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.
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.
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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.”)
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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].
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.
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?
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].
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.
re: alleged local norms of telling the truth even on awkward social matters
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
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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.”)
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re: why Ben Hoffman disliked Said’s comments on “Zetetic Explanation”
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].
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.
re: credibility of claims to believe in local social norms about telling the truth about something
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 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
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.)
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
Yes.
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.
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.
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.