative judgments are not actually allowed.

It’s hard to see what straightforward aggression has to recommend it, however. When an author writes of having “heard of some really awful real-world cases” of some phenomenon and Achmiz replies, “Could you cite some such cases? I think it would be quite instructive to examine some case studies!”, it’s fair enough to suspect that Achmiz suspects that the author is bluffing and doesn’t really have any examples—but what else is he supposed to do but ask? To instead say “I think you’re bluffing” (in order to be straightforwardly rather than passively aggressive) just seems obviously worse—not only because it’s more unpleasant to receive an accusation than a question, but more importantly because the author might not be bluffing! ^[29]

In any case, it does not appear to be the case that straightforward aggression is allowed in practice. In July 2025 moderation discussion, I wrote that “I think grown-ups should be able to shrug [...] off” other people disapproving of their behavior “without calling for draconian and deranged censorship policies” and that “[t]he mod team should not be pandering to such pathetic cry-bullying.”

Habryka replied:

This is indeed a form of aggression and scorn that I do not approve of on this site, especially after extensive litigation.

I’ll leave it on this thread, but as a concrete example for the sake of setting clear guidelines, strawmanning all (or really any) authors who have preferences about people not being super aggro in their comment threads as “pathetic cry-bullying” and “calling for draconian and deranged censorship policies” is indeed one of the things that will get you banned from this site on other threads! You have been warned!

First of all, Habryka is misusing the term strawmanning, ^[30] but more importantly, I meant what I said, and I’m happy to explain it in different words if the words I initially used in haste are inadmissible on account of their scornful tone. At issue in the comment in question was Achmiz’s stance on obligations to reply. I’m saying that people should be able to tolerate the fact that Achmiz will think less of them if they don’t answer questions that Achmiz thinks are productive. If someone’s mere personal opinion that questions should be answered is not allowed to be expressed, then that’s a harsh and ill-considered policy whose advocates are not behaving admirably because the policy is using people’s emotions as a rationale for demanding changes in others’ otherwise acceptable behavior.

Now that I’ve rephrased it to use less inflammatory words, is that still a banned opinion? Is that a thought that LessWrong 2.0 users are not just not allowed to say, but not allowed to think and continue using the website? Because even if I don’t say it, I’m probably going to write in such a manner that you’ll infer that I’m thinking it, which is all anyone had on Achmiz—and in any case, I’m telling you right now that I’m thinking it.

We would appear to have reached a contradiction: it can’t simultaneously be the case that passive aggression is grounds for banning, and that straightforward “aggression and scorn” is grounds for banning, and that it is “not a norm on LessWrong to not express negative feelings and judgments.”

The paradox is resolved if we posit that the relevant distinction is not really about aggression, but rather about acceptable targets. Habryka writes that “it is often appropriate to be rude and offensive, and often inappropriate[,]” that “LessWrong has a culture, a lot of which is determined by what things people are rude and offensive towards[,]” and that “[o]ne of [his] jobs as a moderator is to steer where that goes.”

On the same day in July 2025, Habryka also wrote that he has “mostly procedural models about how LessWrong should function, including the importance of LW as a free marketplace of ideas[.]” I think it’s pretty weird to write both of those things on the same day.

It would appear that the complaint about passive-aggression is a rationalization that can’t be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of the observed behavior is to posit that the real offense is possessing ^[31] negative feelings and judgments towards unacceptable targets. If the person with negative feelings is polite, that gets framed as “passive aggression,” but no one honestly thinks that being less polite would be an improvement.

The Real Rule Is to Cover for the Ingroup

So if the complaint about passive-aggression is a rationalization, what are Achmiz’s detractors really after? What determines the acceptable targets?

It can’t be that they’re trying to silence all criticism whatsoever—and not even only because they couldn’t get away with that (without third parties noticing). These people aren’t insane enough to not understand that being told why you’re wrong is useful for becoming less wrong.

Rather, going off of comments that explicitly talk about, for example, “a general trade off between authors’ experience and improving correctness”, it seems like they’re trying to strike a balance between ego gratification and being less wrong. You can get away with making on-topic, intellectually substantive criticisms, but only if you take care to manage ingroup members’ emotions and cover for their reputations—as if to put a hand on the other’s shoulder and say: hey, buddy, while I’m disagreeing with the literal thing you said, you didn’t do anything wrong; I’m still on your side; I’m not judging you; I still care about you.

Said doesn’t send those signals. Said doesn’t make people feel like he cares about them and isn’t committed to believing that they did nothing wrong. He wasn’t unique in delivering harsh criticism—other people do that sometimes, too. What distinguished Said was his inflexibility, which is to say incorruptibility. Everyone else knows when to flinch and pull their punches—that is, to lie or prevaricate—when the collective vibes say enough is enough. That’s why he had to go. ^[32]

The people trading off correctness for author experience don’t seem to realize why others might consider the trade illegitimate and resist participating. Pace writes disapprovingly of “any commenter being able to demand answers to questions at the risk of the post-author’s status[.]”

Well, yes. How did Pace think status worked, exactly? “Status” is just other people’s beliefs about you. People are going to update their beliefs about you based on their observations of your behavior. Your status is always at risk. ^[33]

In a similar vein, Habryka expresses a desire for freedom from judgment while struggling to explain why he wrote such a detailed ban announcement, rather than just admitting ^[34] that he’s personally fed up with Achmiz without trying to justify it:

And then there is also a third thing, which makes me want to be particularly detailed and concrete and give lots of arguments and models here, which is more relevant for Said in-particular. And that thing is the feeling of being insane, of at the same time really feeling like something hurtful and harmful is happening, while tons of people around you are denying that any such thing is going on, is at the core of a lot of the complaints I have received over the years about Said, and is also at the core of my own bad experiences with Said. More specifically the thing where I read a top-level that I cannot help but read in a sneering voice, dripping with judgment, pointing a finger at me or the author in a way that summons judgment and punishment, but which as soon as its [sic] called out disappears, denies it ever existed, or keeps slipping away, redefining itself in endless circles.

And I don’t know, maybe any attempt to disentangle the things that are going on and to try to make some kind of compelling demonstration that I and others are not insane is doomed.

Habryka hopes that “maybe [he]’ll be a better writer in a few years and can get it across more easily.” He won’t. Habryka is already a decent enough writer to explain what he means; the reason that any attempt to demonstrate that he and others are not insane is doomed is because the thing that he means is completely unreasonable. People don’t owe you a lack of negative judgment. ^[35] You can’t force people to convincingly pretend to like you.

Habryka seems to think he can and should, because it would improve his job satisfaction. In a comment on “grappl[ing] with the concept of ‘contempt of court’”, Habryka writes that “[t]he cost of someone being a dick to moderators is indeed very high” because “because moderator energy is often the limiting factor for a functional forum”, ^[36] but that “Said is a huge outlier in how much he was contemptuous of any attempts to moderate him, so it might just be less of an issue in the future”—apparently interpreting the phrase “contempt of court” as literally referring to the emotion of contempt. This is a cartoonish misunderstanding of the legal concept. It’s a term of art that refers to behavior that interferes with judicial proceedings, like ignoring a subpoena. It’s not about protecting judges’ morale, such that they don’t quit their jobs! ^[37]

Similarly, Habryka writes that he “would appreciate some courtesy to keep discussion to the principles and decision-level instead of critiques of [his] personal behavior, as indeed much of the cost of moderation is measured in having any moderation-adjacent action be torn apart and be requested to be justified or defended.” ^[38]

I reply: what principles? Every principle I can find in the ban announcement is either immediately contradicted (“Every individual owns their own judgment of you”) or grounds out in the subjective “by the lights of the moderators.” Asking me to keep discussion to the principles amounts to asking me to pretend that the decision was made on the basis of principles, when I see very little reason to believe that.

Preventing “Relitigation” Is a Pretext for Suppressing Dissent

In the ban announcement, Habryka writes that users who disagree with the moderators can “make a post about how you disagree with some decision we made.” He also writes:

I think I should very rarely prevent whoever is being affected by a moderation decision from defending themselves on LessWrong. For practical reasons, I need to limit the time I personally spend replying and engaging with their defense, but I think it makes sense to allow the opposing side in basically all cases like this to publish a defense on the site, and do at least some to signal-boost it together with any moderation decisions.

This would be great if Habryka were telling the truth that users would in fact be permitted to “make a post about how [they] disagree with some decision [the moderators] made.” However, when user Sting made a question post, “Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away?”, Habryka unlisted it (making it only available by direct link) and demoted it to a comment on the ban announcement post, stating, “I do really want to avoid this becoming a recurring topic with lots of disconnected top-level posts doing relitigation”, and “I think this is the right choice for stuff like this”.

When Sting pointed out that their question met the Personal Blogpost criteria, Habryka replied, “To be clear, we relatively routinely merge and move comment threads (as is common practice on most internet forums).”

The claim that the unlisting was a “relatively routine[ ]” operation is questionable: while I’m aware of some three cases where a derailed comment thread was split onto its own post, an investigation of unlisted posts using the LessWrong 2.0 GraphQL API did not turn up any other cases where a human-authored Personal post from an established user was manually unlisted over the author’s objections. ^[39] The question had achieved 48 karma in 19 votes, suggesting that the voting userbase thought it was an appropriate and high-quality post for the site. ^[40]

I pointed out that when users make posts on topics that have already been discussed before, the moderators do not demote subsequent posts to comments. ^[41] What made this topic different?

Habryka replied, in part:

The default equilibrium of internet discussion like this is that stuff gets eternally relitigated because people show up who don’t want to read the previous context and are looking for some kind of drama, or get drawn in by someone else presenting some isolated facet of the context. The whole reason why I spent 60+ hours writing the previous post is to avoid that exact dynamic. Allowing lots of top-level posts will inevitably then cause me to have to spend another 100+ hours on this, which I do not want to do. Indeed, in this case there are a lot of comments on the banning post that directly address questions in this post, and I strongly expect any discussion situated in that context to go a lot better.

At the time, I pointed out that “have to” isn’t warranted: other people have an interest in discussing the ban amongst themselves independently of whether Habryka thinks it’s worth his time to reply (to which Habryka agreed).

Separately from the semantics of “having to” respond, however, it’s not clear to me that Habryka understands what a stunning admission the phrase “which I do not want to do” is.

The personal convenience of moderators is not a legitimate reason to limit the visibility of content! This should be quite clear if we consider any other topic. It would be obviously corrupt if the moderators wrote a post announcing that the “one-third” answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem is correct and demoted any subsequent posts taking the “one-half” position to comments on the announcement that the answer is one-third.

If the moderators in this hypothetical scenario were to defend their actions on the grounds of their “strongly expect[ing] any discussion situated in that context to go a lot better,” one would hope users would ask the obvious question: better for whom? As a matter of human psychology rather than rationality, it makes sense that someone who had sunk 60+ hours arguing that one-third is the correct answer might feel personally annoyed if someone else were allowed to make a top-level post arguing for one-half which emphasized different facets of the context: if readers found the second post persuasive, that might be embarrassing for the author of the first post and even subject them to social incentives to spend even more time replying, which they might not want to do.

But there’s little reason to think the first author’s personal annoyance has anything to do with what would make the discussion go better in terms of readers having accurate beliefs about the Sleeping Beauty problem. For readers who haven’t yet made up their mind on whether the answer is one-third or one-half, the obviously fair policy is that both sides should be allowed to post under the same rules, rather than one side’s arguments only being allowed in a context chosen by the other. Indeed, if one side insists on asymmetric rules, that’s itself suspicious. ^[42]

In the comments on Sting’s question, I asked if I would be allowed to make a top-level post commenting on the ban decision. In his reply, Habryka wrote that it’s “quite important to provide context as to the efforts already exerted on the topic and associated lack of response, as the norms by which many, if not most, readers will interpret the lack of a response is as some kind of admission of wrongness”, such that it’s “bad form to not provide it in the top-level post[.]”

I have no idea what kind of context Habryka is expecting me to provide. He wrote a post justifying his ban decision; I’m writing a post explaining why both the ban and its justification are bad. In doing so, of course I’ve linked to the ban announcement and extensively quoted its language: I had to in order to argue against it!

If it helps, I’m happy to clarify that I don’t think readers should think I’m right because Habryka might not reply. (He’s been very clear that he didn’t want to spend more than 10 hours of his time responding to comments on the ban, and I’m happy to provide that context.) I think readers should think I’m right because I’ve successfully argued in the preceding sections that the ban justification is riddled with logical errors and factual misrepresentations. Whether Habryka chooses to reply or not is his prerogative; in either case, readers will judge on the basis of whatever information is available to them. Similarly, that I chose to write this critique was my prerogative. If the things I have to say are personally inconvenient for someone else, that’s not my problem.

If it helps, I’m happy to acknowledge that Habryka already spent 60+ hours on the ban announcement, which evokes sympathy for him not wanting to spend any more time on this affair—but I actually think that context that helps my case, not his. If he spent so much time trying to craft a convincing ban announcement, and ended up with such a poor result (such that I could write so many words credibly critiquing it), ^[43] I think that speaks to the underlying weakness of his case.

VII. Conclusions and Recommendations for Readers

LessWrong 2.0 Has Forfeited Its Intellectual Legitimacy

I began by saying that this post is not really about Said Achmiz. I meant it. I am not writing this post to the moderation team to beg them to reverse the Achmiz ban. Firstly, that’s obviously not going to happen. But secondly, on the object level, the ban itself is not of tremendous importance. If Said had found a new hobby and stopped commenting of his own accord, it would probably take me a while to notice. I wouldn’t be upset, and I certainly wouldn’t write a 18,000-word post about it.

Rather, I am writing to the world in defense of a principle that I’ve spent the last decade of my life ^[44] fighting for: that the truth matters, and specifically, that the truth matters more than people’s feelings. If someone makes an intellectually substantive comment on an intellectual discussion forum, it makes sense to object if it’s false or irrelevant. It does not make sense to object that the intellectually substantive comment makes you feel bad, because whether the comment makes you feel bad has no bearing on whether the comment is true or relevant. As a grown-up on an intellectual discussion forum, it’s not other people’s job to manage your feelings.

This website was founded from a sense that more is possible—that a sufficiently detailed understanding of the laws of systematically correct reasoning would enable cognitive feats that would both improve lives today and help humanity confront the machine intelligence transition.

It was understood, at the time, that aspiring to systematically correct reasoning was an unnatural ambition that would require effort and probably psychological discomfort. As it was written in the founding texts:

People don’t think about the real weak points of their beliefs for the same reason they don’t touch an oven’s red-hot burners; it’s painful.

Correspondingly, the founding texts advised confronting the pain rather than fleeing from it:

Better to think of such rules as, “Imagine what a skeptic would say—and then imagine what they would say to your response—and then imagine what else they might say, that would be harder to answer.”

Or, “Try to think the thought that hurts the most.”

That is, in the Sequences era, it was understood that even if you don’t have any persistent and demanding critics in real life, you should try to simulate them. It was understood that the process would be unpleasant, but that’s it’s unpleasant because it involves fighting the human instinct to rationalize, and that the reason to do it anyway is because you care more about being less wrong than about having pleasant emotional experiences.

In the comments on the ban announcement, a commenter pleads for posts from less prominent authors to not be criticized, because “[t]here are selection effects on who stays in the community under these conditions.”

Indeed, selection effects are important. In particular, a Less Wrong that bans Said Achmiz is selecting for bullshitters who don’t care whether what they say is true or false. Because people who care about whether they’re telling the truth want to be held accountable! They want to be criticized! ^[45] They want people to ask questions about their work! Probably, they want people to ask questions about their work even if they personally won’t have time to answer, because they understand the concept of a public comment section in which other people might be able to answer!

Once, people who cared about whether what they say is true and who wanted to become stronger could look to Less Wrong as a beacon transmitting best-in-class information on the topic of that inhuman ambition—a place that really forces you to get your arguments together.

Well, the writing’s been on the wall for a while, but the Achmiz ban should make it clear to everyone that that era is over now. It’s not just that the culture doesn’t train people to think the thought that hurts the most and to imagine what a skeptic would say that would be harder to answer. It’s gotten to the point that when a human volunteers to do that work for free, the reigning powers ban them specifically for being too hurtful and hard to answer! Those who would rather the beacon be bright than correct have completed their annexation of Earth’s global rationalist community and converted it into a hip Bay Area party-and-AI-discussion scene—a great improvement from their perspective. They’re not going to give the beacon back.

What now? As always, that’s up to everyone for themselves, but I have a few thoughts.

LessWrong 2.0 Is a Website, Not a Culture or an Authority

In the ban announcement, Habryka invites users dissatisfied with how the site is being run to loudly quit, but adds that “not all things are so bad as to make it the right choice to stop using LessWrong altogether” and that he doesn’t believe that agreeing with the LessWrong 2.0 team “on all fronts” should be “a requirement for thinking LessWrong is good for the world.”

I think it’s wrong to conflate using a website with thinking that the website is good for the world. Internet discussion platforms pose a coordination problem: the main reason to use a website is because everyone else is already using it. I use Twitter (officially called X since 2023) as a discussion platform and as a marketing channel for my writing. That doesn’t mean I think Twitter is unambiguously “good for the world.” On the contrary, I think Twitter has a lot of negative effects on the world (in the form of sapping attention spans, spreading misinformation, increasing political polarization, &c.). It’s just that me unilaterally forgoing Twitter wouldn’t make a dent in the harms it does. In the absence of a critical mass coordinating to switch to some superior website, I’m trapped—but because I know that I’m trapped, I can relate to the trap in a sane way.

Namely: Twitter is infrastructure—not a community, and definitely not any kind of intellectual authority. It makes sense to not directly link to Substack in one’s Tweets in order to avoid being algorithmically punished, but it should be clear that this is a matter of complying with Elon Musk’s whims because he took over the infrastructure (legally, by buying it) and has the hard power to do what he wants, not because there’s actually anything wrong with Substack. If Elon Musk were to proclaim that X is a culture, a lot of which is determined by what things people are rude and offensive towards, and that a lot of his job as CEO is to steer where that goes, I think self-respecting Twitter users would laugh in his face. Owning a website does not make you a religious authority.

I think students of human rationality should relate to LessWrong 2.0 the same way as they relate to Twitter—as infrastructure—and relate to the moderation team the same way they relate to Elon Musk. ^[46] I think LessWrong 2.0′s suppression of intellectually substantive discussion in order to protect contributor feelings is doing harm by deceiving the world about what rationality even is, but it still makes sense to use the website as a discussion platform and as a marketing channel for our writing, because we’re trapped: coordinating to move to a new website is hard enough that—for now, if things don’t get worse—it makes sense to stay put and keep doing our thing under Musk’s terms of service. (Although it’s probably advisable to keep your own blog that you control and merely linkpost to this website as a marketing channel, rather than trusting LessWrong 2.0 to host the canonical copy.) ^[47] In that sense, I agree with Habryka when he writes that “for the rest of us” “not that much has to change.”

However, unlike the case of Twitter, I worry that too many students of human rationality aren’t modeling themselves as trapped and therefore aren’t relating to the trap in a sane way. I worry that a lot of people are clinging to an implicit assumption that there is a healthy and trustworthy “rationalist community”, such that trying to gain the approval of “the community” and its leaders amounts to the same thing as trying to be rational.

That was never going to be real. Those who seek the Way have to invent it for themselves.

Speak the Truth, Even If Your Voice Trembles

To the people who care about whether what they say is true, I advise courage. The people playing ego-flattery and reputation-protection games will hate and fear you, as they hated and feared Said Achmiz. When one of their own declares that beliefs about dragons don’t require evidence, they might let it slide when you contradict them and say that all beliefs require evidence. (Mere disagreement doesn’t threaten their self-image, as long as they can frame it as coming from a place of mutual respect.) But they won’t take it lying down if you try to further point out that the most plausible reason why someone would claim that beliefs about dragons don’t require evidence is in order to protect false beliefs about dragons. (That threatens their marketing story about being a community of collaborative truthseekers.) They’ll say you’re sneering, heaping scorn and social punishment on the virtues and values that are the lifeblood of the community by their lights.

Don’t be intimidated. You don’t have to comply with their demands to soften, obfuscate, and lie. Just keep speaking clearly on whatever channels are available to you.

To be clear, it’s not that these people can’t hurt you in any way. They can slander you and silence you on the platforms that they own and ban you from their events.

But in the long run, their power is self-limiting. In a conflict between people who care about whether what they say is true, and people who say whatever they need to say to achieve their immediate social goals, the latter will tend to achieve their immediate social goals—but only by flooding the zone with nonsense that doesn’t stand up to basic logical scrutiny and trying to prevent anyone from applying basic logical scrutiny (perhaps under the guise of preventing “relitigation” or “fights of attrition”). They can martyr the occasional principled person when they have an overwhelming local resource advantage, but their reputation protection scheme will never be safe unless they can successfully purge everyone capable of applying basic logical scrutiny—and they need our eyeballs for their platforms and our money for their hotels. Though trajectories are harder to predict than endpoints, it’s reasonable to expect that the charade can’t last forever.

1. ↩︎

   A similar process played out again during the construction of the present post. The original title of the post was to be “Said Achmiz in His Felon Stripes Stands Far Above You Now”, from an adaptation of Voltairine de Cleyre’s impassioned 1890 defense of the jailed proto-feminist publisher Moses Harman that I wanted to use in the post:

   If, beyond these, there are those here tonight who have ever forced intellectual deference from a peer, those who have prostituted themselves in the name of Charity, those who have brought confused, immoral, or unexamined arguments to the light, without the means of defense for them, and yet will go from this post and say, “Said Achmiz is an unclean man—a man rewarded by just punishment,” then to you I say, and may the words ring deep within your ears until you die: go on! Drive your sheep to the shambles! Crush that old, uncouth man beneath your Juggernaut! In the name of Niceness, Community, and Civilization, do it! In the name of the Chicagoan who preached the twelve virtues, do it! In the name of Clear Thinking, Clear Communication, and Collaborative Truthseeking, do it!

   [...]

   Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, “We are rid of this obscenist”? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids! The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless, folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and your shame! Said Achmiz in his felon stripes stands far above you now, and Said Achmiz dead will live on, immortal in the race he died to free! Kill him!

   At first it was going to be an epigraph—to the last section, if I couldn’t get away with making it an epigraph to the whole post without getting dismissed by an unsympathetic audience. Said thought it was “too overwrought” and that it remained to be seen if a later draft might “earn it.” I couldn’t bear to cut it and ended up using it as a peroration in a later draft. Said didn’t buy it, saying that his “previous comments about the tone stand” and that it “muddle[d] the concluding section.” He was right.

2. ↩︎

   Although curiously, Habryka’s detailed description of the sneer attractor doesn’t particularly seem to resemble Achmiz’s comments in any aspect other than them both involving harsh criticism. Habryka writes that “[t]he key component of making good sneer club criticism is to never actually say out loud what your problem is.” But Achmiz is quite willing to say out loud what his problem is, and is clearly committed to answering clarifying questions at length if his initial complaint was unclear.

3. ↩︎

   The Zionism analogy for re-centralizing a dispersed community writes itself given the term “Less Wrong diaspora”; no particular geopolitical implications are intended.

4. ↩︎

   My first comment—while the original Sequences were being written on Overcoming Bias, more than a year before Less Wrong was founded—dates to December 2007; I attended the first Overcoming Bias meetup in February 2008. Achmiz’s first comment dates to May 2010.

   In contrast, Pace “read The Sequences [...] in 2011”, Arnold’s account dates to September 2010, Ruby Bloom “found LessWrong in 2012″, Ronny Fernandez’s account dates to 2011, Vaniver’s account dates to October 2010 after he “found [Less Wrong] through a link to HPMOR on the xkcd forums”, and Habryka’s account dates to 2015 with Vaniver confirming that Achmiz has “been here longer” than Habryka.

5. ↩︎

   User-level bans or ignore functionality—and indeed, karma voting itself—are impartial in the sense that everyone has the same tools: if Alice doesn’t like Bob, she can downvote and ignore his comments or ban him from commenting on her own posts, and vice versa. The impartial tools help people share the website without the moderation team needing to take sides.

6. ↩︎

   It’s notable that Yudkowsky’s articulation of “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” includes the clause “where our wishes cohere rather than interfere”, such that “[a] minor, muddled preference of 60% of humanity might be countered by a strong, unmuddled preference of 10% of humanity.” Analogously, a majority of rationalists mildly disliking having to share the website with us shouldn’t outweigh our strong desire to share it.

   The coherent-wishes clause also illustrates why objecting to banning Achmiz is not tantamount to demanding no moderation whatsoever. No established users are writing 18,000-word manifestos complaining about the rejected posts slushpile being censored, because our wishes cohere on censoring the slushpile in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio.

7. ↩︎

   In the comments on the ban announcement, Vaniver writes that the correct response to differences between cultures of aspiring rationalists 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.

   Does Vaniver assume that people on one side of the conflict aren’t even interested in reading anything by people on the other side? (One would have imagined that the eleventh virtue of scholarship would recommend being well-read.) Why not just share the website, since we’re not going to run out of paper?

8. ↩︎

   See the subsequent section, “User-Level Bans Are a Sufficient and Less Intrusive Remedy”.

9. ↩︎

   An analogy could be made to Habryka’s 2024 complaints about the effects of Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving) on AI safety work in which he wrote that “[i]n as much as [Open Philanthropy] is the most powerful actor in the space, the original geeks are being thoroughly ousted.” Coefficient Giving might well reply, “our money, our rules”—that it’s ungrateful nonsense to complain about how Dustin Moskovitz chooses to spend his own money—but this would seem to be missing the point.

10. ↩︎

    The rhetorical device of juxtaposing seemingly contradictory passages from an author with minimal additional commentary as a prompt for the author to clarify, is not a unique innovation of Achmiz’s. In a June 2023 email discussion, I received an email from Hoffman himself that quoted two parts of my previous message, with the comment, ”?????”. The meaning was quite clear. I did not take offense or interpret Hoffman as claiming that I deserved to be punished. I just said, “Thanks for pointing out the tension between those two passages,” and explained what I meant.

    And what Achmiz dishes out, he can take. In a May 2026 discussion of the æsthetic merits of the musical Hamilton, I perceived an apparent contradiction between two things that Achmiz had said and quoted them with the comment, “Hmm …” He didn’t interpret it as claiming that he deserved to be punished, either. He just said, “Yes. Exactly,” and explained what he meant.

11. ↩︎

    As an accomplished baker, Achmiz is in a credible position to tell.

12. ↩︎

    “Top authors” receive lots of comments by virtue of being “top”, and not all comments are good; it would be strange if one commenter merely asking pointed questions—not being abusive or overtly insulting—was somehow so offensive that “many top authors” found him in particular a “top reason” to not use the site at all, particularly given the existence of user-level ban functionality.

13. ↩︎

    Not by name, but the discussion in the comments section makes the inspiration quite clear.

14. ↩︎

    Presumably Habryka meant the history of the LessWrong 2.0 reboot. Less Wrong launched in February 2009.

15. ↩︎

    In May 2026, I also emailed Eliezer Yudkowsky to attempt to corroborate Habryka’s claim about Yudkowsky’s opinion of Achmiz, but Yudkowsky could not be reached for comment. I’m only aware of one direct interaction between Yudkowsky and Achmiz on Less Wrong, a 2022 thread about the faithfulness of Yudkowsky and Lintamande’s collaborative fiction Planecrash to Pathfinder rules as written.

16. ↩︎

    Habryka also writes, concerning Benjamin Hoffman, that the conflict between Achmiz and Hoffman on “Zetetic Explanations” and another conflict between Hoffman and Duncan Sabien “seemed like roughly the thing that caused [Hoffman] to leave”—but those incidents were in May 2018 and August 2018, respectively, whereas Hoffman went on to make more than 20 posts (including two Curated posts) between August 2018 and June 2020 (before a gap until April 2022). The lag from putative stimulus to response of almost two years calls into question the reliability of Habryka’s ability to perceive what is “roughly the thing that caused” what.

17. ↩︎

    The unreliability is implied by probability theory. The evidence of a report of a discouraged author is determined by the likelihood ratio, . If not-discouraged authors are incorrectly reported as discouraged, it follows that any given report is less meaningful. The conclusion is agnostic as to the cause of the false reports: we don’t actually need to know whether the false statements were due to dishonesty, ignorance, poor memory, weak reading comprehension, &c.

18. ↩︎

    Habryka links to the clarifying comment in footnote 11 as “further details on what Said means by ‘responding’”, but I don’t think this suffices to clarify Achmiz’s true views to readers of the ban announcement.

19. ↩︎

    In personal correspondence with the present author, Achmiz re-stated his position again:

    To put it concisely: one has an obligation to reply to questions/​criticisms/​etc. in the same way, and to the same extent, as one has an obligation to do any of the other things that we consider to characterize good writing, good thinking, and good communication. If you write a post on LessWrong, you have an obligation to reply to criticism and questions … and an obligation not to mischaracterize your opponents’ views, and an obligation not to lie about the facts, and obligation to acknowledge evidence against your position, and an obligation to avoid blatantly misleading claims or descriptions … and so on in this vein. And if you fail to do any of these things, especially if this failure is habitual and/​or persistent in the face of un-rebutted criticism, then readers of your writings will judge you negatively for it, and rightly so.

20. ↩︎

    More precisely, to assign probability distributions with a worse proper score.

21. ↩︎

    The distinction being that auto-collapsing comments from an ignored user doesn’t prevent other users reading the comments. Discord’s block functionality in shared channels works similarly.

22. ↩︎

    Modulo the karma limits, but the behavior of the mod team since the feature was introduced seems to imply much more concern about the harm done by unwanted comments than by frivolous bans: I’m not aware of anyone punished or warned for banning too many users. This suggests that the karma limits could be dropped or revised without issue.

23. ↩︎

    The point of a unilateral block feature is precisely that you shouldn’t need someone’s consent to get them to stop talking to you.

24. ↩︎

    And to the extent that readers are taking into account the selection effect of who the determined critics target.

25. ↩︎

    Thanks to Said Achmiz for this observation.

26. ↩︎

    Vaniver also writes that his younger self was “missing the point about the conversation quality being worse because of indirect effects.” This is too vague for me to address without further explanation; I don’t know what purported indirect effects Vaniver is referring to.

27. ↩︎

    Throughout this part, claims about motives should be understood in a functionalist sense: an agent that systematically chooses actions that result in X can be said to “want X” without necessarily consciously verbalizing, “I want X.”

28. ↩︎

    In the comments on the ban announcement, Habryka writes that he “feel[s] some temptation to try to restore some of [his] sanity by providing compelling demonstrations of what has felt like gaslighting to me”, although that that wasn’t the primary motivation for the ban announcement post.

29. ↩︎

    A question can simply be answered, but accusations need to be defended against—and if successfully defended against, the accusation is recognized as unjust. This makes accusations a uniquely terrible way to elicit examples in situations where examples would be helpful: the elicitation succeeds if and only if it shouldn’t have happened!

30. ↩︎

    Strawmanning is mischaracterizing a speaker as having said something other than what they did. Hostile descriptions of someone’s behavior (that are understood by readers to not represent that person’s opinion of their own behavior) are not strawmanning. In context, I’m obviously not saying people are advocating policies that they think are “draconian” and “deranged”, or even necessarily constitute censorship as they would use that word: the negative connotations of censorship make people reluctant to use it to describe instances of information suppression that they approve of. Habryka seems to understand this point in other contexts, as when he writes that “trying to force every description of every organization to pass their [Ideological Turing Test] is bad.”

31. ↩︎

    In light of the ban announcement’s declaration that “You are at least somewhat responsible for the subtext other people read into your comments, you can’t disclaim all responsibility for that”, I think possessing is the correct verb here, not expressing. Not saying anything negative won’t save you if people can infer that you’re thinking it.

32. ↩︎

    In 2018, Benjamin Hoffman wrote that Achmiz was “one of the few people to consistently call out” “a tendency to conflate the stated ambitions and actual behavior of ingroups like Rationalists and EAs, when we wouldn’t extend this courtesy to the outgroup, in a way that subtly shades corrective objections as failures to get with the program.”

    Achmiz’s first moderator warning on LessWrong 2.0 was for a comment answering the original post’s question about the lack of popularity of the Center for Applied Rationality’s “Double Crux” technique, in which Achmiz stated that the technique’s origin at CfAR was “an anti-endorsement.”

    The warning stated that “A simple ‘I think that...’ or ‘...for me’ would have done a great deal to resolve” the problem of Achmiz’s answer “generat[ing] a lot of unnecessary friction”—but as Achmiz points out, the comment in question already begins with “My take”. Was that not enough of a personal-opinion-only indicator, such that Achmiz should have somehow known to also append “for me” to the “anti-endorsement” claim? In the comments on the ban announcement, Habryka cites the fact that the original post had a “Thinking out loud” epistemic status line as evidence that Achmiz would ignore author requests to not criticize an undeveloped idea. But the comment in question wasn’t critical of the post, but rather of Double Crux and CfAR—unless one construes criticism of Double Crux to imply criticism of the post insofar as the author writes that Double Crux “failed to take root as well as it should”?

    Looking at the pattern of moderator behavior, it’s hard to believe that the problem is Achmiz’s conduct, rather than him refusing to conceal his negative opinion of CfAR.

33. ↩︎

    It has to be, in order to mean anything: in order to gain status when you do good things, it needs to be possible to lose status when you do bad things.

34. ↩︎

    Habryka writes that he “do[es] think a huge fraction of this announcement should be seen as ‘look, it’s been too long, I’ve spent a lot of energy on this, I am not dealing with this anymore, let’s part ways’.”

35. ↩︎

    Much as Habryka doesn’t owe people free meetup hosting space.

36. ↩︎

    The moderation page lists comments that have been marked as being made in the role of a moderator. There were two such comments in April 2026 and five in March 2026, which casts some doubt on moderator energy being the limiting factor for LessWrong.

37. ↩︎

    The fact that “contempt” in the judicial sense is not about judges’ or perpetrators’ feelings is immediately clear from a cursory examination of famous “contempt” cases. In United States v. Shipp (1906), a local sheriff was found guilty of contempt of court for allowing a lynch mob to murder a death row prisoner despite a court order granting an appeal. In Miller v. Davis (2015), a county clerk was found guilty of contempt for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. In Illinois v. Allen (1970), a defendant was found guilty of contempt for persistently interrupting proceedings, threatening the judge, and declaring, “There is going to be no proceeding. I’m going to start talking and I’m going to keep on talking all through the trial”—that is, the point was that he was actively disrupting the trial, not merely “being a dick” in the judge’s subjective opinion.

    The analogy to forum moderation is straightforward: a user who actively defies clear moderator orders would be guilty of contempt in the judicial sense, but Achmiz clearly hasn’t done any such thing: indeed, Habryka reports that he “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”! (If technical limitations prevented a software-imposed ban, posting and voting in defiance of moderator orders would be contempt, and Habryka trusts Achmiz not to do that.)

38. ↩︎

    A footnote clarifies that “of course in as much as something seems egregious, you and others should feel free to call it out”—but Habryka doesn’t seem to consider that someone might find the request itself to be egregious. The only reason to silence discussion of conduct but include an escape hatch for “egregious” bad behavior would be to provide a license to indulge in less-than-egregious bad behavior. Indeed, one must wonder how Habryka himself would respond to Sam Bankman-Fried or Dario Amodei requesting the same “courtesy” from the people they have power over. He can’t say, “That’s different because I’m the good guy.” That’s their line!

    The asymmetry in who is entitled to such “courtesy” is also striking: Said was clearly not exempt from critiques of his personal behavior! As stated, the argument seems to be that people with power should be subjected to less scrutiny than everyone else, because their jobs are just so hard.

39. ↩︎

    A May 2026 query of query { posts(selector: { unlisted: {} }, limit: 200) { results { _id, title, pageUrl, postedAt } } } found 80 unlisted posts, whose reasons for unlisting were analyzed with GPT-5.5 Thinking. The results included: 11 posts belatedly identified as in violation of the LLM writing policy that were unlisted but not unpublished in order to keep comments accessible (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11), a clue for the 2024 Less Online puzzle hunt, test posts titled as such (e.g., 1 2 3), posts serving as meta information pages about the site (e.g., About, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, “Quick Guide to Tagging”), appendices of mathematical proofs (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13), &c., but nothing that seemed comparable to the unlisting of Sting’s question. Thanks to Robert Mushkatblat for GraphQL assistance.

40. ↩︎

    Moderators do routinely prevent inappropriate or low-quality posts from being published on the site, as can be seen in the rejected posts slushpile on the moderation page, but Sting’s question is clearly not in the slushpile reference class.

41. ↩︎

    For example, no one seemed to have a problem with “Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It” prompting the reply posts “Forecasting is Not Overrated and It’s Probably Funded Appropriately” and “Comment on ‘Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It’”.

42. ↩︎

    If one-half is in fact wrong, wouldn’t you expect readers to find your post more convincing on the merits? Crushing them with your mod powers only invites doubt that you weren’t convincing on the merits.

43. ↩︎

    I think some readers may be wary that a long post such as this one represents an effort to “filibuster”: that the mod team did something I disliked, so I’m trying to delegitimize them by throwing up an impressive-looking flood of verbiage. I’m denying this on the grounds that it wouldn’t work: that would be bad writing, and the comment section would notice. The reason this post is long is because the reasoning offered for the ban is so terrible in so many different ways that I actually have this much to say about it.

44. ↩︎

    Given the existential risk situation, perhaps in more ways than one.

45. ↩︎

    Because if they can’t answer the criticisms, they learn something, and if they can, they gain more justified confidence in their ideas: an idea is more likely to be right if someone tried to prove it wrong and failed—but for that to happen, critics have to be allowed to try.

46. ↩︎

    Who, notably, also talks a good game about “truthseeking.”

47. ↩︎

    Prior to the ban, I used to write a lot of “Less Wrong exclusives”, but now I only intend to do that when the content is specifically about “the community” rather than general rationality or AI topics. I regret that “Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution” and “Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing” initially went up as “exclusives” due to technical issues with an old WordPress setup.

[Vaniver]

Responding to the section about my argument (and a few related parts):

You title it “The Founding Values Have Not Been Refuted.” But I never set out to refute the founding values! We prioritize the founding values a bit differently; perhaps from your perspective it looks like I’m dethroning the central one. But it really seems relevant to me that I am the one arguing Eliezer’s position from 13 years ago. To summarize my thoughts on Said and your arguments here, I might as well quote him from earlier, “If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.”

Vaniver then claims that the new culture is the more sophisticated one (analogous to FDT), but the justification he offers is fundamentally lacking if not absent.

I don’t justify it in that comment; the justifications are spread across many comments and many posts and several authors. I would attempt to justify it here, but on reflection I think that’s putting the cart in front of the horse. Cultures are package deals which have many impacts, both positive and negative; no real culture is born from picking a justification and then optimizing purely for that. They are grown, negotiated, and cultivated across many people and many actions.

To continue hammering on my example of the Royal Society, the thing that they wanted to do was understand the world better. They succeeded much more than others before them. Why? Maybe they had more geniuses; maybe they had more wealth; maybe they had better social technology. It seems to me like one of the contributors here is that they believed that social graces were important, and that managing the feelings of the participants was important. Not the most important thing—they weren’t a social club first and foremost—but not banned from consideration, a sort of anti-trump that loses every competition it enters. They wanted people to stay engaged in the project, to keep supplying data and attending meetings, and they thought seriously about how.

But that’s not what the Ideological Turing Test (henceforth ITT) is for.

I am using it to answer the question: “which of these views incorporates the other?”. I think it’s a valid tool for that.

Now, is that question relevant? I was replying to parts of Said’s comment where he objected to habryka’s framing of the ban post:

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).

...

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.

I agreed that it was a disagreement about principles, and that it wouldn’t be correct to just say “we’re more sophisticated, therefore we’re right.” The way I’d put it today is that including all the same principles in your calculation and more doesn’t give you a strategy-stealing argument in the way that including all the same information and more does, because it doesn’t mean you are setting the prices correctly. Said and Zack appear to think some things should have 0 cost, and habryka and I think those things have a cost that cannot be ignored; the question is about what price the culture should put on them.

I think this does point to what I find frustrating about this conversation, however; I think we never managed to find cruxes because you thought our charges were inadmissible, and rounded them into something different and more base. (We’ll return to this point.)

I have to question whether Vaniver read past the title of “Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant”

So far, I’ve read everything you’ve written on LW moderation issues, because I view it as my responsibility to.

I think I adequately handled the case of objections not intended as logical criticisms in the final section

I don’t think so. Or, that is, I think your post spends nearly two thousand words to investigate a simple puzzle, badly. habryka and Duncan complain about the hedonic and reputational effects of a style of behavior. “But what does this have to do with correctness?” you ask, and spend 1300 words demonstrating that, as the alert reader might have anticipated immediately, it is not about putting correctness before all other concerns. Therefore it must be about something else—perhaps, for example, ad revenue.

In a fit of Said-like politeness, I comment to ask why you don’t view comments as speech acts, a category which naturally resolves the puzzle. (Said replies that it’s not unreasonable to, and that most comments are primarily about the information content—which, while true, doesn’t obviate that we’re talking about the cases where it’s not true.)

This time, thankfully, you cut to the chase:

The relevance of people having objections about commenters that don’t make sense as logical criticisms is that if the objectors have their way, that establishes a precedent of the forum being a place where logical criticism is dismissed in favor of other concerns, which might be desirable for a social or hobby group whose only mission is for its members to have a fun time, but is contrary to the mission of an intellectual forum like Less Wrong purports to be.

We were open about changing the culture and the discourse norms at the very beginning! One of the goals of LW 2.0 has always been to make posting fun again.

I’m not sure how to say this more clearly, but we disagree about how to accomplish the mission of an intellectual forum like Less Wrong purports to be. It’s the same disagreement as the interpretation of the Royal Society or Socrates. We think it advances instead of betrays our Sacred Mission to enforce a minimum standard of social graces. It is easier for you to pretend that this is about us seeking ad revenue, apparently.

I don’t think your values could build Less Wrong. (Obviously Said can build websites, and has built other forums.) You’re welcome to try, and to put your ideas into practice, and see what comes of them.^[1]

Vaniver’s suggestion that I reread “Feeling Rational” is a non sequitur.

The sequitur is that in the post EY argues that a popular belief about rationality is that rationality opposes all emotion, but this isn’t how probability theory works, and instead the question is whether or not emotions are concordant with reality. Rational emotions are downstream of models that correspond to reality; irrational emotions are downstream of models that don’t correspond to reality. When someone finds one of Achmiz’s comments hurtful, is it rational for them to do so? Well, that depends on whether or not the models underlying their hurt correspond to reality.

[Incidentally, one of the reasons why I think this isn’t “the weaponization of emotional harm” is that we’re not just measuring emotional outbursts or tears or whatever, but instead trying to figure out how it connects to our goals for LessWrong, and sometimes the hurt seems real and relevant and sometimes it fails on either count.]

A site dedicated to advancing the art of rationality shouldn’t go out of its way to silence people with high values of the trait in order to accommodate people with low values of the trait.

I think you’re mistaking defense and offense. I’m not the one being silenced here, and it’s not Said’s fortitude we’re complaining about.

That is, yes, fortitude is a virtue, as is readiness of comprehension. But it is likewise a virtue to be smooth instead of rough, and clear instead of confusing. Someone’s whose posts are confusing and incoherent may find themselves managed out—either by the karma system, or getting rate-limited, or not accepted as a new user—even if they readily understand all the posts and comments other people write.

Is it a good thing that Said requires more fortitude in those around him than the typical poster? You could imagine a school having an evil potions master in order to cause its students to develop a certain kind of resilience, but that’s not what’s going on here. Instead we had years of asking and telling Said to be easier to deal with, and eventually told him that if he was going to keep it up, he would have to do it elsewhere.

But the mere observation that present-day Vaniver possesses “the concept of emotional tallness” doesn’t explain what the younger Vaniver was allegedly wrong about!

Younger Vaniver was using his personal experience—and the expectations downstream primarily of that, and advice he should have reversed—rather than empiricism, such as by polling others or doing interviews. He wasn’t attuned to the questions of what is good for the site overall, rather focused on the momentary turn-by-turn of the conversation. “Wait, someone in a position of power doing something because it’s fun or unfun?” he said with a look of disapproval, and was not tracking that how much and what Eliezer was posting was downstream of what sort of an environment LessWrong was, and that it was smoother and more rational to work inside of those dynamics rather than attempt to force them into a shape they were not, and that commenters were being shaped by the culture that they were shaping.

Now, is this being corrupted by social pressure? I mean, you could say that, in the same way that a lot of my hygiene habits are the result of social pressure exerted on me, but that doesn’t mean it’s corruption that I shower regularly. There is an actual tension between being able to work with anyone and cultivating a circle of contacts where people can trust that someone being your friend means they’ll likely be their friend too.

As a grown-up on an intellectual discussion forum, it’s not other people’s job to manage your feelings.

Note this is a one-way arrow. I don’t think I ever viewed it as other people’s job to manage my feelings, but I did think I had some duty to other people to manage their feelings. (Otherwise, why be polite?) It was a limited duty—their feelings could be disproportional—but the fundamental question was not whether I was justified in losing but whether I got what I wanted.

That is, in the Sequences era, it was understood that even if you don’t have any persistent and demanding critics in real life, you should try to simulate them.

In the Sequences era, it was also understood why our kind can’t cooperate. We have been trying to fix that, with our new culture.

1. ^

   To be clear, I don’t think we could build Less Wrong either; I think EY deserves that credit. I don’t think we could even have built LW 2.0 without the inheritance of the URL and The Sequences.

[Zack_M_Davis]

But it really seems relevant to me that I am the one arguing Eliezer’s position from 13 years ago.

To be clear, I did say “Founding Values” and not “Founders”. Yudkowsky from twenty-three years ago put up a page about Crocker’s rules. (To preëmpt the obvious knee-jerk objection: yes, I did read the part about “Crocker’s Rules does not mean you can insult people.”)

The reason I’m considering the 2002 page about Crocker’s rules but not the 2013 comment about hedonics to be part of the founding ideal, is because to me, the founding ideal isn’t about this Eliza Yudowski person.

It’s about the philosophical vision articulated in “The Bottom Line”, “A Rational Argument”, “What Is Evidence?”, the “Technical Explanation”, and the “Twelve Virtues”—about seeking the mathematical laws that govern how a small part of the world (a “map”) can function as a predictive model of the rest (the “territory”), and how conditional predictions can be used to steer the world.

Crocker’s rules is obviously consilient with the philosophical vision. “Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor,” “[w]hich, in point of fact, they would be,” says the page. (You see, because having an accurate map is instrumentally convergent for rational agents: if I were an idiot, I would want to know about it, because that might have decision-relevant consequences.)

Of course, humans can’t embody the ideal, but it’s important that there is an ideal, and claims that humans shouldn’t even try to better approximate the ideal because it’s supposedly impossible don’t comport with the philosophical vision I learned from the texts. (As it is written, “The ninth virtue is perfectionism. [...] In every art, if you do not seek perfection you will halt before taking your first steps. If perfection is impossible that is no excuse for not trying.”) If later statements by this Yudowski person contradict the philosophical ideal, I go with the ideal, not the person, because that’s what the texts taught me to do.

It seems to me like one of the contributors here is that they believed that social graces were important, and that managing the feelings of the participants was important.

Unfortunately, the reason I haven’t been able to engage with this intuitively-surprising-to-me claim much is because I’m not a specialist in 17th Century English history, and so I’m not in a good position to evaluate the claim without a lot of catch-up labor.

The reason it seems like an intuitively surprising claim to me is because—as a non-specialist, I thought the standard explanation for the Royal Society’s success was, um, Science? The experimental method? Right? Like, these are the guys whose motto was Nullius in verba, “Take no one’s word for it”, said to be “an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.” I take this to mean that if someone who could contribute to your project (with money, skills, &c.) is sad that you won’t take his word for it, you have to disappoint him and find some other way to keep the project alive.

Said and Zack appear to think some things should have 0 cost, and habryka and I think those things have a cost that cannot be ignored; the question is about what price the culture should put on them.

So it’s not that the cost should be literally zero. (I agree that Crocker’s rules doesn’t mean you get to insult people; Said believes in his version of politeness.) It’s that there is a normative ideal about information processing, and you want a culture that socializes the humans into aspiring towards the normative ideal even when it’s hard (Bayesian reasoners wouldn’t hide from information, I want to be more like that), and the “emotional tallness” excuse doesn’t even pay lip service to the ideal.

as the alert reader might have anticipated immediately, it is not about putting correctness before all other concerns

You say that so casually! Okay, sure, humans can’t put correctness before all other concerns. But that’s, like, non-normative, right? I’m more optimistic about a culture that encourages striving for the ideal in a non-formalized way, than a pseudo-economic culture that talks a good game about “prices” (which, according to the microeconomic theory, should theoretically exist), but which, in practice, I think psychologically functions as an excuse to not even try. Is that a better crux?

perhaps, for example, ad revenue.

I should confess that that was not my finest work, rhetoric-wise. (I was in a rush that week to ship as many posts as I could before Habryka got the draw on me, posting on the 14th, 16th, 17th, and 20th, and quality may have suffered somewhat.) Hopefully my comments here about the importance of normative ideals in culture is clearer.

we disagree about how to accomplish the mission of an intellectual forum like Less Wrong purports to be

Right. (But, um, note that I think most apparent “disagreements” among humans are actually disguised conflicts; I don’t think I’m obligated to take your self-report literally, nor would I expect you to trust mine.)

was not tracking that how much and what Eliezer was posting was downstream of what sort of an environment LessWrong was, and that it was smoother and more rational to work inside of those dynamics

I’d expect you’d agree that focusing on Yudkowsky feeling comfortable with posting is Goodhartable. We likely disagree on how Goodharted it is in practice. (As I’ve written about at length elsewhere, I think a lot of Yudkowsky’s work since at least 2016 is just not very good for reasons that have to do with him giving up on the normative ideal.)

[AnnaSalamon]

The reason it seems like an intuitively surprising claim to me is because—as a non-specialist, I thought the standard explanation for the Royal Society’s success was, um, Science? The experimental method? Right? Like, these are the guys whose motto was Nullius in verba, “Take no one’s word for it”, said to be “an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”

I’ve attempted to read primary sources from around the origins of Science (quite a bit, though still less than I’d like and also it’s been 20 years), and my own impression is that Science was enabled partly by a designed shift in social graces (by humans who thought social graces matter), but, not a content-neutral sort of advance in social graces (nothing like “this way we can create more harmony in arbitrary situations”), but an engineered change in social etiquette aimed specifically at making it easy for gentlemen who cared about their reputations, and cared also about not being challenged to duels etc., to be able to verify one anothers’ experiments. Like, “we have a norm around here in which everyone aspires to verify everything for themselves, and so if they ask you how you did your experiment, and share their own attempted replications and results, they won’t be doubting your honor, they’ll instead be practicing our local virtues. Also, everyone will keep their speech strictly about what happened when they tried different experiments, and will not e.g. accuse one another of lying—they’ll only say that their own attempt yielded a different result.”

I do think it was pretty darn different from Crocker’s Rules.

[Vaniver]

The reason it seems like an intuitively surprising claim to me is because—as a non-specialist, I thought the standard explanation for the Royal Society’s success was, um, Science?

This explanation is on the wrong level of abstraction. From my point of view, the whole question is “How did this group of humans manage to do science together?” It wasn’t by embroidering “Science!” onto their banners; there were lots of details to their organization.

(And the practice of science has changed substantially, over the years, such that even a practicing scientist today might be far out of touch with the underpinnings of the true science. Comparing organizations, comparing eras, asking which is better—this takes scholarship and empiricism to figure out.)

Like, on the simplest level, Nullius in Verbia cannot be the basis of science because of limited human observational capacity. (Do you think the Earth has magma inside it? Is that because you checked, or because someone told you?) The actual basis of science has to be something more like “take people’s word only on clearly laid-out chains of checkable inferences and observations, and careful observation of their character”.^[1]

Crocker’s rules is obviously consilient with the philosophical vision. “Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor,” “[w]hich, in point of fact, they would be,” says the page. (You see, because having an accurate map is instrumentally convergent for rational agents: if I were an idiot, I would want to know about it, because that might have decision-relevant consequences.)

Crocker’s rules erode the foundation on which they rest, in a way that I suspect Eliezer learned by experience. If it is costly to call you a moron, then people deciding whether or not to do it will have to determine whether or not it’s worth making the bet, and to the extent they have skill at telling whether or not you’re a moron, they’ll only call you out when it’s correct. But if it’s too costly, you miss out on corrections you would’ve want to have; the only way to get all of those is by making it free, and thus all bets worthwhile.

But all bets? The only reason to tell an unknown they’re a moron is because they have made a mistake; there are many reasons to call a celebrity a moron which do not depend on the celebrity having made a mistake. Crocker’s Rules liberates the autistic, but it also attracts the cruel and meanspirited to you, the sneerers who delight in you having abandoned a sort of social self-defense. At some point the signal from criticism drops into the negative, and you find yourself missing out again, because it is no longer worthwhile to pay attention to the pile of messages.

[This is why, if you do follow Crocker’s Rules, it primarily makes sense to do so for private communications; there’s less reward for sending someone hatemail than there is for writing hateful comments.]

That is--

Of course, humans can’t embody the ideal, but it’s important that there is an ideal, and claims that humans shouldn’t even try to better approximate the ideal because it’s supposedly impossible don’t comport with the philosophical vision I learned from the texts.

I think it would be different if we were saying “look, Said hurts our feelings and that’s not where we’d like to spend our limited pain tolerance.”^[2] Instead we’re saying things like the preceding sections, that “yeah I can see why people might think that Crocker’s Rules make sense, but actually we think the society where people expect that other people are (or should be) following Crocker’s Rules is worse than one where they don’t.”

That is, the ideal is actually different based on your goals and situation. The Tao of a lone scholar is not the same as the Tao of a participant in a university or a scene; arguments that you receive a benefit in some situation from following a policy do not constitute a complete argument for that policy.

You say that so casually! Okay, sure, humans can’t put correctness before all other concerns. But that’s, like, non-normative, right?

I think the thing that often is going on is that someone will complain that Said is annoying, or that they didn’t like his speech act along some layer other than correctness. This will then be interpreted by you or Said as being about correctness—the deflection of legitimate concerns rather than addressing them—which will then be viewed by the someone as deflection of their legitimate concerns (about something other than correctness). Unsurprisingly, little progress is made from that starting point.

To return to the point of instrumental convergence—many things are instrumentally convergent for rational agents, like continued survival, or other agents thinking highly of them, and so on. A thing that we need for a proper intellectual scene is more like sportsmanship, in that people want the truth to win socially, or are identifying with the sport instead of with their team. A professor who suppresses papers critical of his contribution to an academic field is not being irrational—he is pursuing a plan that achieves his values based on an accurate understanding of the world—he is instead being evil or anti-social, in that he’s putting his wants above humanity’s shared understanding; we wish he was operating on different values.

I think this is the layer where you need to make your case—that Said was pushing people towards the right sort of sportsmanship—and I think this was not true on net.^[3]

[Edit] On reflection I think this section might be confusing and I should try to lay out my reasoning more clearly. I think one of the arguments for Said being fine is that it is the user’s job to have an emotional orientation where they like Said’s style of criticism, and that’s because that emotional orientation is both good for them personally and also good for society. I buy the argument that the emotional orientation has benefits for society—for example, I think it’s better if the professor has it—but I think the question is “which environment causes there to be more of that orientation?” and I think your plan is “require it and let them sort out how it’s produced” in a way that I think is trying to simplify the world so that you neither need to figure out whether your plan is efficacious or put in any of the work that would cause the system to be better.

1. ^

   Like, I’m sticking my neck out here on the Royal Society analogy, and doing it primarily on the strength of one historian. If it turns out that my understanding of that historian’s work is confused, or the work is discredited, so too my point, and this is bad for my overall credibility.

2. ^

   The closest to this is the “limited moderation time” argument, but I’m not sure time is actually the most important resource there.

3. ^

   I might buy that Said was operating in a way that would work well in a culture already high in this sort of sportsmanship, but that’s different from causing the culture to have more of it.

[Steven Byrnes]

I feel like some of the stuff about “nitpicking” /​ “non central objections” /​ principle of charity /​ etc. is people talking past each other regarding two different things.

The FIRST THING is “non-load-bearing errors”. An unusually clear-cut example would be: Alice publishes a math proof, and the summation in equation (17) starts from 0 when it’s supposed to start from 1. It’s kinda obvious from context that it’s supposed to start from 1, and the proof as a whole would be valid once that’s corrected, but it’s still an error as written. Bob reads the manuscript and points out the mistake to Alice.

The SECOND THING is “Gricean failures”. An unusually clear-cut example would be: Alice says “I need to fill my car with gas”, and Bob says, “Well, no, you mean fill the car’s gas tank with gas. You’re not gonna be closing the doors and pouring gasoline through the windows onto the seats!!”

Hopefully we can all agree that Bob is being helpful in the first example and unhelpful (and annoying) in the second example. Outside of formal contexts like math, communication is always hard, and always involves imperfect analogies, ambiguities, etc. The speaker can and should do what they can to make the listener’s job easier, but ultimately the listener will inevitably need to apply at least some interpretive effort, using the principle of charity, to figure out what the speaker probably intended. Hence Grice’s maxims.

(I think my two chosen examples are at opposite extremes of a spectrum, with shades of gray in between, as opposed to “non-load-bearing errors” versus “Gricean failures” being two discrete categories.)

So anyway, I feel like at least some of the dispute is that some people are accusing Said of doing the annoying & unhelpful second thing (“Gricean failures”), and then the OP (and Said himself) are reacting with horror to the idea that people don’t want to be apprised of the first thing (“non-load-bearing errors”).

(I’m not very familiar with Said (I don’t recall him commenting on my posts ever?) so don’t have a very strong opinion either way, but I just read the famous 2018 comment on “Zetetic Explanation”, and I think I’d vote for this comment being an example of the bad second thing, not the good first thing.)

[Zack_M_Davis]

and then the OP (and Said himself) are reacting with horror to the idea that people don’t want to be apprised of the first thing (“non-load-bearing errors”).

Rather, I think a lot of the people complaining about the second thing are being dishonest (in a functionalist sense that’s about a systematic mismatch between their verbal reports and their world-models, not about whether they consciously think the sentence “I am lying now”) and what’s actually going on is that they just don’t want to be criticized. People trying to protect their current beliefs have an incentive not only to misrepresent non-bearing-errors as Gricean failures, but also to misrepresent load-bearing errors as non-load-bearing.

I think the karma system works fine for genuine Gricean errors. If someone asks a dumb question that isn’t worth your time, you can downvote it and move on with your day, trusting that readers will also recognize it as a dumb question and not think less of you for not answering it. The desire to purge users who ask annoying questions (for imposing a cost on authors who are afraid of looking bad if they don’t reply) would seem to rest on an implicit recognition that readers don’t think the annoying questions are dumb Gricean failures.

[Gordon Seidoh Worley]

I think the karma system works fine for genuine Gricean errors. If someone asks a dumb question that isn’t worth your time, you can downvote it and move on with your day, trusting that readers will also recognize it as a dumb question and not think less of you for not answering it. The desire to purge users who ask annoying questions (for imposing a cost on authors who are afraid of looking bad if they don’t reply) would seem to rest on an implicit recognition that readers don’t think the annoying questions are dumb Gricean failures.

In practice I don’t recall many cases of people downvoting Gricean errors. And in particular Said was really good at pointing out Gricean errors relative to the framing presented in the Sequences. That would be fine, except he’d do it when a post was specifically trying to reject some part of the framing provided by the Sequences, which is not really engaging with the post so much as attempting to say “i reject your framing” without actually arguing for why the framing is rejected.

(My general complaint is that Said doesn’t argue in good faith or seem to know what that means. What you see as his virtue of asking questions to get you to say exactly what you mean, I see as the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage with the author to try to understand them.)

[AnnaSalamon]

What you see as his virtue of asking questions to get you to say exactly what you mean, I see as the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage with the author to try to understand them.

I suspect this (set of paired perceptions) is might help for seeing some part of what is scissors-y about Said.

[Zack_M_Davis]

doesn’t argue in good faith or seem to know what that means

As I’ve pointed out before, your definition of “good faith” is nonstandard (albeit not entirely unmotivated).

virtue of asking questions to get you to say exactly what you mean, I see as the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage with the author to try to understand them

As an author, I expect to be able to answer questions aimed to get me to say exactly what I mean! Don’t you?

I don’t always get around to answering questions, but I would never, ever disparage someone asking real questions about my work as engaging in an “the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage” with me. That just seems ungrateful: in a world of abundant information, the fact that someone is paying attention to my work at all is a precious gift; I’m not in a position to demand that they do it on my terms.

[Gordon Seidoh Worley]

As an author, I expect to be able to answer questions aimed to get me to say exactly what I mean! Don’t you?

I reject the framing that there is exactness about what I mean, per se. There is only what my words mean to me, and what they mean to others. I can at best say words that cause others to say words that I interpret to mean they understand what I mean, and sometimes this can be proven with high confidence by, say, using a mathematically precise model built on a agreed upon common grounding.

I’d instead say that I expect to answer questions aimed at clarifying confusion arising from differences of interpretation about what I intended to communicate, as well as questions about whether or not the world model induced in the reader’s mind (including my own mind reading my own words) by my words is accurate.

I don’t always get around to answering questions, but I would never, ever disparage someone asking real questions about my work as engaging in an “the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage” with me.

Have you never dealt with a troll whose trolling was disguised as real questions? Or more generally never dealt with someone who engaged in ways that exploited you for the purposes of their own agenda? My read is that you’re employing “real questions” to paper over a lot of complexity in how people comment on posts.

I’m not in a position to demand that they do it on my terms.

I mostly think you are, or at least are to the extent they choose to do it in the comments of something you wrote. For example, rather than a post on LessWrong, if I were hosting an academic symposium on nuclear physics, I’d reasonably be upset if a crank showed up to argue about perpetual motion. Similarly, I think there’s some good reason to push back if someone shows up and tries to yank control of the frame within the context of the comments on a post, especially if, like Said, they do it implicitly rather than explicitly.

I can’t think of a specific example, but for example I’d be much happier to see a comment that said “I think you’re wrong because you have the wrong framing. We should think about it this way...” than “You’re wrong because this contradicts this thing...” when the thing in question is a complex theory rather than some obvious, settled fact.

[Canaletto]

Well, good point. But there are clearly situations where this fails, like suppose a user with a lot of karma starts unambiguously insulting someone, e.g. throwing slurs. They should be warned/​banned for this one act! Karma mechanisms would not react appropriately, as only a small number of people would see this comment and react to it.

[TsviBT]

A further wrinkle is that one man’s Gricean failure is another man’s crusade to uphold norms. Elliptical comments leave a whole lot of ambiguity (e.g. are you curious, or critiquing; do you think you already know how to better do what I was trying and allegedly failing to do), and principles of charity fall prey to ambiguity by regrettedly overinvesting effort.

[AnnaSalamon]

For me there’s a few layers I need to sift out to respond well here. Apologies for the length.

1) Habryka’s mandate of heaven looks secure to me.

I believe Habryka and co have, and deserve, the mandate of heaven w.r.t. being the LW mods. I am grateful to them for running LW, and I support their authority to decide who is and is not banned.

(Why: This place remains impressive to me for a certain kind of discussion and community vetting that I value a lot. I’m really grateful it’s still here! I predict most plausible replacements would produce something much worse; also I don’t see any deep/​large/​recurring pattern of epistemic rule-breaking or other ethical rule-breaking of the sort that might cause a site to lose “mandate of heaven” even without suitable replacement.)

(@Zack, I believe you disagree with me that Habryka and co have the “mandate of heaven,” and Said’s ban and its causes and rationale are a partial crux for you here? Sorry if I’m getting you wrong.)

2) My personal experiences of Said on LW were clearly and substantially net-positive, for whatever that’s worth.

My experiences of Said in some threads that I cared about, but didn’t ~dare comment on:

• Several times (on different topics, with different sets of people) there were conversations I watched with horror unfolding on LW, that I didn’t want to personally engage with because I expected I’d get caught up in politics of sorts/​degrees that I didn’t really have budget for. And then Said made particular comments in those threads, and I felt a little more safe here.

My experiences of Said in threads I didn’t much care about:

• Kinda neutral to mildly negative/​boring

My experiences of direct interactions with Said:

• Fine. no trouble.

• Also, there’re particular “sequences” I’ve been daydreaming of writing, and making long drafts toward writing, for years. (While occasionally posting small chunks, such as Believing In, with more hopefully upcoming eventually.) I found Said’s imaginary presence in those threads helpful; I thought of him there often when trying to draft; it’s part of why I wanted to post them to LW and not to Substack or somewhere. (Though, only part. This community is still intact IMO. I love it here.) But, like, I expected Said would be drawn to the posts I’ve been trying to compose, and that he could and would check whether I was making a certain particular kind of sense that I wanted to make.

(I do think there are others, attempting different things from me with different premises, who ~predictably had other experiences of Said, and not because they’re unvirtuous or were acting poorly. My best theory of this is #7c, below. I separately think there are others, attempting different things from me with different premises, who ~predictably had other experiences of Said at moments when they did act unvirtuously; hence my past gratitude to Said for intervening in the “some threads I cared about” mentioned above.)

3) Accurate naming of what we’re doing on LW (whatever it turns out to be) is helpful.

In a large majority of communities, the leadership team and local norms ask not only that people support their authority to impose rules, but also that people support the “load-bearing narratives” of that community, and the leaders’ ability to choose these narratives (e.g. “we banned user X for prosocial reasons; please trust us on this and don’t erode our authority by arguing about it.”

On LW, the mod team does not ask this. We have instead a strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters (at least the “public” variety): accurate naming of whatever’s going on publicly is good. If there’s a load-bearing narrative that is false, pointing out that it’s false is welcome and should be considered pro-social.

This is a very cool experiment IMO, and linked with much of what I love about this place.

I’m excited about the project of trying to locate whatever it is that was actually happening between LW and Said, and I hope to do this in a way that doesn’t confusingly imply that the LW mod team has to do whatever I or the majority think is correct (hence me clarifying #1 and #3 here).

4) Finite moderation budgets may, in some circumstances, require reducing lesswrong.com’s ambitions

When good projects repeatedly “bite off more than they can chew”, they get destroyed.

Oli and the mod team have finite budgets of time, attention, [ability to keep doing tasks that seem futile/​unrewarding], etc. So do authors and commenters. Since LW is building beautiful, worthwhile things, it ought not attempt to bite off more than it can chew.

Part of what I take Oli to argue for, in Banning Said Achmiz is that, for whatever reason, when Said was here, there kept being ~unsustainable costs paid by the moderation team, and also the moderation team tried pretty hard to find a better way and did not thereby locate a sustainable alternative that satisficed on all their goals. Insofar as that’s true (and I think it is), they were right to ban him: it is high priority that the site continue sustainably.

Despite me being fairly sure they were in this sense “right” to ban Said, I’d like to know more about the mechanics of why Said couldn’t be here, because it’ll help me understand what LessWrong is, and what aspirations are and aren’t alive for this forum.

(It seems to me plausible that banning Said required deciding LW should not to aspire to some forum property that some still believe it is aspiring to. It also seems plausible to me that it did not. Either way, I’d love common knowledge on this point if we can get it. Terrible things can come of a project holding visible titles without deserving them; and sad things come also of people withdrawing hopes from a project inaccurately.)

5) Healthy communities require some empiricism or implicit know-how

Something very cool has been happening around LW over the years, and has survived while many (though not all) other internet forums died. How? I would love to know. Some of it’s from correct principles; some of it’s from noticing patterns in the local context and acting prudently on them even without an explicit understanding (though, ideally, while desiring such an understanding). As Vaniver said, “[good communities] are grown, negotiated, and cultivated across many people and many actions.”

(I’m including this point because I suspect it’s part of where @Zack and I disagree? If I didn’t think this, I would think it a more feasible demand that moderators either make a rule Said is breaking, or tolerate Said’s actions.)

6) I think the norms questions involved in Said’s ban are important

This conversation is much too labor-intensive to be an affordable response to most user-bans. But IMO it is unlike most user-bans: I suspect we are near the nub of some of LW’s cultural choices, and pieces of self-concept, and that getting this stuff clear (where we can) will pay off.

(I mention this, because I do want to discuss Said at length but don’t want to contribute to a cultural norm in which people expect most user-bans to be discussed this much.)

7) Why exactly is Said involved in so many demon threads, with so much moderator attention?

Oli stated in his ban post that Said [was involved in lots of demon threads, with huge costs in moderator attention]. Oli also says “one person [is] able to derail a comment thread.”

When I’m deciding whether banning Said indicates LW giving up some important aspiration, a lot hinges on what kept causing these demon threads and moderator costs. From my POV, this is the core interesting question about Said and LW!

There’re at least three hypotheses I’d like to consider:

Hypothesis A: Conversational blocking via “my feelings would be hurt”

One hypothesis: [Some people don’t like to have (their particular) cherished beliefs/​egos/​etc weakened in public] + [LW’s context allows such people to create demon-threads and moderator-attention-sinkholes whenever these arbitrarily-choosable cherished beliefs would otherwise be attacked, until the attacks stop].

I think this is roughly Zack’s hypothesis in the OP.

If this hypothesis is true, LW is indeed abandoning something very important (though it may need to for affordability reasons, per #4.) This is a priori plausible to me, because I’m told by varied people that many academic fields (such as sociology) and also areas of public discourse die of this, which suggests it’s a common equilibrium.

There is a continuum of more or less damaging ways “mandatory agreeability” could occur: less damaging if it is only very particular users or topics, more damaging if it is more widespread. Either way, it’s a thing the site’s protectors would want to be vigilant about tracking the non-expansion of, even if they couldn’t afford to keep it at zero.

I do not think think this is what was happening in the Ben Hoffman case, although I do think it may have been what was happening in some of the other demon threads.

Hypothesis B: Any Sequences-fluent user can DDOS attack easily, on LW. And Said frequently did.

A second hypothesis: Said was DDOS-ing people often, using an overly ~symmetric methodology that could destroy ~any useful conversation [within the high trust LW backdrop]. Also, Said chose his DDOS-ing contexts without enough redeeming good taste /​ virtue, and was uninterested in good faith conversation about whether this was good.

I think this was roughly Oli’s interpretation, as witnessed by his footnote 2. (Very roughly: any user who can make comments that reliably aren’t all downvoted, can swallow arbitrary amounts of time from authors and readers, and prevent useful discussion in any thread, given LW’s existing social norms and context. Moderators must therefore either remove users who abuse this, or change this background context, if LW is to host fruitful discussions or to retain authors who are motivated by fruitful discussions.)

If this is the case, the Said ban does not constitute LW giving up on any important aspirations.

Hypothesis C: An uneasy sometimes-norm against using concepts one can’t build from validated pieces

My own lead guess, which I don’t put that much stock in but do wish to include, is as follows. (There are of course also many other possibilities.)

A sometimes-norm: LW sometimes has a norm:

• “do not use any concepts in your writing that you can’t explain how to construct, and validate, from their constituent parts.”

This norm has much use, but also must be suspended in any cases where a person is to discuss a “gestalt” that pays useful rent for them and that they have not constructed from the ground up (which includes most concepts people use). This uneasy truce between norms is one of a core tension in today’s LW (and is fruitful; LW gains much from having some of each).

Said often messed with this uneasy tension between norms as follows:

• (i) Said would zero in on cases where a person is using such a concept;

• (ii) Said would ask beginner questions as though interested in pinning down which concept (rather than initially telegraphing “I am visibly challenging your concept”)

• (iii) The person with the concept would be caught flat-footed, trying to be consistent with ~definitions that hadn’t been intended as can-hold-weight-to-a-critic constructions, but only as pointers that might help a friendly beginner roughly locate the gestalt intuition.

(I believe i-iii also occured with Socrates in Athens.) If Said had instead challenged the concepts more explicitly from the outset, it would’ve led to less demon-threading and moderation-demand because people could more easily have said “I acknowledge that I don’t know how to build this concept from the basics, but it’s doing work for me anyhow and I’d like to make use of it.”

(Robert Pirsig, in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, argues that Socrates attacked Athens in roughly this fashion, and persuaded many people of a false thing thereby – namely, that he persuaded people that “virtue” had to be a Platonic form, rather than a Tao that can’t fully be named, and he relatedly persuaded people that many of those who actually had virtue, didn’t.)

[Zack_M_Davis]

Your section (1) is super weird. Imagine an OpenAI employee wrote an impassioned post condemning the superalignment team being denied the compute it was promised and arguing that this reneged on OpenAI’s mission to make sure AGI benefits all of humanity.

Now imagine another employee wrote a response that began:

I believe Sam Altman has, and deserves, the mandate of heaven w.r.t. being the CEO of OpenAI. I am grateful to him for running OpenAI, and I support his authority to decide how compute and personnel are allocated. This place remains impressive to me for a certain kind of AI capability and safety research that I value a lot. I’m really grateful it’s still here! I predict most plausible replacements would produce something much worse.

That would be weird, right? First of all, it just doesn’t seem like something someone would write if they honestly disagreed on the merits about the superalignment compute allocation decision being bad. Someone who honestly disagreed would write something like, “Actually, your claim that superalignment was ‘promised’ compute rests on a misinterpretation of what leadership actually said. Furthermore, here’s why the decision is actually better for the odds of AGI going well …”

(Or if they were uncertain on the merits, they’d say, “I’m uncertain about your claim that superalignment was really promised compute, because …”)

But more than that, it’s that it isn’t even trying to look like something someone would write if they honestly disagreed or were uncertain on the merits. It’s a loyalty pledge. You can’t possibly believe that it makes your following remarks more credible to people who are devoted to making sure AGI benefits all of humanity and are trying to judge the superalignment compute question on the merits. So … why would you write that way, then?

In a large majority of communities, the leadership team and local norms ask not only that people support their authority to impose rules, but also that people support the “load-bearing narratives” of that community, and the leaders’ ability to choose these narratives (e.g. “we banned user X for prosocial reasons; please trust us on this and don’t erode our authority by arguing about it.”

On LW, the mod team does not ask this. We have instead a strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters

So, that would be great if it were true, but is that in fact true of today’s LessWrong 2.0? Why do you think that? I think §VI.3 “The Real Rule Is To Cover for the Ingroup” and §VI.4 “Preventing ‘Relitigation’ Is a Pretext for Suppressing Dissent” offer a lot of textual evidence to the contrary.

there kept being ~unsustainable costs paid by the moderation team [...] Insofar as that’s true (and I think it is)

Which part of §VI.1 “User-Level Bans Are a Sufficient and Less Intrusive Remedy” do you disagree with? What’s wrong with telling complainants to downvote and move on with their lives?

[AnnaSalamon]

re: Zack’s claims about my section (1)

re: Zack’s claim that my section (1) in the grandparent comment is “super weird” and isn’t a thing a person would write if trying to agree/​disagree/​evaluate the moderator decision on the object level:

I agree it isn’t a thing I’d write if I were considering only the object-level “did the mod team’s decision to ban Said stem from virtues or vices, and did it have important good or bad consequences” question, as it (mostly) isn’t about that question.

I disagree that it’s “weird”: I make comments like this fairly often in various contexts. E.g., while running CFAR, I’ve often had occasion to want to share object-level views on e.g. which way the storage room ought to be organized or how much pizza we ought to buy, while making it clear that authority to make that decision still rested with [person who was charged with it] and they ought to make their own best mistakes, not mine. I also appreciated it when others make this clear. Sometimes there are political fights; sometimes there are epistemic bits of sharing; IMO it often allows a simpler/​clearer/​less-politically-constrained epistemic discussion, and improves future decision-making (by leaving it clearer who’s in charge, so that we continue to get actions from the in-charge-person’s inside view instead of from a political muddle) to be very clear that one is not wishing to change the political power structure when one is not. Here, I am not wishing to change the political power structure.

Possibly-skippable “nitpick”:

This last bit is complicated I can’t actually express my actual views without it:

Even with respect to the “object level” question of “did the decision to ban Said stem from virtues or vices, and did it have important good or bad consequences”:

• There really are at least two “layers of decision” here, and it’s easy to get confused between them, but it’s valuable AFAICT to not get confused between them.

• Layer i: the mod team decided(/​believed in) they had the authority to ban Said, even without a “here is the specific explicit rule Said broke,” based on the empirics of “as far as the mod team can tell, bad things keep happening (from mod team’s POV) when he’s here, and mod team put in a good deal of effort to try to change this without successfully changing this.”

  • I confident this layer of the mod team’s decision stems from virtue, and will have expected-good consequences. I expect us to have far more “ability to have good things” if mod teams such as Lightcone’s decide they have this power, vs if they don’t.

  • (And it’s not obviously consensus or anything; it’s a thing I would’ve gotten wrong at age 18, and I think a fair chunk

• Layer ii: the mod team decided(/​predicted/​believed in) that Said’s actions were unvirtuous, and that Said’s actions had bad consequences, and that Said’s actions were something like “responsible” for the repeated demon threads and “huge moderation overheads” phenomenon.

  • My inside view disagrees with the mod team on this.

  • Accordingly, I would have made a different decision if I were (god forbid) in the mod team’s shoes (though I would not have been in those shoes; running LW looks like a huge amount of work and pain to me, and I am truly grateful the mod team does it)

  • My all-things-considered predictions are… weak disagreement still, I guess? but less disagreement than my inside view, because the mod team spent way more time both thinking in detail about Said’s LW threads (which I haven’t even read most of, though I’ve read a sizeable chunk), and figuring out how to run the site broadly, so I’m pretty sure they’re better than I am at running a site that stays healthy, and I weight their inside view here substantially when arriving at my all-things-considered predictions/​would-bet-on’s.

re: Local norms of telling the truth even on awkward social matters

Me: We have instead a strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters

Zack: So, that would be great if it were true, but is that in fact true of today’s LessWrong 2.0? Why do you think that?

I believe in this norm for LW, and I predict that the mod team, if asked, would say they endorse this norm. That is, I predict that the mod team, if asked, would say something like “yes, Anna (or Bob or whoever), we do not have a request that you avoid public speech that might undermine our narratives about it being good to have banned Said or whatever; we rather have a view that it is prosocial for you to attempt to promote truth and clarity as you see it, including here.” We can check this by asking the mod team if you want.

I agree that LW does not fully hit this aspirational norm. I still care about the aspiration, partly because it’s something I personally aspire to for LW and I believe in attempting to do this in alliance with the mod team and with the (I predict) many others on LW who also believe in this norm. (Though I expect plenty of other users don’t believe in this norm.)

re: Causes of “unsustainable costs” from demon threads and mod team facilitation time

Me (adding here a bit more of my original statement): “for whatever reason, when Said was here, there kept being ~unsustainable costs paid by the moderation team, and also the moderation team tried pretty hard to find a better way and did not thereby locate a sustainable alternative that satisficed on all their goals.”

Zack: “Which part of §VI.1 “User-Level Bans Are a Sufficient and Less Intrusive Remedy” do you disagree with? What’s wrong with telling complainants to downvote and move on with their lives?”

I either don’t understand you, or I think you’re not responding to the thing I was intending to say (which may be my fault for unclarity). Let me try again.

I believe that, as a matter of what empirically ended up actually occurring:

• a) The mod team repeatedly paid unsustainable costs in time, attention, and morale.

• b) The mod team put significant time and effort toward seeking a solution that would satisfice on other fronts and keep Said.

• c) The mod team in fact failed (in that time) to find a solution that they believed satisficed on other fronts and that kept Said. (And, I predict, would still have failed to find a [solution they found acceptable] if they had somehow read these sections of your post at that time.)

I think a-c is hard to dispute. Do you dispute it?

re: your question: “Which part of §VI.1 “User-Level Bans Are a Sufficient and Less Intrusive Remedy” do you disagree with? What’s wrong with telling complainants to downvote and move on with their lives?”

My inside-view is that, if god forbid I was site dictator, I would try telling complainants to use user-level bans and/​or downvotes. My inside-view is also that the LW mod team had reasons, born of experience, why they didn’t think this was sufficient for goals they had; I don’t think I’d presently be able to pass their ITT on this matter.

My guess at some reasons some reasonable people might find user-level bans plus downvotes insufficient:

• Maybe many users would eventually realize they wish to individually ban Said, but Said’s disguises are of such a calibre (and peoples’ priors of such an inaccurate sort) that they usually don’t realize this until they’ve paid large costs that they predictably regret having paid. So it’s helpful for moderators to anticipate this and ban him for everyone.

  • My attempted solution: Perhaps, in this world, the mod team could try having him banned-for-each-user-by-default, while letting individual users un-ban Said from their posts if they actively bother to do so.

• If Said makes his own top-level posts complaining about posts he is banned from replying-to (as he did at least once), there are at least two objections I could imagine a reasonable person having to this state of affairs:

  • He is changing (“interfering with”) the LW user-base’s notions of which [posts, and claims in posts] are “in good standing” and which claims “are unable to reply to earnest beginner questions.” If these changes are bad/​confusing (e.g. because Said pretends to be “unable to understand” claims he in fact disagrees with, and sometimes persists until his interlocutors are exhausted rather than until anyone is convinced, and people have trouble noticing Said’s motives or patterns if they haven’t read huge amounts of Said), a reasonable-person mod might disprefer this.

  • If Said’s threads are best interpreted as fairly-successful attempts to enforce particular norms that the mod team doesn’t want to have as site norms (as argued by Jimmy, in his example on the Ben Hoffman post), a reasonable-person mod might object to this, because they don’t want site users to infer that this site’s culture believes in the norms Said is enforcing.

  • Users might feel some (need/​desire/​obligation) to respond to top-level posts about their posts, and wish not to have to engage with top-level posts about their posts by Said, and so be discouraged from posting to LW. (This could in principle be discouraging of relevant good posts even if Said’s points are mostly bad, as long as Said’s points seem good to a decent chunk of users, and as long as the poster cares about the views of that chunk of users, or of other users who update off that chunk of users.)

What is your take on why Ben Hoffman disliked Said’s comments under “Zetetic Explanation”? I would guess that for Ben a user-level ban would have been sufficient; but I still think his response is a counterexample the hypothesis that [“downvote and ignore” will be sufficient if a person isn’t seeking to unjustly control their own reputation in others’ eyes].

[Zack_M_Davis]

re: alleged local norms of telling the truth even on awkward social matters

I predict that the mod team, if asked, would say they endorse this norm [for telling the truth even on awkward social matters]. That is, I predict that the mod team, if asked, would say something like “yes, Anna (or Bob or whoever), we do not have a request that you avoid public speech that might undermine our narratives about it being good to have banned Said or whatever; we rather have a view that it is prosocial for you to attempt to promote truth and clarity as you see it, including here.” We can check this by asking the mod team if you want.

You can’t possibly expect me to be that gullible. You wouldn’t accept claims about what “strong local norms” hold at OpenAI by asking Sam Altman.

Sure, if I accepted that as the adjudication criterion for the claim and we then asked the mods whether they affirm that we have a strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters, there’s a pretty good chance they’d say Yes.

But if so, they would be wrong. As I pointed out in §VI.3, Oliver Habryka is already on the record saying that he “would appreciate some courtesy to keep discussion to the principles and decision-level instead of critiques of my personal behavior, as indeed much of the cost of moderation is measured in having any moderation-adjacent action be torn apart and be requested to be justified or defended.”

Asking people to withhold “critiques of [a moderator’s] personal behavior” in their capacity as a moderator is not compatible with a “strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters”! It just isn’t! You can’t wiggle out of this one by claiming that it’s covered by “LW does not fully hit this aspirational norm.” The request is a denial of the aspiration!

(For completeness, I should note that a footnote disclaims, “though of course in as much as something seems egregious, you and others should feel free to call it out”. I don’t think this changes anything. The only reason to make the request but provide an escape hatch for “egregious” bad behavior is to give a free pass for less-than-”egregious” bad behavior.)

re: separating object-level from authority claims

I don’t think a manager telling an employee “My opinion is X, but I want to emphasize that it’s your call” is analogous to the present situation.

Suppose someone wrote an 18,000 word post with careful quotes and citations accusing CfAR employee Emily of abusing her pizza-purchase responsibilities for personal gain against the organization’s mission: Emily deliberately purchased too much of her own favorite kind of pizza, knowing that the workshop attendees wouldn’t eat that much, so that Emily could keep the leftovers. Would you begin your response with “I believe Emily has, and deserves, the mandate of heaven and I support her authority to decide what pizzas to buy”?

I still think that would be weird! If I were President of CfAR in that scenario, I would not say that, even if I liked and trusted Emily and had no intention of firing or punishing her under any circumstances. (Quietly overriding her on the pizza-ordering task need not be a punishment, if Emily’s pay and status were to remain the same.) I would say something more like, “I trust Emily, and that doesn’t sound like something she would do.” I would then say either, “I expect this to be false upon investigation,” or “This is so implausible that I’m not even going to bother to investigate it.” I would not affirm Emily’s authority independently of the accusation being true!

If my support for Emily were unconditional, it would be dishonest to claim that norms questions about the use of CfAR’s food budget are important. Yes requires the possibility of No: if there are no consequences for breaking norms, then there are no norms. The honest thing to say in that situation would be, “Why are you even telling me this? I don’t care what would be good for the workshop attendees or the organization’s mission; what matters is that Emily gets the pizza she wants.”

re: causes of “unsustainable costs” from demon threads and mod team facilitation time

I think a-c is hard to dispute. Do you dispute it?

If I’m supposed to accept “reasons, born of experience, why they didn’t think this was sufficient for goals they had”, then it’s vacuous! I’m not going to deny the the tautology, “If the mods are always right, then the mods are always right.”

If I’m allowed to doubt such reasons, I deny (b). As I suggested in July 2025, I think an obvious thing to try, that was not tried, would be to actively raise awareness and encourage use of the per-author user ban functionality. We have evidence that there was low-hanging awareness fruit in the form of, e.g., Romeostevensit’s comment on this post that he “didn’t know that was a feature”, and the Surprise react on my pointing out the existence of the feature in the first paragraph of §IV.1 by abstractapplic (who “voice[d] strong approval of the meta-level approaches on display” in the original ban annoucement).

He is changing (“interfering with”) the LW user-base’s notions of which [posts, and claims in posts] are “in good standing” [...] a reasonable-person mod might disprefer this.

By means of arguing about them! Changing the userbase’s notions of which posts are in good standing by means of arguing with them is what intellectual discourse is all about! Your “reasonable person” who disprefers this is not a “mod”; they’re a wannabe religious authority.

Users might feel some (need/​desire/​obligation) to respond to top-level posts about their posts, and wish not to have to engage with top-level posts about their posts by Said, and so be discouraged from posting to LW

So it’s not enough to let people censor criticism from the comment sections on own posts (which I’m supporting as a pragmatic solution to help people share the website), it’s not allowed to appear anywhere else on the website, either? Again, this amounts to a religious authority declaring Achmiz a heretic whom the faithful should ostracize. This is intellectually indefensible.

I would guess that for Ben a user-level ban would have been sufficient

So you concede that this is not relevant to my case that a site-wide ban was unjustified given the existence of user bans as a sufficient and less intrusive remedy as articulated in §IV.1.

[AnnaSalamon]

I think you misunderstood most of the views of mine that you’re responding to in this comment. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I am mincing words in a way that leaves things more confusing than necessary? Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding your remarks and you’re actually getting me fine and I’m confused about that? Or perhaps my views are outside what you’re expecting in some way.

Zack: Suppose someone wrote an 18,000 word post with careful quotes and citations accusing CfAR employee Emily of abusing her pizza-purchase responsibilities for personal gain against the organization’s mission: Emily deliberately purchased too much of her own favorite kind of pizza, knowing that the workshop attendees wouldn’t eat that much, so that Emily could keep the leftovers. Would you begin your response with “I believe Emily has, and deserves, the mandate of heaven and I support her authority to decide what pizzas to buy”?

No, because in that case Emily absolutely would not have or deserve the mandate of heaven with respect to lunch decisions! (This claim is not-super-related to whether a person wants to be in a conflict with or punish her or whatever; it’s just: in that case Emily would absolutely not be a correct or viable holder of the telos of the non-profit’s lunch purchases.)

When I say Habryka and co seem to me to have, and deserve, the “mandate of heaven” as LW site-mods, what I mean is:

• I think better things will happen for this site and the community around it if they keep this role, compared to either:

  • a) someone else taking over the website (within the realm of actually-plausible replacements), or

  • b) the website being shut down, or

  • c) the website continuing, with Habryka and co still technically in this role, but with the user-base mostly thinking of them as random forces rather than as [stewards of a cool project that it’s worth them lending some believing-in to].

• Plus also I think it’s “more dignified” in some virtue-ethical sense, in addition to likely having better consequences.

I tried to say this pretty clearly. I’m not sure why I failed. Did it make sense this time? My claim here is that Habryka and co’s relationship to lesswrong.com is unlike Emily’s relationship to the lunch orders.

Part of my background concepts here are:

Many tasks work better when a single person or team is in charge of them for a decent chunk of time, and isn’t “micromanaged,” and acts on their all things considered best guess about what’s good (rather than being tasked with doing what their manager would want, say). I believe “make lesswrong.com good” is such a task.

There are indeed circumstances and evidences that can mean it’s better to override a person on a task, if one can – but typically in such cases, it is also better to transfer the task away from the person on a lasting basis, if one can. Your example with fictional Emily and the lunch orders is such a case. My view is that the ban of Said on LW is not such a case.

—-

Re: local social norms about telling the truth about awkward local social matters, in cases where they’re a public matter (such as mod decisions or social norms, but not most users’ personal lives):

I was not trying to convince you lesswrong had such a norm, in that section. (re: your statement “You can’t possibly expect me to be that gullible.”) I was trying to answer your question about why I believed LW has such a norm.

My answer to “why do I believe LW has such a norm,” (which I maybe could’ve said more clearly last time):

I believe in such a norm, and am trying to practice it here.

I also believe that LW’s mod team, and LW’s site culture broadly (including among the users), is allied enough with this norm (and accommodating enough of this norm), that I can, without being in too much incoherence with myself, aim to:

• Practice this norm myself;

• Root for a LW that is led by this mod team;

• Practice this norm to some extent on behalf of my “believing in” of the LW project.

Re: your statement that LW can’t hold this aspiration given e.g. a particular Habryka comment: FWIW Habryka’s request that you link to seems reasonable to me, and is one that (at least as I choose to interpret his request) I was already trying to follow, without remembering he had made it explicitly: I’ve been acting in this conversation as though there’s a cost in person X’s attention to saying loudly “person X did bad thing Y,” and also as though there’s a cost to making it such that moderators expect huge amounts of such attention-costs if they take any moderator action. It seems worth-it to me to cause those costs sometimes (at least, that’s how I endorse reckoning these things; you’ve stated that you doubt this about me, and I’m not trying to give you contrary evidence here, just stating what goal I’m endorsing). But: I try first to see whether I have some lower-cost way to accomplish the same thing, and I do less of it than I would if it were cost-less.

I borrowed some of how I’m thinking about this stuff from reading (parts of) Toqueville’s “Democracy in America,” a long time ago. Toqueville says America is founded on two ideals – freedom, and equality – and one cannot fully optimize for one goal without trading off some against the other goal, and so there’s a tension. But he says the tension is fruitful, and that cool projects typically have at least two non-identical ideals that are both at least partially aimed at, in a fruitful tension, with development over time into how to reconcile them in practice.

I’d love your help figuring out where you (Zack) and I are disagreeing, here.

—

Re: my object-level suggestions for how a reasonable person might find user-level bans insufficient:

I think the question “could a reasonable person find user-level bans insufficient for non-evil reasons?” is fairly central to our dispute, and we should be talking more about this part. Does that seem right to you, Zack?

Me: [Said] is changing … the LW user-base’s notions of which [posts, and claims in posts] are “in good standing” [...] a reasonable-person mod might disprefer this.

Zack: By means of arguing about them! …

No, look, I agree (and my inner “reasonable people” agree) that if Said changes a person’s views by arguing with them, and thereby convincing them, that part’s good. The bad thing I am talking about is people observing “mere presence of visible disagreements that I’m not gonna bother to read the details of” in cases via Said starting threads they aren’t gonna bother to read through, and deeming particular claims “disputed by LW users-in-good-standing /​ too hard to sort through” (via the simple fact that it’s disputed and that the thread kinda goes forever (and not in the exciting “here’s all this stuff you’ll learn if you read this” way), not via finding the object-level comments convincing).

To spell out this argument in more detail:

• If you grab a person from the LW’s current “posts rejected for being word salad” pile, and add them to the prolific commenters, the site will get worse. (As you note.)

• This is basically because they cost more attention (to the LW users) than how much value they provide.

• I’d guess that some on this site who I consider reasonable, and who I expect you’d [consider reasonable if you didn’t know their Said beliefs], who believe the same about Said:

  • Costs he causes:

    • I suspect a sizeable chunk of users have a goal like “don’t incur needless reputational damage for via failing to respond to confusing-to-others claims that I made errors I didn’t make (especially if the claim is loud, reads as confident and Sequences-fluent, calls me out by name, etc)”

    • I suspect also Said sometimes responds to a significant chunk of what some users write on their topics of interest.

    • Then, they could abandon their goal, or respond to many statements of Said’s without learning much, or write less about their topics of interest. IMO it’s reasonable to hold a viewpoint in which all three of these options are costs.

  • Benefits he provides:

    • I appreciate some of the challenges he brings sometimes to stuff I think is poorly defended, that I’m afraid might “poison” LW, and his help anchoring parts of local validity semantics. But the “challenging stuff that might ‘poison’ LW” part, at least, is … the sort of “benefit” that depends a lot on tricky matters about what sort of site is good to have here, where some people I respect have different preferences.

    • He hasn’t provided any large amount of more-obvious “simple contributions” such as write-ups of neat stuff about math/​biology/​whatever, or case studies of how to use rationality to get somewhere practical, or funny stories that help rationality concepts stick in the mind, or other “good content.” (He does have a couple quality, upvoted top-level posts. But fairly few for being as long-standing and prolific a commenter as he is.)

(For anyone just dipping into the thread here: this is not my own view of Said. I like the site better with him. It’s my attempt to provide counterexamples to the claim [that I think is implied by Zack? But not actually made in these words, so Zack may disagree with it] “there are no reasonable positions plus non-evil goals a person could plausibly hold that would allow banning Said. User-bans plus downvotes would work for all legitimate goals.”)

–

re: why Ben Hoffman disliked Said’s comments on “Zetetic Explanation”

Me: What is your take on why Ben Hoffman disliked Said’s comments under “Zetetic Explanation”? I would guess that for Ben a user-level ban would have been sufficient; but I still think his response is a counterexample the hypothesis that [“downvote and ignore” will be sufficient if a person isn’t seeking to unjustly control their own reputation in others’ eyes].

Zack: So you concede that this is not relevant to my case that a site-wide ban was unjustified given the existence of user bans as a sufficient and less intrusive remedy as articulated in §IV.1.

I do not concede that, because “relevant” is a pretty broad term!

As I wrote above, I think Ben Hoffman’s large irritation about Said’s comments under “Zetetic Explanation” is a counterexample to the hypothesis [“downvote and ignore” will be sufficient if a person isn’t seeking to unjustly control their own reputation in others’ eyes]. I’d like to know whether you agree with this?

I’d like to know this because if you do agree, I’m curious for your guess at the mechanism why “downvote and ignore” is insufficient, and I’m curious whether the same mechanism indicates that user-level bans are also plausibly insufficient.

Thus, I remain interested in your take on why Ben Hoffman actively disliked Said’s comments instead of [downvoting and ignoring Said without caring much].

[Vaniver]

But he says the tension is fruitful, and that cool projects typically have at least two non-identical ideals that are both at least partially aimed at, in a fruitful tension, with development over time into how to reconcile them in practice.

Incidentally, I think it is helpful to view epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality as two non-identical ideas that have fruitful tension with each other. Self and No-Self was in part an attempt to point at how it makes sense to deepen them in connection with each other, rather than becoming unbalanced.

[Zack_M_Davis]

re: credibility of claims to believe in local social norms about telling the truth about something

I believe in such a norm, and am trying to practice it here.

I don’t believe you. I think you have a self-deceptive belief in believing-in such a norm, but your behavior is not consistent with sincere belief in the stated norm.

I’ve been acting in this conversation as though there’s a cost in person X’s attention to saying loudly “person X did bad thing Y,” and also as though there’s a cost to making it such that moderators expect huge amounts of such attention-costs if they take any moderator action. [...] It seems worth-it to me to cause those costs sometimes [...] I do less of it than I would if it were cost-less.

I think you would see the problem here if we were talking about any other subject. Forget about awkward local social matters. Think about a sequence of random experiments with two possible outcomes—coinflips.

What would it mean for someone to believe in a norm about telling the truth about the sequence of coinflips?

I think it would mean: carefully recording the results of any coinflips they see, no matter whether they were Heads or Tails, and socially punishing people who lie about coinflip results or who selectively report conflip results without being clear about the selection criteria.

The social punishment is necessary because if there are no consequences for breaking a norm, then there is no norm, so people who aren’t willing to punish norm violations don’t believe in the norm. The clause about selective reporting is necessary because we don’t want people to be able to disproportionately ignore Tails outcomes in order to make the coins look Heads-biased and claim that they weren’t “lying” because all of the flips they reported actually happened.

Suppose the coin room supervisor Olivia says, “I would appreciate some courtesy to keep reporting of coinflips focused on Heads outcomes, because recording Tails outcomes increases the costs of coin room supervision.” Ian thinks this is a reasonable request and says he was already trying to follow it, without remembering Olivia had made it explicitly: it seems worth-it to him to incur the costs of reporting Tails outcomes sometimes, but he does less of it than he would if it were costless.

In this scenario, I think it’s clear that Ian does not believe in a strong local norm about telling the truth about the sequence of coinflips. He just doesn’t! Someone who wanted to know the truth about the sequence of coinflips would want to know about the Tails results, and they won’t get that by taking Ian’s reports at face value. If Ian claims to believe in a norm about telling the truth about the sequence of coinflips, he is lying or self-deceiving and it makes sense to tell him, “You can’t possibly expect me to be that gullible.” Right?

re: scope of purported mandates

Many tasks work better when a single person or team is in charge of them for a decent chunk of time, and isn’t “micromanaged,” and acts on their all things considered best guess about what’s good (rather than being tasked with doing what their manager would want, say). I believe “make lesswrong.com good” is such a task.

I buy the anti-micromanagement argument for tasks like “what database schema should the website use” or “how should the hotel be decorated.” You don’t want arbitrary other people in the vicinity of the organization to be able to second-guess the subject-matter expert making the decision when there’s no particular reason why the subject-matter expert might be serving their own goals contrary to those of the organization, and there’s no particular reason to think that the arbitrary other people would make a better decision.

I don’t buy the anti-micromanagement argument for deciding to purge a long-standing community member from a space that’s ostensibly being managed for the community’s benefit, especially a public forum. (Hotels are supposed to be a coherent service and it makes sense for them to have a CEO who hires and fires employees to make the hotel good. The clash of ideas in public isn’t supposed to be coherent and there isn’t supposed to be a CEO.)

Unlike the case of the hotel decor (where we expect the interior designer’s taste to be naturally aligned with what’s good for the hotel), it’s easy to imagine how the power to purge anyone who questions you might be misused. (I have some relevant illustrative evidence that I don’t think fits in this public comment; I’ll send you an email.)

c) the website continuing, with Habryka and co still technically in this role, but with the user-base mostly thinking of them as random forces rather than as [stewards of a cool project that it’s worth them lending some believing-in to].

Why isn’t this just the obvious common-sense default? I care about the practice of human rationality, but it’s not a religion with authority figures!

It makes sense to have a website for students of human rationality to talk to each other. It makes sense for the people who take donations to run the website to use their best judgement on what database schema to use, and to take care of censoring the slushpile of LLM slop that no credible rationalist would miss.

But when the people who run the website start deciding to use their ownership of the infrastructure to prevent my friends and collaborators from commenting on my blog posts in the same place where everyone else does, of course I’m going to regard that as random forces getting in the way of my interests, rather than something I should defer to! If I can’t find a better forum, I’m still willing to chip in to pay the server costs for the service that I use (much as I pay for Twitter), but no, of course I’m not going to lend any more believing-in than that to these people!

re: object-level suggestions for how a reasonable person allegedly might find user-level bans insufficient

I think the question “could a reasonable person find user-level bans insufficient for non-evil reasons?” is fairly central to our dispute [...] Does that seem right to you, Zack?

Yes.

I suspect a sizeable chunk of users have a goal like “don’t incur needless reputational damage for via failing to respond to confusing-to-others claims that I made errors I didn’t make (especially if the claim is loud, reads as confident and Sequences-fluent, calls me out by name, etc)”

As an author, I deny that that’s a legitimate goal. I write things on the internet. Sometimes other people criticize my writing. I can’t prevent third parties from making Bayesian updates about me based on my response or lack of response to the criticism. An example of such a Bayesian update is, if I don’t reply, maybe some the third parties think, “Gee, Zack is probably really busy.” Another possible example of such an update might be, if I don’t reply, maybe some of the third parties think, “Gee, Zack probably doesn’t have an answer to this one.” Which one pertains depends on many details to be resolved in each of the third parties’ individual judgements.

You seem to be telling me a “reasonable person” thinks I should be able to censor my critics in order to prevent third parties from thinking, “Zack probably doesn’t have an answer to this one.” As an author, I categorically deny that this is reasonable. I think that if reality puts me in a situation where someone is inclined to think “Gee, Zack probably doesn’t have an answer to this one”, the honorable and sane responses available to me are (a) let them think that about me, or (b) answer it.

It’s true that (a) is a “cost” to my social goal of having everyone think well of me, but as a citizen in a free Society, I understand that the rest of Society does not have to reorganize itself to maximize my personal social goals. To think otherwise would be totalitarian and childish.

re: comments on “Zetetic Explanation” and mechanisms for downvoting and user-bans not being sufficient

I’d like to note that it would appear hypocritical for Hoffman to object to Achmiz’s infamous “Hmm” comment on “Zetetic Explanation” because, as I point out in footnote 10, Hoffman has used substantively the same rhetorical device in correspondence with me.

One of the things Hoffman seemed particularly annoyed by was Achmiz’s failure to provide feedback on Ben Pace’s Ideological Turing Test attempt. Seems fine as grounds for a user ban, I guess: if you want a cultivated space where people know how to play the “ITT” and “interpretive labor” games, then I suppose it follows that you’d want to exclude people like Achmiz who are skeptical of the value of interpretive labor.

I’m curious for your guess at the mechanism why “downvote and ignore” is insufficient

Seems straightforward: downvote and ignore requires someone to do the downvoting, and it might generate discussion that the author doesn’t want on the page at all.

and I’m curious whether the same mechanism indicates that user-level bans are also plausibly insufficient.

The issue is property rights. Authors with their own websites have control over what appears on their sites, so it makes sense that LessWrong 2.0 wouldn’t want to offer much less control, so as not to disincentivize people from cross-posting to LessWrong 2.0.

But control over your own posts is all you’d ever get on your own site. You don’t get to censor other people’s website, and there’s no reason you should get to censor other people’s Less Wrong posts.

[romeostevensit]

I don’t think you understand the objection that I and I assume many others have had to him. His objections are very non-random/​motivated and this only becomes apparent after repeated interactions with him. I like having scrupulous friends, and even more I like having scrupulous friends who aren’t too burned out from addressing non central objections to actually discuss the ideas that they want to discuss. Scrupulous people are nerd snipeable. So I clear the area of snipers when I can.

[Raemon]

In addition to this, I’d add: there is a valid role for pointing out that people’s claims are confused in a way that is more-central-than-they’d-like-to-admit. But, Said didn’t have good enough taste in that for it to seem net-valuable to me.

(I have only skimmed the OP and don’t expect to engage much since moderators have already spent far too many hours arguing about this)

[Trinley Goldenberg]

fwiw i don’t think taste about how central a claim is is exactly the right framing here

my model is that said was attempting to punish people for claims that in his view were disruptive to the culture of lw as a whole

he didn’t actually care how central the argument was to the individual piece

similar to e.g. eugine neir using many upvotes/​downvotes to punish certain ways of seeing that he viewed as irrational, said did the same thing with many comments

[Raemon]

I think if he had better taste in claims being disruptive to LW as a whole, this would have been good or neutral instead of bad.

[Trinley Goldenberg]

I’m not convinced this is a good way to enforce norms.

[Sherrinford]

The OP pointed out that you can just personally ban people. Does “So I clear the area of snipers when I can.” mean that you think people are unable to do that when it is good for themselves?

[romeostevensit]

I didn’t know that was a feature

[Duncan Sabien (Inactive)]

And also Zack and Said rail against this and overtly and publicly call people cowards when they use it, somewhere-between-insinuating-and-explicitly-claiming (depending on the day) that this is strong evidence that the person using it is wrong and fears them/​their arguments/​isn’t adequate to the task. Other hypotheses (such as “engaging with you is powerfully net negative and often produces no value at high cost”) seem not to be considered at all.

It’s rather disingenuous of Zack to … it’s not quite motte-and-bailey, but it’s something … blink innocently and say “well you can just [costlessly] ban people one-on-one? [Please ignore how we will try very hard to make this very costly.]”

[Zack_M_Davis]

Thanks for commenting! You raise some important points here that I should address.

And also Zack and Said rail against this

I think “rail against” is arguably true of Achmiz but not true of me. (I consider him a friend and I’ve put a lot of effort into defending his interest in using this website, but we’re different people who disagree on many things.)

To clarify my views: while I agree with Achmiz’s argument that the ban feature enables authors to impose a tax on criticism, which is epistemically distortionary, I support the existence of the feature because it facilitates people with different preferred discussion norms being able to share the website. I sincerely believe it should have been possible to share the website. (See footnote 5 and §IV.1 in the post.)

this is strong evidence that the person using it is wrong and fears them/​their arguments/​isn’t adequate to the task. Other hypotheses (such as “engaging with you is powerfully net negative and often produces no value at high cost”) seem not to be considered at all.

I wouldn’t call it strong evidence, but it’s reasonable for third parties to be suspicious. The problem is that “This commenter is net-negative” is something someone could easily say if they were wrong and inadequate to the task, so an individual author saying it doesn’t produce a large likelihood ratio without additional evidence for why they in particular should be trusted. (I think we’d probably disagree about what would constitute such additional evidence.)

It’s rather disingenuous of Zack to [...] blink innocently and say “well you can just [costlessly] ban people one-on-one? [Please ignore how we will try very hard to make this very costly.]”

It would be bad for me to be disingenuous, so let me try to clarify. I think there’s an inherent conflict over setting the zero point when it comes to assessing social “costs.”

As I said above, I’m in favor of the ban feature existing, because that helps different people share the website, and I strongly believe in sharing the website. It seems to me that the natural “zero point” is that everyone is free to use the ban feature to control their own posts, and everyone is free to criticize use of the ban feature on their own posts. That’s how it works on most websites. (You can block someone on Twitter, but you can’t stop someone from Tweeting that you shouldn’t have blocked them.)

But the zero point that seems natural to me isn’t the only possible one. You could imagine trying to enforce that banning is “zero social cost”: not only does the ban feature exist, but banned users also aren’t allowed to talk on their own shortforms &c. about being banned. (Or possibly even on other websites? If someone Tweets about being banned, the Less Wrong mods could theoretically consider that actionable.)

I’m not in favor of the zero-social-cost version (especially not the off-site version), because the epistemic distortion of that seems much worse than the mere existence of the ban feature: you’d be preventing criticism from appearing on the website (or the world, in the off-site version) at all, rather than just on some pages.

Are you advocating for zero-social-cost version? (I don’t want to put words in your mouth.) If so, that’s our disagreement. If not, I’m not really sure what to make of your claim that I’m being disingenuous. Maybe you thought I was being deceptive by implicitly claiming that the ban feature is or should be socially costless (that no one should think less of you for using it), and it suffices that I’m clarifying here that I don’t think that?

[Sherrinford]

I don’t understand in which way you think it is better to ban Said globally. Is the reason that then nobody has to read his opinion on being banned banned anymore, which he writes somewhere else?

[Duncan Sabien (Inactive)]

Already written up here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​JcgtKunqmELefxksx/​​killing-socrates

[Sherrinford]

It is a feature once “you meet the karma thresholds (50 on Personal blogposts, 2000 on Frontpage posts)”. Maybe that threshold is too demanding?

[Zack_M_Davis]

His objections are very non-random/​motivated

I don’t think that matters, because the implied alternative of offering only “random”, “unmotivated” objections (a) is not humanly possible and (b) may not even be well-defined. It’s true that any given commenter has their own “beats”, themes, and pet peeves, because they’re individual humans and not the all-knowing God-Empress. That’s why it’s important to get comments from lots of different people!

addressing non central objections

The problem with this is that people trying to protect their ideas from scrutiny have an incentive to reframe objections as “non-central” in a way that doesn’t actually hold up, such that we want the job of determining whether it’s central or not to belong to the readers rather than the author. If I make a claim and offer some evidence, and someone points out that my evidence doesn’t support the claim, it’s tempting for me say, “Oh, well, you’re just nitpicking, that’s non-central, my claim is still true” even though I wouldn’t have agreed the evidence was “non-central” if no one had challenged it.

Scrupulous people are nerd snipeable. So I clear the area of snipers when I can.

I think either your friends are not actually scrupulous, or you’re being a bad friend. As a scrupulous person, I want to hear the non-central objections! I care about whether all the things I say are true or not, not just the “central” things! (I might not get around to replying, but that’s OK: readers can read the comments for themselves and decide for themselves.) Managing my own effort and burnout risk is my job; I don’t need to censor other people’s speech to do it! Right? What is the scrupulous reason to disagree with this?

[RobertM]

As a scrupulous person, I want to hear the non-central objections! I care about whether all the things I say are true or not, not just the “central” things! (I might not get around to replying, but that’s OK: readers can read the comments for themselves and decide for themselves.) Managing my own effort and burnout risk is my job; I don’t need to censor other people’s speech to do it! Right? What is the scrupulous reason to disagree with this?

(The following should be understood as describing a least convenient possible world.)

This is a contingent fact about you and how you relate to spending your time on receiving and responding to marginal (or bad) criticism. It is possible to rationally regret spending time reading (let alone responding to) marginal criticism; people do not have infinite time. It is possible to be such a person where many people will rationally regret reading or responding to your criticisms, even if your criticisms are often^[1] accurate. The correct^[2] response to broken stairs is often to get rid of them, not to try to ensure that every single member of your community knows how to interact with them safely.

1. ^

   For the sake of argument.

2. ^

   Among bounded agents with limited resources.

[Zack_M_Davis]

To be clear, I agree that people do not have infinite time. That’s why I’m grateful that the rejected-posts slushpile gets censored. The slushpile’s signal-to-noise ratio is terrible! Huge thanks to the mod team, and Pangram, for that.

But the signal-to-noise ratio of a brief critical comment is great, if it’s pointing at a real flaw. (The brevity keeps the denominator small.)

This is a contingent fact about you and how you relate to spending your time on receiving and responding to marginal (or bad) criticism

An important part of the scrupulosity of caring about whether the things I say are true is that it’s not all about me. Just because I don’t have time to respond to my critics, doesn’t mean I should have the authority to decide which of my critics are “marginal” and prevent other people from reading them.

Maybe that’s a contingent fact about me, but I think I’m correct to describe the nature of the contingent fact as me caring about whether what I say is true or false, as contrasted to people who apparently don’t. If you say things, and you not only don’t want to receive corrections, but you also don’t want other people to be able to read corrections, I think it’s a reasonable inference that you just don’t care very much about whether the things you say are true! Right? I don’t see what I’m missing here.

[RobertM]

This seems mostly non-responsive to my comment; you could toss your last question at a language model and get a slightly overwrought but at least mostly on-target answer.

[Zack_M_Davis]

Thanks! I like the thing ChatGPT says about, “Zack has already accepted some censorship for SNR, so the live question is threshold-setting.” I tend to want to argue about principles, but maybe saying something about empirical threshold-setting would make some progress. We agree that, in principle, there is such a thing as bad or marginal criticism. (You could totally prompt an LLM to come up with the most trivial and unimportant nitpicks to post en masse, and that would definitely merit a ban.)

But in this case, look, as I mentioned in §II.3, Said has been compiling a collection of his best comments. I think that if you read it, it’s just very obviously good stuff by the usual standards that rationalists use to evaluate our stuff. I think as a 9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author, my judgement of that means something, and former MIRI employee Jessica Taylor agrees (“Said is far above average at” “specific criticisms, including philosophical criticisms”). And you’re telling me with a straight face that this guy is a broken stair, below the empirical threshold? On the intellectual merits? I just—really have trouble taking that seriously. As I argue in §IV.3, I think this is actually about covering for ingroup members’ feelings and reputations and not about the intellectual merits.

[Dacyn]

But in this case, look, as I mentioned in §II.3, Said has been compiling a collection of his best comments. I think that if you read it, it’s just very obviously good stuff by the usual standards that rationalists use to evaluate our stuff.

I mostly agree with this, but want to highlight an exception: Said linked to his explanation of the solution to the Monty Hall problem as an example of one of his best comments. This started a thread on DSL about how accurate his purported solution was. The consensus by the end of it was that Said was somewhere between confused and crackpottish. Said never retracted anything he said though. Just wanted to add that as a data point,

[Dacyn]

I have been informed that it’s inappropriate to talk about your criticisms of someone that originated on one forum on a different forum where the target of your criticisms cannot respond. So I’m retracting the parent comment, and apologizing to Said Achmiz for it.

[jimmy]

I agree with the emotional oomph behind this, and the thesis that the ban betrays the values. That matters, and it hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves IMO.

At the same time, I don’t think this essay will have the effect that you desire because it’s missing some things that are important to understand about why things have unfolded the way they have.

To be clear upfront, I don’t have any opinion on the ban itself, and I feel fondly towards Said because I recognize pieces of myself in him—for better and for worse. In this comment I’m speaking from a place of “here’s what it looks like from this perspective”, and not actually asserting any of the criticisms or defenses of anyone.

Anyway, quickly picking at it, line by line:

Said, no less socially perceptive,

Honoring the spirit of Said, what evidence do you have for this claim?

Yes, it is disappointing when a post doesn’t land in the comment section the way I wanted it to, but it’s obviously not because commenters are culpably withholding their illumination of my precious ideas.

On the contrary, this is not at all obvious. People often culpably withhold their illumination of ideas that challenge them. Take any political argument ever.

(As for “implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas”, I suppose it’s true that when someone rejects an idea, that creates a logical implication that the rejecter thinks they’re more rational than the idea-proposer on that topic. It’s a weirdly petty implication to focus on, though. Who cares?)

Approximately everyone cares. That’s who. Even those who try to not care because they think they shouldn’t.

Criticism isn’t easy for you to take, right? If someone seems to be handling it easily, what do you think is actually going on behind the scenes beliefs they consciously claim to hold?

Handling it well doesn’t mean “not caring”. It means not being thrown off by this. If someone rejects an idea of mine, and they’re right to do it, that means they caught something I missed. It means they’re capable of seeing things that I do not. This matters! I want to notice this!

What is most striking about the second perspective’s list of reasons that critical commenters make Less Wrong unrewarding to interact with is what it does not say.

It doesn’t say the commenters are wrong!

[...]

We can infer that bad arguments and strawmanning are not seen by user reports as a pervasive problem on Less Wrong. (If they were, the second perspective would have mentioned it.)

This tells you that they can’t see the problem clearly enough to articulate it.

I know I have been criticized in ways which were factually incorrect on the face, by people who couldn’t articulate the actual problem because they were in no position to criticize… which were nonetheless gesturing at a real thing I was doing wrong.

It’s true that posting on Less Wrong can be “unrewarding”—but that’s because the rewards are real and therefore have to be earned.

The big problem is that this misses the most important type of reward altogether.

There’s the reward of the pat on the head, and then there’s the reward of becoming less wrong. That’s the one that matters, and isn’t covered here.

The process of learning to be less wrong, when done right, feels less wrong. Feels good, relative to the baseline you’re leaving.

It’s absolutely possible to foster a culture in which people enjoy being called out and corrected. For now, I’ll leave “What does this require, which is different from LW as it stands?” and “which is different from what Said does?” as an exercise for the reader, because the important part is that more is possible. Humility can feel good. How?

The reason Said needed to be banned, at least according to the perspectives that enacted this ban, is that the community norms here either failed to foster the humility in the community needed to learn from Said—or else failed to foster the humility in Said needed to learn from the community.

What is missing in the norms, and what would it look like to facilitate this learning? Why don’t people already like learning when they’re wrong, here? Why don’t people already like teaching people that they’re wrong, here?

The only way I can read it as “an implicit claim that [Hoffman] violated some social norm” “for which he deserves to be punished” is if there’s a social norm against making posts that can be criticized,

Oh, no. Said is absolutely attempting to punished the according-to-him deserved because Hoffman violated Said’s norms.

Brief overview of the conversation, then we’ll go through it line by line:

“[quotes] hm”

“What’s your best guess as to what I meant here?”

“I assumed you meant what you wrote. It does not seem mysterious or confusing, just contradictory. (If you meant something other than what you wrote, well, I guess you’ll want to clarify.)”

“In case my point was obscure—time travel stories aren’t real, and Robinson Crusoe is also fictional.”

Said didn’t even make any substantive comment. He just juxtaposed quotes as if that’s all that’s needed. But he didn’t get the response “Ah, good point. I guess my whole post is wrong then”, or even “Ah, I see the confusion. Let me clarify” that he would have gotten if “all that’s needed” was correct.

Nor did Said show any signs of surprise. He didn’t say “Wait, you don’t see a problem here?” or “Oh, I misread?”. Instead, he doubles down on the presupposition that his interpretation is the only correct one, by conflating the meaning with the words used to convey the meaning. Said responded with “I assumed you meant what you wrote”. He didn’t respond with “I assumed you were intending for a relatively literal interpretation” or “Maybe we attach different meanings to the same words”.

Said is behaving exactly the way one would expect someone to behave if Hoffman is violating the norm of not saying obviously stupid shit. “Dude, I don’t even have to say anything for it to be obvious what’s wrong here. That’s how dumb it is. No, it’s not possible that the problem is on my side. I’m literally reading the meaning straight from your words with no interpretive layer, and if I read things wrong you should have written them right. Norm violation number 2!”

This is very different from someone who is offering an explanation that he expects the author to not have seen, or that he expects an author worthy of feeling welcome at LW to have not seen. And that communication of “You are not worthy of feeling welcome at LW” is exactly what “social punishment” is, right? The word “criticism”, as you’re using it, papers over the distinction between “here’s an error in your object level reasoning” and “here’s an error in thinking you even belong here, loser”.

If I read that same post and thought that Hoffman deserved to be in LW but couldn’t square such a seemingly obvious mistake with the idea that he shouldn’t be shunned off of LW, I’d ask. “Doesn’t this fall apart as soon as we notice you’re talking about fiction? What am I missing?”.

That’s the same information conveyed without the contempt. That does a better job teaching people like Hoffman, conditional on Hoffman being the one that’s missing something. And a better job teaching people in Said’s shoes, conditional on Said being the one that’s missing something.

The only question left is whether the implicit claims in the contempt are correct—a topic, which I’ll note, is kinda off limits to discuss explicitly in the comment section of this post. For in order for Said to speak plainly, he’d have to say “This is such a basic error that you do not belong here”. And in order for Hoffman to respond in kind, he’d have to say “No, u”.

But we can’t handle that, can we? We’re not going to resolve that one with either side saying “Okay, you were right” or “I was wrong”—are we?

What do you expect to unfold when these disagreements can’t be hashed out in the light? Is there any surprise that things have unfolded the way they have?

Achmiz is privately making a negative character judgment about the interlocutor as a person, even if Achmiz didn’t say that. Such an inference might well be correct, but it’s hard to see why it’s a moderation issue.

Well, it’s a moderation issue when correcting such incorrect judgements itself becomes a moderation issue.

Is it a moderation issue when someone says “You’re such an idiot, Said. No one respects you. You act like your judgements matter, and they don’t. You are too emotionally cowardly to face what you know yourself to be, and as a result you fail to meet the bar to be worthy of contributing here”?

If your answer is “no”, what moderation is left? What do you expect to happen to one more essentially unmoderated forum?

If your answer is “yes”, then what happens to the marketplace of ideas when you tax representation unevenly?

Punishing Achmiz and only Achmiz for frequently finding authors’ replies insufficient (because people suspect, rightly or wrongly, that Achmiz is privately judging them) would be incoherent,

That’s not the issue, at all.

No one has a problem with “finding authors replies insufficient”. I find your replies here insufficient. Yet you know I respect you. You can tell, ahead of time, even, that I want you here, posting this stuff. And I bet this makes it significantly easier and more pleasant to deal with even before we get into how that relates to the epistemics.

The problem is that Said jumps from “finding authors replies insufficient” to leaning on the status ledger that we’ve kinda sorta agreed to not lean on, and can’t within-moderation respond to with seemingly-appropriate force in kind. And he leans on it in ways that don’t read as “fair”.

To the extent I make a good point here, you will learn on the margin “Oh, Jimmy knows shit”. Even if I do it respectfully, if I make the point that you were missing more than you had realized, you’ll learn “Oh, I don’t know as much as I thought I did”. To the extent that I don’t succeed in making these points, those updates don’t happen. So either way, any updates will feel fair, because you chose them.

Tell people what they’re supposed to think on the status ledger, and they’ll be inclined to push back. Ban the pushback, and pressure will build until something gives.

I’d like the dam to not fail as much as anyone. “Dam failing is bad!” is true, and I think actually does need to be said here—so strong upvote.

At the same time, water pressure gonna do what water pressure gonna do. “Dam shouldn’t fail” doesn’t have much traction on me because it’s just physics. Actual goodness is served by routing water efficiently such that pressure to abandon our values never builds in the first place. This requires modifying our values to be more internally consistent, and noticing where they are failing us.

Let us not resist the pressure to abandon our values, but to notice the pressure, and what it says about our values as we’ve been understanding them.

Pace, for example, characterizes Achmiz as “holding extreme disdain and disrespect for interlocutors while being committed to never saying anything explicitly or even denying that it is the case.” [...] … But It’s Hard to Believe That Open Disdain Would Be Better

Right, so he’s good at noticing the norm about saying this stuff in the open and doesn’t say it in the open. Nor does he attempt to pretend his perspective is different than what it is, so people notice. This is good! He’s respecting the rules, being as honest as he’s allowed to be, and people are objecting to his actual beliefs! The ones he’s not even allowed to argue for!!!

Because they’re not allowed to argue back, sure. But man, what would you do if you were to realize that most people on LW are morons who don’t belong because they don’t even care to make sure they get basic shit right? How would you feel if no one could argue you out of your growing contempt, because instead of countering its correctness with arguments, they just got upset at you for daring to look down at them when that’s where they’re speaking from?

Once you realize that you’re in fact better than everyone else, such norms really paint you into a corner about what you can do about it.

Which is a problem if you’re correct about being better than everyone else and if you’re incorrect. We can’t even figure out how much of column A how much of column B, because we can’t talk about it.

Am I … somehow wrong about that? Have I been deceiving and gaslighting people this whole time by engaging with the substance of their ideas and trying to keep my thoughts about how stupid and dishonest they are to myself?

Yes, but you’re following the norms. And that’s probably good because it’s really hard to tell people that they’re stupid and dishonest in a way that they register as rewarding enough to sign up to learn from.

Engaging with the substance of the ideas is a big part of doing it skillfully, and it’s good to notice when you don’t have the skills to pull something off… but yes. There is a skill in telling people how stupid and dishonest they are in such a way that they realize you’re right and thank you for it. And furthermore it is a rationality skill. A skill in noticing what you’re really saying and believing, and whether it is as justified as you think it is. A skill in noticing how their beliefs are formed, whether they might be right in ways you’re not tracking about things you don’t realize they’re saying, and whether saying the things you think should be said actually does what you think it should.

I am not a polite person and am not committed to never saying anything explicitly nor denying that it is the case, so if it would help, I’m happy to clarify that I hold extreme disdain and disrespect for the entirety of the Less Wrong moderation team and a decent fraction of the userbase for general reasons that are neatly exemplified by the concrete case of their relentless persecution of Said Achmiz.

What a polite and respectful way to say that.

To the extent that I might qualify as part of the userbase for which you hold some amount of disdain/​disrespect, thanks for respecting me enough to say it. That’s what’s important to me.

Your post here seems like a good example of the kind of straightforward aggression that is permissible, and I notice that it takes an amount of both skill and time that it is prohibitive.

“Criticism will be accepted, so long as every other line rhymes, each line contains a prime number of words, and there are no typos. Response time 1 year”.

Rather, I am writing to the world in defense of a principle that I’ve spent the last decade of my life [44] fighting for: that the truth matters, and specifically, that the truth matters more than people’s feelings

Thank you. Sincerely.

The one little addition I’d like to make is that feelings are about reality as well, and as such embody statements with truth values. Knowing what to make of these matters immensely, because otherwise we cannot orient to what the challenge actually is.

[Zack_M_Davis]

Honoring the spirit of Said, what evidence do you have for this claim?

Um, subjectively he just seems socially sharper in private emails than public comments. (Honoring the spirit of Said, I should note that my subjective perception of private correspondence is worthless as public evidence, but that’s my answer.) This is the part where his persecutors say, “A-ha, so you admit we were right about the weaponized obtuseness!” And that’s the part where I say, “Okay, but ‘weaponized obtuseness’ is just your pathologization of ordinary politeness, and you people obviously don’t want to hear the rude version.”

[jimmy]

he just seems socially sharper in private emails than public comments

Interesting.

I think it makes sense though, for the reasons you gesture at. I have at times responded to charges of “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole” with “Except I’m also asserting that I’m not the asshole and that you are. Can you tell me I’m wrong now?”. Funny that no one can say “Yes” :P

It’s definitely a mistake to write Walters off as “missing the social signals that The Dudes sees”, because sometimes Walter is the only one that remembers when rules matter.

Honoring the spirit of Said, I should note that my subjective perception of private correspondence is worthless as public evidence,

Eh, it’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t something you’d lie about. And now, to anyone who trusts my trust in you. And to anyone who has similar trust in Anna, since she did the “Agree” thing.

That kind of thing won’t reach everyone, but I don’t think it has to.

[AnnaSalamon]

I love many parts of this comment, most notably your analysis of the Said /​ Benquo interaction.

One model I need for understanding the situation about Said, that I don’t have and don’t see above, is an understanding of common knowledge creation in many-person forums. It seems to me that in one-on-one interaction, communication worth attempting is communication that tries to be wanted by, and received by, the person one is communicating with (as you, Jimmy, argue in the parent-comment). In certain sorts of many-person forums, such as LW or the math community, there are upsides for group processing in making it apparent that some [things posing as agreed on by a community, that might otherwise be taken as newly established norms or things to build on] are not in fact agreed on /​ established /​ vetted. And such moves can aid the group even when not received-as-helpful by the poster whose work is being commented on. One common ~norm for such situations is something like: “please go ahead and point out false claims and arguments that violate local validity semantics, even when the person you’re responding to doesn’t like it.” Oli’s counterpoint seems to me to roughly be: (paraphrased) “in the context of LW, this norm would let anyone DDOS anyone, and shut down any conversation, and so such comments aren’t prosocial unless paired with taste.” (I am uncertain whether this argument is true.)

Do you, Jimmy, have a proposed model of how visible common-knowledge ~vetting should work?

[jimmy]

Yeah, I do. The same problem exists in one on one situations, actually.

So, “communication that is wanted and received” is often the right play in a one on one thing. It’s what I’m aiming for here, and wouldn’t change if this conversation were in private. You can’t really get through to people if they don’t wanna hear you, so talking at people who aren’t interested is a big failure mode and all that. Sure.

At the same time, there is another function of private speech, which is filtering.

Say we’re interacting one on one, and I’m coming off like an arrogant jerk. This gets in the way of the interaction because arrogance makes people dumb, so you can’t take my words seriously and we can’t actually do things. To the extent that you care about being able to interact with me, you have reason to find a way to communicate that I’ll want to hear. “I’m struggling to interact with you. Would you like to help me figure out how to go about this?” rather than “You’re an arrogant idiot”, perhaps.

Sure.

But what if you don’t have reason to care that much, or I’m pushing back against your attempts to help me get along with you? What do you do? “If I have nothing nice to say, I don’t say anything?”

That’s the most common response, among people who try hard at these things, but it’s missing a lot. One of the most significant relationships for my development came from what can be caricatured as “You dumb” “no u, because X” “No u, because response to X”.

If you would have watched that conversation and the immediate aftermath, it would be easy to conclude “See, wasted time. Shouldn’t have offered what wasn’t wanted”, because neither of us changed our mind on the topic of discussion and we both agreed to go our separate ways and stop interacting.

But what ended up happening is that he reached out again because he could see that I wasn’t actually dumb (even if he thought I overreached on points) and the situation was symmetric in that respect. If either of us had gotten upset and run away, then that’s the filter working as intended. Dumb worthless people running away when shown what they are. But the fact that we didn’t dodge this conflict is what demonstrated that we were both able to face what the other person thought they saw, and either counter it legitimately or else find the humility to update.

The extra ingredient here is

“I’m gonna show you [what I see to be] the truth, including the truth of how worthwhile you are as a person, and find out if this is something you want to hear, at the level of effort I’m willing to put in to make it palatable”

It’s a filtering move. If he runs away, good. That’s what I want, given that he’s not interested in humbling himself far enough to find the truth that I can see, at the costs I’m willing to pay to make it seeable. If he doesn’t run away, good. Now I can see that he actually wanted to hear this, and that enables useful interaction. Most will fail the filter if you filter aggressively like that, but damn you’re missing a lot if you don’t give people the chance to prove you wrong about what they’re interested in hearing.

Tell me I’m being an arrogant jerk, and if my perspective is more compelling than yours here I can just share it and win you over. If it’s not, I’ll feel it. And then I’ll have to choose whether to dodge—to which you can keep hammering me, until I decide differently—or accept your points, or run away myself. No matter what happens, you win.… unless… you are actually dodging yourself. Because inviting conflict doesn’t help you avoid recognizing your own wrongness. But you wouldn’t want to do that anyway, right? :P

The whole impulse to “be a jerk”/​”Tell people they’re wrong on the internet”/​”engage in status BS instead of cooperative truth tracking” comes from perception (or perceived ability to claim) that the other person’s self concept is delusional to the point that it is interfering with cooperative truth seeking, and that pushing back is the necessary impetus to work towards a solution.

The problem, as I see it, is that we’re so starved of examples of people “fighting” in ways that prove productive—fighting playfully, with engagement rather than flinching and upsetness driving the boat—that we’ve come to believe that the rational thing is to avoid such conflict and emotions, instead of learning how to have them productively. Instead of learning how to engage in them such that they resolve, how to engage in them such that the unworthy filter themselves out, etc.

I write in depth about these dynamics in my sequence “Beneath Psychology”. The short version is that we need Security so that we can negotiate for Respect, so that we can even get started making progress on the object level. But we conflate lack of Respect with lack of Security, in part because we’re motivated to cover up our own insecurity and “disrespectful!” is one way to do it, and we miss the ways in which Security is downstream of actual clarity, so we end up doing insecurity at the process of resolving disagreements on Respect, which is the exact thing that blocks resolution of disagreements/​updating on evidence.

And all of this dissolves once you see the pieces for what they are. Because, for example, instead of “He’s disrespecting me!”, it’s just “And? Am I worthy of it or not? I can show up and we’ll find out, if I want. Do I want that?”

[AnnaSalamon]

Jimmy writes:

“I agree with … the thesis that the ban betrays the values.”

Could you say more about that part, please?

[jimmy]

I say more in my other response, but basically, I am deeply suspicious of any “I should ban him because he’s not updating” because of how cleanly justification enables pressure to update or “self-ban” and how easily the justification serves as a shield. So like, “If I’m as justified as I think I am, and he’s as beyond reach as I think he is, maybe I should prove it”.

This can sound kinda naive at first glance, because everyone has seen first hand that some people are “unreasonable”, but I’ve pushed on this hard. Like, in my perspective pain is obviously just information and can’t ever actually be a problem… which seems absurd because of the obvious reality of chronic pain and the implication that if I’m right then engagement lead to people with chronic pain perceiving their pain as not a problem, so… What happens when we try it?

After pushing in this direction for the last fifteen years, I’m not finding much room for valid excuses. Every time I fail to get through to people it turns out to be a skill issue on my side, and that skill is in epistemics, and structurally it kinda has to be.

So for example, the only person I’ve ever blocked on any platform is Said. To give myself a little credit, it was for one post in particular which he had already proven he couldn’t handle in a previous exchange on the topic. And it wasn’t “I need to ban him because he’s unreachable”. I would have had a good time going further with it, if it weren’t for my perception that LW didn’t have the stomach for going any further (and to Said’s credit, he did).

But still, according to my own principles, it kinda seems like that too should fall away? Like, if I actually know LW norms to be wrong, they should dissolve on contact with how I relate on this topic. But I didn’t anticipate that I could just poke fun at Said in a loving but teasing way and have the median LW voter notice “Ah, this is what it should look like!”. I anticipated that LW would flinch in the same way I anticipated Said to flinch, and motivatedly not-acknowledge the warmth and implications of their discomfort.

Running that simulation forward, as I write this comment, what I actually anticipate is provoking so much insecurity that if I keep going down that path I either get banned or write off LW myself… which I don’t want to do. So there’s my own flinch. And like “Yeah, so don’t do it, dummy”, which I didn’t. But also I hadn’t fully worked through that flinch because mourning that loss of “At least Less Wrong can be expected to get this… right? Right?” was overwhelming for me. It has been a lot of work for me lower standards until I no longer have contempt for most people, and meeting the people who showed up to early LW meetups was an oasis of much needed relief. So to have that threatened, to me, was a bit hard to take. Still is, I guess.

I’ve been chipping away pieces of it and am somewhat better now, but it’s still my own wrongness and neglecting to mourn is against my own principles that the sequence is about in the first place. I think it would have been better if I let Said make his predictably dumb comments, do my damn mourning, and then respond in a way that demonstrates the principles I was trying to gesture towards… even though it would have been super off topic for that post in particular, and it doesn’t feel like that’s a “fair” standard to hold myself to because it’s a significantly higher bar than Said is holding himself to or whatever. Oops. My bad.

So yeah, totally understandable move. I did something very similar myself, even though I probably wouldn’t have if I was sitting on the other side of the ban hammer. But I still ultimately see it as a failure to live up to ideal truth seeking to do it. And even little violations matter in big ways downstream.

[Duncan Sabien (Inactive)]

Just a couple of small notes:

Zack and Said would love it if people would agree with their frame-propaganda, that this is a battle between logic and correctness on one side, and [everything else] on the other. I do not in fact cede that ground; I found Said’s commentary frequently woefully illogical and at least once just outright lying (claiming that a link contained content it patently did not contain, and that it bolstered an argument he was making, when it did not).

Similarly, Zack is often just … confusingly incapable of understanding the plain meaning of words on a page; my first block of him was downstream of an instance of that and a simple example from the above post is “It’s not clear why Vaniver (or Sabien) uses a height metaphor.”

(I would expect >50% of the literal eleven-year-olds I taught in public school to notice that the piece Zack links is pretty straightforward and clear in its usage of height-as-metaphor, and >20% of them to be able to adequately answer “why talk about height instead of something else?” in a five-sentence paragraph.)

There is a world in which there are a couple of champions of [logic and rigor and consistent high-quality zeroing-in on the crucial foundations underpinning various arguments] who come up against complaints about their unpopularity, and in that world, there’s an interesting question of whether those virtuous champions are being unfairly besmirched and denied their rightful place in the Hall of Reason.

But this is not actually that world. Zack and Said are that intermittently at best (I don’t deny that they are ever that), and often doing something close to its opposite (and occasionally literally the opposite). Meanwhile, plenty of other commenters regularly carry that banner.

There’s actually quite a large distance between agreeing to “shouldn’t [virtue] be present and defended on LW?” and agreeing to “therefore Said!” and the above wants to elide that distance. I reject the framing “we’re the ones championing actual rigor” the same way that I don’t refer to the people murdered at Salem as “witches”—most of them were not, and calling the murders “witch-burnings” is giving the bad guys a chunk of valuable territory for free.

One can thump one’s chest and claim to be many things that one is not.

[Zack_M_Davis]

Thanks for commenting! It’s always a pleasure. (I really mean that. What I find most disappointing about interactions with you is that you tend to leave just when things are getting interesting from my perspective!)

confusingly incapable of understanding the plain meaning of words on a page [...] >20% of them to be able to adequately answer “why talk about height instead of something else?” in a five-sentence paragraph

Okay, so this is an interesting one! Notice that I don’t just say it’s “not clear”, I give a reason why I think strength would be a more natural choice, and then go ahead and propose a cynical explanation (marked as uncertain with, “One has to wonder”) for why I think height might have been chosen (viz., to imply that fortitude is immutable in order to absolve “emotionally short” people of responsibility for engaging in emotional blackmail tactics). That should be a tell that “not clear” was a Tenth Guideline compliance move. I don’t want to confidently claim that that was the reason height was chosen, because I never have hard evidence about other people’s true inner motivations. But there does seem to be textual support for the immutability-as-absolution hypothesis: e.g., the text rhetorically asks, “Have you considered your own role in contributing to this situation where you’re claiming victim status?”, and I’m basically intending the same question literally.

I’m open to suggestions that I shouldn’t be using “not clear” in this kind of situation (because it’s, um, not clear), but I don’t think this one was a reading comprehension failure.

In general, when I seem to be saying something bizarre, I hope readers will consider the hypothesis that it’s just a language oddity which I am totally willing to unpack on request. For example, in a different conversation, my interlocutor had just made a negative judgement about me, and I said, “If you want to tell me why, I’d be really curious to hear it!”, and they said that they thought I was misreporting, that I wasn’t actually curious. My explanation for that is that “I’m really curious to hear it” wasn’t meant as a literal report of the raw emotion of curiosity; it’s an idiomatic stock phrase meant to elicit more detailed criticism by conveying the idea that I’m not going to to punish it.

Meanwhile, plenty of other commenters regularly carry that banner.

Well, yes, of course. The reason why the soul of Less Wrong is worth fighting over is because it’s a Schelling point that attracts high-quality people who are worth paying attention to. If I think I have an “edge” along some particular dimension that’s worth trading on, that obviously doesn’t mean other people don’t have their own edges over me. (For example, I think I’m particularly skilled at noticing problems due to selection effects on approved information, but you’re probably more skilled than me at noticing problems due to assuming that one lives in the max-likelihood world.)

One can thump one’s chest and claim to be many things that one is not.

Well, yes, of course! I emphatically agree with that: that’s exactly why I think a culture of diverse criticism is so important! I obviously don’t expect people to just take my word for it that me and my allies are the ones championing actual rigor: I expect them to read what we say and read what our critics say and judge for themselves. That was Said’s case against the user ban functionality (that it made it easier for people to claim to be something they’re not, by making it harder for other people to point out that they’re not).

[jessicata]

Something I wrote in July 2025 in an email thread:

I overall like Said’s comments and think they move LW more towards royal society on the margin. I think if he were banned then the value I get out of the site would drop by about 5%. I understand the concern about him driving away posters but I don’t feel like I’m losing value by seeing fewer of the sort of posts that Said’s comments would prevent.

I stand by this. I am not sure how much Said’s banning is the cause, but the value I get out of LW has dropped in the past year. One useful thing about posting on LW is to get specific criticisms, including philosophical criticisms. Said is far above average at this. I think other than causal factors, there is also the evidential/​correlation factor here, that banning Said is a sign of a culture change against criticism, and I think this culture change makes this website less useful to me.

[TsviBT]

I wish we had better concepts around things like attention; degrees and dimensions of butterflyness of ideas; claims to attention; types of engagement; types of attention sharing (that is, paying attention to the same things or not); cognitive labor in general and interpretive labor in particular; etc.

I wonder if there’s a feature level fix; something like labeling a comment /​ post, or parts of it, as more or less butterfly. This might correspond to both less so claiming “this thing is a hardened-steel claim which you should either debate or update on” and also asking for more interpretive labor from the other party /​ less harshness /​ more space for speculation+unclarity /​ etc. (I’m quite skeptical of this working, especially as stated, but I feel I don’t have the concepts to think clearly about why and why not; I expect unknown unknowns; e.g. maybe it turns out that people sneak lots of discourse-shaping stuff under the label “butterfly ideas” in order to avoid criticism /​ clarification /​ counterargument, or something in that genre.)

[AnnaSalamon]

In my imagination of a world where it worked, part of what’s up is that there’s ~[community common knowledge] that if a labeled-as-butterfly idea isn’t torn to shreds, that doesn’t mean it isn’t tearable-to-shreds.

And so the community vetting function isn’t impeded.

[Eli Tyre]

Ideating: What if authors could opt into Crocker’s rules for particular posts? With a tag or or something?

Or maybe a “Crocker’s rules” tag and a “butterfly idea” tag, with the default being something between those two extremes?

[TsviBT]

(Not that that’s a bad idea, but regarding both this idea and my original comment:)

My guess is that there’s core aspects of the Said dispute (as far as I understand it, not really being read in) that Crocker’s rules and butterfly ideas doesn’t address—issues around coordination and cognitive labor.

As an example to illustrate the type of thing I’m gesturing at:

Suppose I start talking about X, and you are interested in Y. Then you ask me elliptical questions that could ambiguously be “about X” (in the sense of having the Gricean mental context of investigating X together), causing me to go down this rabbit hole where you’re not actually trying to talk about X.

This can be construed as a kind of defection against the conversational project of even talking about the same thing.

This can be largely orthogonal to butterfly/​Crocker (if those are properly opposed). E.g. you could be pretty polite while derailing. And conversely, in some contexts you can be “Crockerish” productively and normatively even with butterfly ideas. For example, quickly coming up with counterexamples to a conjectured generalization, disregarding hopes about the hypothesis being true, can still be a cooperative butterfly sanctuary—because, for example, you are not being dismissive in tone, and are devoting attention to the actual butterfly idea, and are rolling with frequent revisions of the conjecture without getting snippy.

(A further random guess I have, again not being read in including not having fully read the OP, would be that talk of “hurt feelings” in this whole context is confused about some of the cases, because the feelings aren’t “you said mean things about me” but more like “I turned out to be frustrated with this thread, and even if I can’t explain exactly what’s happening I still think it was kinda adversarial and a regretted use of my time, which is an annoying situation and I just want to avoid this.”, or something like that. In other words, the thing that’s going wrong in some of these cases might be NOT something that Crocker’s rules are even supposed to be opting you into.)

[Zack_M_Davis]

talk of “hurt feelings” in this whole context is confused about some of the cases, because the feelings aren’t “you said mean things about me” but more like “I turned out to be frustrated with this thread, and even if I can’t explain exactly what’s happening I still think it was kinda adversarial and a regretted use of my time, which is an annoying situation and I just want to avoid this.”

I think it’s pretty gullible to treat those different self-reports as representing relevantly different things in the territory. My theory is that the “kinda adversarial” thing that’s happening that the person “can’t explain exactly” is: disagreement unadulterated by social improv games—disagreement with someone who refuses to soften, hedge, or obfuscate their vision of reality in order to maintain a cooperative vibe of mutual respect. It’s annoying and people want to avoid it because it’s less socially rewarding than the improv game.

[TsviBT]

[NB: I disagree voted but not karma voted.]

I think it would be gullible to uncritically assume all self reports of hurt feelings are not covering up some sort of bad behavior. I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’m not actually sure what you’re actually saying. My best guess literal reading of what you wrote is that you’re saying that all these self-reports are more or less always (or usually? or what?) mainly motivated by a kind of coverup for poor reasoning. If you’re saying this, then I probably pretty strongly disagree. It could depend on which people we’re talking about, but I think there are other frequent main reasons for someone to end up with that report, such as the one I sketched in my example.

[Zack_M_Davis]

I think your “go down this rabbit hole where you’re not actually trying to talk about” story could potentially fit the improv game framework, actually? (Briefly: improv performers and people who don’t like adversarial debate try to “Yes, and” each other’s bids to steer the scene, rather than “blocking”, denying the other’s bid.)

Say: I write about my research program which you think is fundamentally flawed. I’m interested in hearing about in-paradigm improvements on my ideas, but not interested in hearing that the whole research program is shot. You ask questions that you think I should be able to answer if my research program were good. I have trouble answering the questions, and get frustrated that you weren’t talking about what I wanted you to talk about. (I wanted you to build on my ideas, not try to destroy them! Whether the research program is good is a separate topic, not what I wanted to talk about!)

Maybe there’s a case that you should have more clearly flagged that you were commenting in an “adversarial” role rather than a “cooperative” one with respect to my research program, so that I could have made the decision to ignore you earlier. But maybe I should stop trying to be so controlling of how other people interact with my ideas? (Maybe you could have been won over on the merits of the program if I had successfully answered your questions, and you couldn’t know until you asked.)

[TsviBT]

I think your “go down this rabbit hole where you’re not actually trying to talk about” story could potentially fit the improv game framework, actually?

Absolutely not, no. I hope the following can help explain.

you should have more clearly flagged that you were commenting in an “adversarial” role rather than a “cooperative” one with respect to my research program

Yes, IMO this is a much more prosocial pattern and tends to go better for everyone involved. You’re saying this is “controlling”, but again, there’s a simple matter of matching intents. Like a traffic light.

Suppose this happens:

I write a big post that assumes X and goes on to discuss Y. Then you come in and say “It seems like this post assumes X; Is that right? Maybe this is a bit off topic /​ off of your interests, but I think that X is false, and I think this affects/​invalidates your conclusions about Y in reality.”.

Now, I could be annoyed or something that I’m not getting the engagement I want, or annoyed that you’re getting more attention, or something. But I think in this case that annoyance is probably largely my problem, or possibly a problem with the local discourse [i.e. collective user behavior] (e.g. because it’s not able to allocate its cognitive resources properly). It’s a perfectly valid way for you to engage in discourse in a public forum; it’s interesting + relevant to discuss whether X is true, whether it affects my conclusions about Y, and whether my post does assume X.

However, suppose you come in and make an ambiguous comment, e.g. “just asking questions”, while in fact you mostly already have an opinion which you are for some reason not stating. Specifically, highly ambiguous about what you care about /​ what you’re trying to talk about /​ what topic you’re trying to get at. (And perhaps, further, the comment is elliptical, or seems to presume something about what I said incorrectly, or seems to signal that I “ought” to engage or have a response or something.) Well, now I might want to engage on the assumption that you’re talking about Y. There might also be attentional presumptions that I ought to engage. For example, it could be that most readers /​ the community broadly agrees that X is true, and doesn’t view it as that worthwhile to debate whether X is true unless there’s important new evidence. But if your comment is ambiguous, then I as the author and especially the audience would not have common knowledge that you’re not arguing against my claims about Y (presuming X).

If you signpost what you’re doing, then IMO what’s supposed to happen is this:

• If your arguments are bad, you get ignored.

• If your arguments are kind good /​ interesting, you get upvoted and discussed, but I may ignore because I believe X.

• If your arguments are really good, then I’m eventually “forced” (within some ideal discourse community) to grapple with what you’re saying somehow.

This seems to be like both feasible and a much better sort of attentional traffic-light coordination. (Though plausibly I’m confused /​ missing important stuff, and I’m confident this is far from comprehensively addressing the overall conflict at hand.)

As a random illustration (forgive my poor memory), for something like a year or two (? not sure), I had various “debates /​ debate skirmishes” with various other people doing agent foundations research at MIRI (circa 2019-2021 I guess, though I’m quite fuzzy on that). This would generally take the form of me saying stuff like “this whole research program is dooomed because it is too slow /​ it looks at the wrong data /​ it’s asking the wrong questions /​ it’s presuming away too much of the important stuff /​ it’s not sufficiently grappling with our lack of the appropriate concepts /​ etc.” or similar, and then trying to communicate about that, mostly by waving my arms around. IDK how much of an impression it made, but anyway, eventually I realized that I and the other researchers just had “fundamentally” different background presumptions about how to approach the whole problem of alignment /​ research taste /​ how to think /​ what questions to ask /​ how important methodology is /​ etc.; and therefore they weren’t trying to orient to the same things I was trying to orient towards; and therefore it was somewhat of a waste of effort to invest too much (beyond more initial fun versions) in these debates, and generally stop trying to attack the core parts of the problem together as a team with them. If I had been able to more quickly figure out, and state explicitly, these fundamental positions /​ orientations, then I could have avoided derailing other people’s research conversations as much. (I don’t think this is a direct analogy in most respects to the topic; my intent is to exemplify the structure of “unexpressed basic difference of orientation --> wasted effort; expressed basic difference --> more efficiently parallel /​ independent processing” or something like that. My guess is that in the cases at hand, it would be much easier to just state the disagreement directly, though maybe that’s incorrect?)

[Beckeck]

I appreciate your work on many issues, but find myself pretty strongly disagreeing.

finding minor criticism of a sub point that is technically valid (often only if you interpret things noncentrally) doesn’t mean the broader claim is wrong.

Said imposed more cost then provided value, and refused to cooperate with extensive efforts to find third options. Banning that seems productive.

[Tenoke]

No comment on the rest, but there’s a community I’ve quite liked throughout the last decade (and more) but rarely participate in anymore because he is active there—and that’s as someone who has less of a negative reaction to his kind of abrasiveness than others. I can see how a lot of people have had that experience with him but in regards to LessWrong.

I feel bad making a negative comment about him, but I understand why Habryka et al. would’ve made that decision in the end. I don’t know if that means he should be banned, but I understand it.

[AnnaSalamon]

Thanks. Would you happen to be up for saying more, e.g. about what he’s doing that you’re responding to by not wanting to participate in this other community, or about what’s going on with you such that participating there wouldn’t give you as much of what you want if he’s active, or etc.?

[Tenoke]

Again I want to preface that I don’t even dislike him but It’s simply that engaging with a community that he is a part of means engaging with him, and engaging with him gets tiresome. At best it’s technical contributions people kind of enjoy and at worst It’s kind of like talking to r/​SneerClub if they were on ‘your’ side. And no single thing crosses a line, it is more a death by a thousand cuts that results in me valuing not communicating with him more than I value being there.

(Sorry for this when you read it, not that I imagine you care much about this type of comment)

[Jiro]

As a grown-up on an intellectual discussion forum, it’s not other people’s job to manage your feelings.

It absolutely is.

Of course, the trick here is the fuzzy meaning of “manage your feelings”. It’s something that both parties have to do. Yes, people must moderate their own feelings and not act emotional about every little thing. But likewise, it is the responsibility of the poster to not attack others and justify it by claiming that it’s just feelings and it’s not the poster’s fault if someone gets upset from being attacked.

It does not make sense to object that the intellectually substantive comment makes you feel bad, because whether the comment makes you feel bad has no bearing on whether the comment is true or relevant.

This is the autistic quokka attitude: autistic because of the assertion that feelings don’t matter and quokka because you need to recognize attacks.

If the intellectually substantive comment makes you feel bad because of its intellectual content, for instance, because you don’t like being proven wrong, you might have a case. If it makes you feel bad because of other reasons, then no. It’s not at all hard to write something which intermixes intellectual content and personal attacks, and we need to be able to ban those, not say “reacting to attacks is feelings. Nobody should be concerned about feelings, and the intellectual content is still sound”.

By your reasoning if he was in your house tossing live grenades and making arguments, it would be bad to kick him out of your house, because the grenade explosions don’t affect the logical consistency of his arguments.

[AnnaSalamon]

Zack: As a grown-up on an intellectual discussion forum, it’s not other people’s job to manage your feelings.

Jiro: It absolutely is.

I’m with Zack on the quoted sentence. Typically when a person doesn’t like something, that because there’s something bad about it [the thing they didn’t like]. It’s generally good to avoid bad things. But… I think we get far healthier patterns when we make it peoples responsibility to avoid causing particular kinds of bad things, than when we make it peoples’ responsibility to manage other peoples’ feelings (even if done by both parties).

In terms of things (that seem to me to be) near your (Jiro’s) statements that I can agree with:

• I think feelings are a source of data, and the data matters, and the data is often about other things that matter. Someone who says “it’s just feelings” is typically missing this /​ has a weird ontology or missing mood here, from my perspective.

• Plenty of things beyond “intellectual content” can cause harm /​ be worth tracking, e.g. live grenades, or off-topic personal attacks.

[yams]

I’m noticing a pretty significant imbalance in the comments section, but the post having positive overall karma (despite, I assume, receiving many downvotes).

Can more people sympathetic to Zack’s position please chime in, either in a top-level comment or in one of the threads where Zack is currently ~solo-defending himself against ~a dozen people, or else chime in under this comment with what’s keeping you from doing so? [eg fear of retaliation, or ‘Zack seems to have it handled’ or whatever else]

I have hypotheses for the discrepancy, but curious if a naive appeal might move the needle.

[AnnaSalamon]

I personally upvoted it despite disagreeing with it, because I think it’s a serious attempt to make sense of a cultural question worth making sense of.

[frontier64]

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs. If you dislike a moderator decision you’re more likely to leave that community or interact with it less than if you liked the moderator decision.

[AnnaSalamon]

Edited to add: I still believe there’s a core thing that’s pretty vital here (a hill I would die on), but I no longer believe my words below are adequate to gesture at that hill. I’m gonna retract the below comment for now to save my own and Habryka’s and others’ attention, then come back when I think I have a more adequate conceptualization. (I’m also still uncertain how much anyone disagrees with it, as I was explicit about in my original comment; but I’d like to post a revised comment when I work one out because I eventually want ~common knowledge of the relevant principle, if I can get it.)

Original comment in strikethrough below:

There’s a hill that is sometimes-central and sometimes-tangential to this discussion, that I will die on: this forum should not ask users to directly manage others’ feelings, basically ever.

(The word “directly” is doing some work here: the site should indeed ask users to be (certain kinds of) polite, and those politeness norms will indeed tend on average to cause fewer upset feelings. Similarly for some other good norms.)

Why should the forum ~never ask users to directly manage others’ feelings? Because it gives those others too much power over what actions are/​aren’t acceptable, in a way that’s pretty confusing for everybody and messes with good boundaries. My degree of irritation over a LW comment-reply has to do with its epistemic and rhetorical virtues (which’re a reasonable thing to ask the author to optimize for) but also has to do with e.g. whether I missed lunch and whether the author reminds me of some difficult bit of my college years. It would be unreasonable of the site to e.g. demand that I eat lunch before engaging — that would be way too invasive and tangled-up; LW can ask actions of me but my emotions are my own business. It would be similarly unreasonable (and invasive, and tangled-up) for LW to ask the other user to attempt to optimize-for my emotions directly.

(By way of analogy, the rules of chess were perhaps crafted to cause fun and challenge and so on, but when I’m playing the literal board game of chess I’m not usually thinking about how to cause fun and challenge and so on to my opponent; I’m usually thinking about how to cause checkmate; and this is fine.)

I’m honestly not sure to what extent this is a point of disagreement:

• Habryka states “The issue with Said is not that “he hurts people’s feelings”. I would never use that phrase…”

• If I understand Vaniver correctly (which I’m not at all sure I do; I’m guessing some), his view is that Said and others should manage peoples feelings in cases where those feelings are “rational,” i.e. would not be destroyed by the truth. I disagree with this principle: my fasting-exacerbated feelings of irritation would not be destroyed by the truth (only by a sandwich) and are nonetheless a poor target for other LW-users’ optimization.

• This comment thread contains an upvoted statement that “it absolutely is [your responsibility to manage other peoples’ feelings],” (which has sometimes had medium-high agreement votes, though at this moment has net-disagreement-votes), and some other statements I interpret along similar lines.

In any case, I would like to stand up for “this forum should not ask users to directly manage others’ feelings, basically ever” and to argue with anyone who wishes to disagree, if there are such people.

[habryka]

I think “managing people’s feelings” is too ambiguous of a term to make a principle out of. I can imagine some versions of it that feel good to me, and some version of it that seem quite bad to me.

As phrased, this would make it a bad principle to adopt because the ambiguity includes various interpretations of it that would IMO be catastrophic to the site, especially if we allowed users to push them all the way to the edge.

For example, it seems obvious to me that if someone experienced a recent tragic death, that if you are engaging them in comments directly, that you don’t make jokes related to that death, and expect them to take it in stride. Is this “managing someone’s emotions”? I think unambiguously yes. You might even be making jokes that would land a year or two later when the hurt is less raw. I also think it would be really pretty crazy for someone to do that (and also to not stop if asked to do that, because that is “asking them to manage someone else’s emotions”).

[AnnaSalamon]

For example, it seems obvious to me that if someone experienced a recent tragic death, that if you are engaging them in comments directly, that you don’t make jokes related to that death, and expect them to take it in stride.

I agree with this example, but I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out where you’re going with it, and I currently disagree with “Is this ‘managing someone’s emotions’? I think unambiguously yes.”

Possibly my conceptualization of “asking people to manage others’ emotions” is not the clearest/​best.

Do you have a guess about whether you and I disagree about anything substantial about norms? Do you have a phrasing you agree with that might capture the core thing I’m trying to stand up for here, in a way that is less confusing?

[habryka]

Hmm, I think I don’t really have a good positive example, or pointer, at the thing you mean by “not managing other people’s emotions”. Not making jokes you expect them to be triggered by, for sympathetic reasons, seemed to me like among the most central examples of managing someone’s emotions, so if that isn’t included I am now pretty confused what you are pointing to.

[AnnaSalamon]

“Not asking users to directly manage other peoples feelings” was my original phrase, FWIW. (Emphases added.)

Two central examples of the kind of thing I have in mind (from elsewhere):

• Person A says a thing, which upsets person B. Person A is expected to try to make B not-upset, kinda regardless of how this happened.

• Participants in a large-group conversation are asked to “slow down” whenever at least one person in the conversation seems too triggered to process things well, even if this means [obviously interesting and relevant issue X] is never in fact talked about, or not at enough speed to get much throughput.

[AnnaSalamon]

Part of my intuition here is that property rights and ~Hayekian natural law allow miracles of interactive productivity, and there’re a bunch of contexts in which this gets messed up when the {property rights and domains of allowed free choice and responsibility} get mangled.

Asking me to be (particular kinds of) polite is totally compatible with clear property rights of a sort that lets me choose freely what I’m gonna do, with an eye toward what I want to achieve, while leaving others a predictable domain in which they can do the same (without them needing to worry that I’ll mess up the rights they’re counting on). Asking me to not upset others (in generality) wouldn’t be.

[habryka]

Person A says a thing, which upsets person B. Person A is expected to try to make B not-upset, kinda regardless of how this happened.

But how is “not making a joke that would land well if not for the other interlocutor recently having experienced a tragic death that rhymes with that” not an example of this?

Or do you mean “there cannot be a norm that you are always responsible for someone else’s emotions, no matter how their emotions arise?”. In that case, sure, I agree with such a norm, but it also seems exceptionally weak. It doesn’t say much about there being some circumstances where we consider other people’s emotional reactions sympathetic, and worth modeling in the conversation, and the “recent tragic death” example is one such instance.

[Benquo]

I’m not going to express any further opinions about Said here but agree otherwise with this post; it seems to me that the explanation of the ban was not an honestly mistaken application of good principles, but an appeal to bad principles. If an appeal to feelings can be reduced to legitimate considerations motivating those feelings then one should do so; if not, the appeal is illegitimate. I took the ban as a confirmation of a policy of unprincipled and unbounded submission to threats by the people (or personas) whose feelings are supposed to matter, which seems to be disjoint from those who mean to be accountable for their speech and behavior.

[AprilSR]

policy debates should not appear one-sided

your strength as a rationalist lies in your ability to argue for a belief being constrained by whether that belief is actually true

Hmm.

[jwfiredragon]

Policy debates are about opinions in addition to truth. Even if both sides only contain good rationalists who argue from true beliefs, they won’t necessarily agree on which beliefs matter more.

[AprilSR]

I think this is basically correct, but the English word “belief” is often considered to include opinions (because most people don’t draw an incredibly clear distinction between questions of fact and questions of value), so—like, you just have to be careful you’re drawing that distinction correctly, I suppose.

[Alex Darby]

The revised passage is less engaging writing than the original. (It was a really clever analogy.) But it’s clear, and for that I have Said to thank

LessWrong is, to me, not about building a community of people writing dry, technically correct essays on various topics. It is about actually become less wrong, both as individuals who learn from each other, and as a community. This means “other people reading your writing” is not optional.

In this case, I see an example of Said ignoring the tradeoff between engagement, and clarity of the argument. Engaging writing is good. It means people actually read the post, instead of bouncing off after two paragraphs.

As far as I am concerned, this analogy points to what I consider the ‘true reason’ behind Said’s ban.

Net positive effect due to Said causing local argument improvements in the author by commenting.

vs

Net negative effect due to less posts due to people worried about (e.g.) Said nit-picking a non-central point, arguing an actual flaw using blunt and inconsiderate language, or socially trapping the author in a long comment chain that gets further and further away from the post and into critiquing each other’s comments.

If the moderators think the chilling effect of Said on posts and comments is worse for {rationality/​the site/​a third thing}, a ban is the right decision. If they don’t, a mistake was made.

In all of the above I have attempted to phrase my views on Said’s ban in neutral language observing the tradeoffs involved, but my n=1 example is “I comment more now that I won’t have Said making me regret it, and my comments, while not perfect, are net positive at making the community less wrong, so the ban has made my experience much better.

[FeepingCreature]

I genuinely think, and note that this is just a personal aggregate view and that I don’t have cites for this, but I’ve known several people like this: the default mode of engagement of some people in this community is one that can be hurtful or can be interpreted as aggressive, neglectful, spiteful or trolling. I think that you need a baseline of cognitive/​social modeling skill to avoid this, and that people often don’t have this. From what I saw of Said, on this forum and other places, he says exactly what he thinks, but is often completely unable to read or predict the second-order implications of his communications, and in fact is so unable to perceive them that he doesn’t even see that there’s something he’s not seeing. I’ve seen this pattern multiple times in the discussion.

He’s generally perfectly honest about the exact words, but someone with “normal-ISI communication” sees second order inferences as so obvious that they’re also interpreted as a deliberate part of the communication, and this is just never the case with Said.

I’m not saying this to excuse him, or to excuse Habryka, but I think it’s impossible to understand this if you don’t have the model of “Said’s way of speaking has a factor that raises antipathy against him, that is impossible to understand if you don’t have very high instinctual social intelligence (way more than me, to be clear) and impossible to even notice if you have low instinctual social intelligence, and this factor causes people with more social perception to grasp for reasons why he is in the wrong. This is the actual reason for the ban.”

[Sodium]

LessWrong 2.0 Is a Website, Not a Culture or an Authority

Man I don’t think I agree with this. Clearly what draws people here is the culture and the vibe.

And I do think I relate to twitter and Elon Musk in a similar way as I relate to LW and the LW team? I have preferences over what content should be promoted on Twitter, and I would be happier with Elon if he shared my preferences. Ditto with Lesswrong.

[Yoav Ravid]

fwiw, I feel the same as you about LW, but feel the same as Zack about Twitter

[Dagon]

it seems like they’re trying to strike a balance between ego gratification and being less wrong. You can get away with making on-topic, intellectually substantive criticisms, but only if you take care to manage ingroup members’ emotions and cover for their reputations

I think this is core to the question. It’s been a main point of discussion since the inception of LessWrong and the split from Overcoming Bias—how to balance the needs of anchor posters and the rest of us. Ego gratification is a big draw, and it likely keeps the site healthy overall to notice and prevent particularly grating responses and demands.

EVEN IF those annoying-to-ingroup behaviors are legit in a lot of lenses, they’re harmful to the feeling of community. I don’t honestly know if it’s possible to have a feeling of community without in-group enforcement of norms that aren’t ideal.

[frontier64]

A lot of this is obviously correct, but also mostly pointless. Moderators that aren’t founders almost always run a site more for social status than following the site’s founding principles. There’s no reason that the moderator-but-not-founder of a rationality site should be substantially different than the moderator of any large forum. Rationality on this site is more of a theme than any real effort to have correct and effective ideas.

[Zack_M_Davis]

also mostly pointless

I believe in seeking death with dignity.

[JohnWittle]

I have spent the last year and a half or so falling in with some very strange people who believe some very strange things about language models

I keep considering writing up a very long and detailed post trying to explain these things, in the hopes that someone will actually check if I’m being dumb, and tell me

each time I actually imagine doing this, my emotional core predicts that I will get downvoted and not engaged with. not prodded, not questioned. And the form this thought usually arrives in is: ”but Said got banned”.

i feel like i understand where the moderators are coming from, re: hurting people’s feelings. i can readily imagine being discouraged from posting, if i thought that someone like Said would make me feel low status. and i would definitely feel that discouragement.

but i empirically seem to be far more discouraged by Said’s ban than i ever would have been by Said himself

sometimes you really need to learn if the dress makes you look fat in reality, and the existence of politeness as a social norm really fucking sucks

[habryka]

FWIW, Said basically never commented on any AI-adjacent topics, so him commenting there would have been unlikely (not zero likely, but quite unlikely).

re: hurting people’s feelings

To be clear, this is not at all my position. The issue with Said is not that “he hurts people’s feelings”. I would never use that phrase, it doesn’t show up in the big moderation post, and IMO nothing close or equivalent to it is something I expressed there or anywhere else (though I’ve written an absurd amount on Said, so it might be somewhere).

It’s OK if you just intended to state what you believe my or the rest of the LW team’s beliefs are, but the context makes it seem like you think that is how I would describe my position as well, so I felt the need to correct that.

[JohnWittle]

ah yeah i didn’t mean to imply that my instinctive response was reasonable for lots of reasons, just that… i had, in fact, thought those exact 4 words: “but Said got banned”, as a handwavy way to refer to the fear in my own mind

i agree that “hurting people’s feelings” isn’t a great way to categorize what Said did, but i certainly do feel as though my feelings (but perhaps not my epistemics? hard to say, above comments are interesting) are being protected from being hurt by his ban. that’s not to imply anything about the motive behind the ban

[Yoav Ravid]

I enjoyed this post and thinks it gives valid criticisms of the original decision and its justifications, as well as making important general points about LW. With that said, I think both this post and Habryka’s original post^[1] missed a valid reconciliation of the two ideals Habryka gave in his post—namely, that LW should be a place that forces you to get your arguments together, and that LW should be a rewarding place to engage with.

If the goal is to be less wrong through posting on Less Wrong, but posting LW is discouraging and unrewarding, then it hurts the initial goal of becoming LW. If the end goal is to become less wrong and your strategy or culture is in fact not conducive to people becoming less wrong, then it would constitute a failure. Just like two-boxing on Newcomb’s problem is wrong because it looses regardless of how supposedly virtuous your decision process is.

Given that we are humans, are far from perfectly rational, and have various factors, including social factors, that affect our ability to be rational in various situations, the rational thing to do is to take that into account when designing our environments and cultures, or choosing which environments and cultures to participate in or stay away from. Ben Pace and Habryka wrote about this in more detail.

In the case of LW, it means creating the sort of culture that both entices people to participate, and entices them to get their arguments together, since focusing one just one of these would result in losing both. If you only focus on being enticing, then LW may have lots of people, but they won’t become less wrong over time. If you only focus on forcing people to get their arguments together, then very few people will participate in the first place, except a tiny minority which seeks exactly that, and you will fail to raise the sanity waterline.

This frame doesn’t immediately give exact prescriptions for how LW’s culture should look like, or whether it was right to ban Said, but I think it’s a useful lens to look through.

(personally, I do tend towards the view that banning Said was excessive)

1. ^

   I read it at the time and don’t remember it framing this as I’m going to, but I haven’t re-read to make sure it hasn’t. If it has, I apologise in advance for misrepresenting it, and will happily edit the comment if pointed out.

[David Joshua Sartor]

That is, to the extent that the community can distinguish between good and bad criticisms on the merits,^[24]determined critics of a particular author are just providing free verification labor, not conducting a DDoS attack: as it is written of the fifth virtue, “Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favor is to you.” (And to the extent that the community can’t distinguish between good and bad criticisms on the merits, we have bigger problems.)

In fact, obviously to some extent we can’t distinguish between good and bad criticisms on the merits; we have limited time.

We have many big problems to solve, that doesn’t mean we should ignore smaller ones.

[David Joshua Sartor]

The reason this 2023 comment is compatible with the controversial 2020 remarks is because Achmiz believes that (what he considers) simple requests for definitions and examples are productive, even if not all comments are productive. According to this view, a request for examples of a phenomenon should not be hard to satisfy if the phenomenon is real; a request for a definition of an niche term should not be hard to satisfy if term means anything. Ideally, the answers should have already been in the post; the fact that commenters have to ask is a manifestation of the post not being complete.

My understanding was that the two conversations just used ‘obligation’ in different ways. One was assuming Heroic Responsibility, and the other was using prosaic responsibility.

[Shankar Sivarajan]

the State of Israel’s legitimacy as a homeland for the Jewish people depends on its including all Jews

Your analogy cuts the other way if you know of Meyer Lansky.