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