My reply to a subsequent comment that you posted and then deleted:
I have a model of why what I dislike about LW culture will shift over time in my preferred direction, despite what you wrote, if LW got rid of author mod powers. I don’t particularly want to discuss it with you but I am discussing it with others. Are you saying that I must convince you that my model is correct or plausible before Lightcone is willing to take this deal?
Also, can you please clarify “measured in opportunity-cost-of-habryka’s time” since if that’s a hard blocker to my proposal then there’s no point in discussing other aspects of it.
I’m saying you need to convince habryka that whatever your proposal is would increase net intellectual progress on LessWrong. It seems like you keep avoiding engaging with any of our cruxes, and you will eventually need to do that if you want us to change anything.
From what I can tell, your current model is based on several wrong assumptions, and it sounds like you are about to rabbithole on a plan that rests on those false assumptions.
Habryka has spent a lot of time explaining this to you and you keep AFAICT not listening. (Part of where the cost-in-time comes from, as well as training. Any new hire requires habryka onboarding time)
We would not onboard third-party moderators that moved the site in a different moderation direction until you convinced habryka your changes would result in a better LessWrong by his lights.
I’m fine with you onboarding moderators of your own choosing. My model/hypothesis is that your thoughts on what would increase net intellectual progress on LessWrong are significantly biased by the history of, and current dependency on author moderation, so it only makes sense for me to try to convince you/habryka otherwise after getting rid of this, which you earlier said would be good as long as third party moderators are free, so I’m trying to make it as close to free as possible from your perspective. I believe this is a win-win solution, which I can investigate further on my end if you gave me a specific dollar amount, including in the millions of dollars per year range if you believe that’s what’s required.
I believe this is a win-win solution, which I can investigate further on my end if you gave me a specific dollar amount, including in the millions of dollars per year range if you believe that’s what’s required.
I gave an estimate of some people’s salaries who could do this here, though even with 1-2 additional moderators, moderation effort would be far from free.
Thanks, I didn’t see the bottom part of that comment. Please also check out my own edit, where I asked for an estimate of the opportunity cost of author moderation.
Additionally, even if this proposal does not solve the underlying cultural issues (from my perspective), it at least fixes the immediate symptoms that block me from participating on LW, because I do not recall having any serious negative experiences personally from site moderators, only from author mods. If you and habryka value my participation / intellectual output, it seems like you should be happy with this even if I’m wrong with my model. @Raemon@habryka
EDIT: Also, it would be helpful if you could give an estimate of the opportunity cost of author moderation per year (if you have one handy), including reduced intellectual output because of time spent on moderation, drama/conflict/wasted time by users, mod time to handle fallout of such drama, waste due to wrong/suboptimal mod decisions (due to the author mods being untrained and inexperienced relative to site mods) even when there is no drama, etc. I could present this to potential funders as an additional reason to fund additional site mods for LW (in case my intellectual output alone isn’t sufficient to justify $X millions per year).
Yeah, this is totally valid, though I think it’s pretty unlikely this would swing a site-wide policy like this. I do think well-respected authors (which you certainly are and I value your contributions greatly), should feel free to just put their chips down and make a request for a change in moderation policy, but I think this one is almost certainly too big. But I’ll think about it for a few days.
I think I may have misinterpreted Raemon when he said
I think “norm enforcement by third parties would (mostly) be actively better if it were free.” The problem is just that it’s very expensive.
I thought this meant that he (and probably you) would be happy to to switch to third-party mods if they were free, regardless of me, and then my continued participation here would be an additional benefit on top of that. If instead you’re at best going to very reluctantly accept my proposal only due to my own contributions, that makes it less of a win-win and more like I’m making a threat (i.e. do this or I’ll leave) which I don’t want to do (at least for now or without thinking about it a lot more).
EDIT: Can you try to describe your actual position about this? Putting aside Wei’s contributions:
Even if I got totally free new site mods and my own opportunity cost was magicked away, I still wouldn’t want to switch to only site mods.
If I got totally free new site mods and no self opportunity cost, I would switch, but given realistic costs (that can’t be compensated by new funding), I would not switch.
I would switch if I got new funding to hire new site mods.
Part of my answer to this is “we have explained our models in detail several times, and I haven’t seen you reference any of those details in your suggestions. You can’t propose a workable idea until you have actually integrated everything we’ve said.”
Our most valuable resource is habryka’s time. We’re happy to talk things through, but by now I think habryka has explained all the pieces of the problem at least twice.
I think things will go better here if you start by rereading everything (at least from this thread, and maybe any specific things he linked to from the past couple rounds of discussion), starting with the assumption “we are not doing this because Eliezer made us, we are doing this because we think it is a good idea”, and try to summarize everything as you understand it so far.
In this case I actually did feed the thread to Gemini 3.1 Pro and asked it how habryka would answer my question, and it said 1 or 4, and then habryka’s actual answer turned out to be closer to 2. Its reasoning, which I thought was plausible, was that habryka has a vision of the archipelago that he wants to achieve, that depends on authors being mods, so the cost of site mods wasn’t really a crux for him. So I was kind of surprised when I saw habryka’s actual answer.
I suspect you may be overestimating how clear your writings/answers are, or how much you explained things, or how relevant previous explanations are given new assumptions, or how much I can/should trust you/others to represent habrya. For example, I asked earlier “Why can’t one of the other experienced mods train or manage the new mod?” and got no answer to this (confirmed via LLM that it wasn’t answered or explained anywhere in the entire comment tree rooted at the shortform OP), so there’s a big blank spot in my model of what’s going on at Lightcone.
Ah, well cool that you tried that and sorry it didn’t work.
But to clarify, I would be using Fable for this, I don’t have a belief that older models are able to track the arguments here.
I don’t have that strong a belief that this “ask the models” thing will turn out to work, maybe that’s a dead-end for now. But, insofar as the idea has promise I’d be doing this with Fable, making sure it’s read Meta-tations on Moderation: Towards Public Archipelago , Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation) and all comments on those, and reading your shortform page for all comments between you and habryka on moderation.
One reason I think this problem is on your side is that Oliver has said multiple times “we are not doing this because Eliezer said so”, and you repeated the belief that we were in your most recent interaction.
There are less straightforward reasons for that but if you’re still ignoring basic statements like that the conversation feels pretty hopeless to me.
For example, I asked earlier “Why can’t one of the other experienced mods train or manage the new mod?” and got no answer to this (confirmed via LLM that it wasn’t answered or explained anywhere in the entire comment tree rooted at the shortform OP)
Oh I see. To explain why I “ignored” it, I thought what you wrote wasn’t directly relevant to what I was trying to do at the time, which was to test whether Lightcone might be amenable to my offer. I had my reasons for thinking that the offer would be a win for me despite what you wrote, basically because I think you didn’t quite understand how I thought it would solve (or at least possibly solve) the problem, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to explain. Because if Lightcone wouldn’t be amenable to the offer, then explaining my model of how it would help me would be kind of pointless.
(i.e. basically, @Wei Dai you can have Claude Code Fable scrape for all the past moderation discussions, and then write up a message and ask “are there replies that habryka pretty obviously say to this?” and then iterate a bit until you get to something that feels like it’s at least moving the conversation forward)
(It’s not totally obvious how to do the scraping part; maybe you ask CC to scrape all content from a list of users you give it, and then ask it to search / read for everything about moderation and put together a timeline of all that content, and then interview it about that blob?)
I’ve done this actually for twitter conversations with people I don’t know and it was just pretty straightforward. “Hey I want to talk to so-and-so about X, please read everything by so-and-so that bears on X”.
One important thing was to fork the conversation after the initial “read up everything relevant”, so that when I asked “okay, what if I wrote this to them?”, it doesn’t anchor on whatever random stuff it guessed the first couple times.
The failure mode I’m concerned about is missing big chunks of content, so you only get 1⁄2 of the relevant stuff or something. It may not be that bad a failure mode, but like, for example, just asking a Fable chat probably would turn up far under 90% of the past convos between Wei / Zack / LW mods? CC would probably do better? (I have done a significant amount of using CC to “read” many papers, and I have to do nonzero poking CC to improve fetching methods; by default it gives up for various reasons even when there is a way.)
I agree it might not be totally comprehensive, but, that seems kinda fine? A lot of the concepts have gotten repeated. (Like, seems fine to try a lower effort version and see how it goes and try a higher effort version if it feels on-track-to-be-helpful but insufficient)
There are some difficulties with that because of system prompts and default tools.
Claude.ai/ClaudeCode by default read websites using the built-in WebFetch tool. The WebFetch tool loads the HTML, turns it into Markdown and feeds it into Haiku(! Edit: Claude.ai’s tool does not feed it into Haiku), which summarizes (with strong instructions for limiting verbatim quotes!) and only that output goes to Fable. (By contrast ChatGPT/Codex’s default tool gives the full text, but also has strong instructions for limiting verbatim quotes. For Codex this is only in the tool instruction.)
ClaudeCode/Codex can easily work around this by using e.g. cURL (especially if you tell them about lesswrong.com/api). Edit: Claude.ai can too, if you enable Network egress in the settings. Both can of course create you a re-usable skill. And with some prompting you can get around the quoting limitations.
Right, I’ve had cc download my whole LW history, and I had to make a system to actually download the actual entire whole paper. I think one can easily do it by asking cc, but one has to specifically ask.
Even if I got totally free new site mods and my own opportunity cost was magicked away, I still wouldn’t want to switch to only site mods.
I think if site-mods were actually close to free, in the way they would be if we could e.g. get Fable to handle moderation disputes, then I think I would want to at least try switching to it (possibly first in some partial way). To be clear, that might still involve something like “authors are given a substantial amount of deference when deciding whether someone is allowed to post on their content” as one of the things the third party mods would take into account when making moderation decisions. Or it might take the case of an appeals process where people can appeal a ban and then one of the third party mods reviews it as reasonable (maybe again with substantial but not ultimate deference to the author).
The big issue is of course that moderation is extremely far from free in this way. The actual moderation demand here would be several full-time people in order to actually make it a non-miserable experience, and that just runs into a lot of constraints. It’s just really hard to run a large organization of people.
If I got totally free new site mods and no self opportunity cost, I would switch, but given realistic costs (that can’t be compensated by new funding), I would not switch.
It does really seem that in basically any world there would be some substantial overhead and management cost that is hard to compensate via funding. I think if we were in the “Fable could do moderation” scenario, I think that might still be worth it, since the upside would be substantial, but we are not.
My reply to a subsequent comment that you posted and then deleted:
I have a model of why what I dislike about LW culture will shift over time in my preferred direction, despite what you wrote, if LW got rid of author mod powers. I don’t particularly want to discuss it with you but I am discussing it with others. Are you saying that I must convince you that my model is correct or plausible before Lightcone is willing to take this deal?
Also, can you please clarify “measured in opportunity-cost-of-habryka’s time” since if that’s a hard blocker to my proposal then there’s no point in discussing other aspects of it.
I’m saying you need to convince habryka that whatever your proposal is would increase net intellectual progress on LessWrong. It seems like you keep avoiding engaging with any of our cruxes, and you will eventually need to do that if you want us to change anything.
From what I can tell, your current model is based on several wrong assumptions, and it sounds like you are about to rabbithole on a plan that rests on those false assumptions.
Habryka has spent a lot of time explaining this to you and you keep AFAICT not listening. (Part of where the cost-in-time comes from, as well as training. Any new hire requires habryka onboarding time)
We would not onboard third-party moderators that moved the site in a different moderation direction until you convinced habryka your changes would result in a better LessWrong by his lights.
I’m fine with you onboarding moderators of your own choosing. My model/hypothesis is that your thoughts on what would increase net intellectual progress on LessWrong are significantly biased by the history of, and current dependency on author moderation, so it only makes sense for me to try to convince you/habryka otherwise after getting rid of this, which you earlier said would be good as long as third party moderators are free, so I’m trying to make it as close to free as possible from your perspective. I believe this is a win-win solution, which I can investigate further on my end if you gave me a specific dollar amount, including in the millions of dollars per year range if you believe that’s what’s required.
I gave an estimate of some people’s salaries who could do this here, though even with 1-2 additional moderators, moderation effort would be far from free.
Thanks, I didn’t see the bottom part of that comment. Please also check out my own edit, where I asked for an estimate of the opportunity cost of author moderation.
Additionally, even if this proposal does not solve the underlying cultural issues (from my perspective), it at least fixes the immediate symptoms that block me from participating on LW, because I do not recall having any serious negative experiences personally from site moderators, only from author mods. If you and habryka value my participation / intellectual output, it seems like you should be happy with this even if I’m wrong with my model. @Raemon @habryka
EDIT: Also, it would be helpful if you could give an estimate of the opportunity cost of author moderation per year (if you have one handy), including reduced intellectual output because of time spent on moderation, drama/conflict/wasted time by users, mod time to handle fallout of such drama, waste due to wrong/suboptimal mod decisions (due to the author mods being untrained and inexperienced relative to site mods) even when there is no drama, etc. I could present this to potential funders as an additional reason to fund additional site mods for LW (in case my intellectual output alone isn’t sufficient to justify $X millions per year).
Yeah, this is totally valid, though I think it’s pretty unlikely this would swing a site-wide policy like this. I do think well-respected authors (which you certainly are and I value your contributions greatly), should feel free to just put their chips down and make a request for a change in moderation policy, but I think this one is almost certainly too big. But I’ll think about it for a few days.
I think I may have misinterpreted Raemon when he said
I thought this meant that he (and probably you) would be happy to to switch to third-party mods if they were free, regardless of me, and then my continued participation here would be an additional benefit on top of that. If instead you’re at best going to very reluctantly accept my proposal only due to my own contributions, that makes it less of a win-win and more like I’m making a threat (i.e. do this or I’ll leave) which I don’t want to do (at least for now or without thinking about it a lot more).
EDIT: Can you try to describe your actual position about this? Putting aside Wei’s contributions:
Even if I got totally free new site mods and my own opportunity cost was magicked away, I still wouldn’t want to switch to only site mods.
If I got totally free new site mods and no self opportunity cost, I would switch, but given realistic costs (that can’t be compensated by new funding), I would not switch.
I would switch if I got new funding to hire new site mods.
Something else?
Part of my answer to this is “we have explained our models in detail several times, and I haven’t seen you reference any of those details in your suggestions. You can’t propose a workable idea until you have actually integrated everything we’ve said.”
Our most valuable resource is habryka’s time. We’re happy to talk things through, but by now I think habryka has explained all the pieces of the problem at least twice.
I think things will go better here if you start by rereading everything (at least from this thread, and maybe any specific things he linked to from the past couple rounds of discussion), starting with the assumption “we are not doing this because Eliezer made us, we are doing this because we think it is a good idea”, and try to summarize everything as you understand it so far.
In this case I actually did feed the thread to Gemini 3.1 Pro and asked it how habryka would answer my question, and it said 1 or 4, and then habryka’s actual answer turned out to be closer to 2. Its reasoning, which I thought was plausible, was that habryka has a vision of the archipelago that he wants to achieve, that depends on authors being mods, so the cost of site mods wasn’t really a crux for him. So I was kind of surprised when I saw habryka’s actual answer.
I suspect you may be overestimating how clear your writings/answers are, or how much you explained things, or how relevant previous explanations are given new assumptions, or how much I can/should trust you/others to represent habrya. For example, I asked earlier “Why can’t one of the other experienced mods train or manage the new mod?” and got no answer to this (confirmed via LLM that it wasn’t answered or explained anywhere in the entire comment tree rooted at the shortform OP), so there’s a big blank spot in my model of what’s going on at Lightcone.
Ah, well cool that you tried that and sorry it didn’t work.
But to clarify, I would be using Fable for this, I don’t have a belief that older models are able to track the arguments here.
I don’t have that strong a belief that this “ask the models” thing will turn out to work, maybe that’s a dead-end for now. But, insofar as the idea has promise I’d be doing this with Fable, making sure it’s read Meta-tations on Moderation: Towards Public Archipelago , Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation) and all comments on those, and reading your shortform page for all comments between you and habryka on moderation.
One reason I think this problem is on your side is that Oliver has said multiple times “we are not doing this because Eliezer said so”, and you repeated the belief that we were in your most recent interaction.
There are less straightforward reasons for that but if you’re still ignoring basic statements like that the conversation feels pretty hopeless to me.
fyi I have stopped answering questions like this after you ignored most of the content of this comment, which stated pretty clearly what sorts of discussion would be likely to move us, and why: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=betXXw7gFskNfiHp3
Oh I see. To explain why I “ignored” it, I thought what you wrote wasn’t directly relevant to what I was trying to do at the time, which was to test whether Lightcone might be amenable to my offer. I had my reasons for thinking that the offer would be a win for me despite what you wrote, basically because I think you didn’t quite understand how I thought it would solve (or at least possibly solve) the problem, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to explain. Because if Lightcone wouldn’t be amenable to the offer, then explaining my model of how it would help me would be kind of pointless.
(Cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=DuiewixJiufzTH84h )
Oh that is pretty good actually.
(i.e. basically, @Wei Dai you can have Claude Code Fable scrape for all the past moderation discussions, and then write up a message and ask “are there replies that habryka pretty obviously say to this?” and then iterate a bit until you get to something that feels like it’s at least moving the conversation forward)
(It’s not totally obvious how to do the scraping part; maybe you ask CC to scrape all content from a list of users you give it, and then ask it to search / read for everything about moderation and put together a timeline of all that content, and then interview it about that blob?)
I’ve done this actually for twitter conversations with people I don’t know and it was just pretty straightforward. “Hey I want to talk to so-and-so about X, please read everything by so-and-so that bears on X”.
One important thing was to fork the conversation after the initial “read up everything relevant”, so that when I asked “okay, what if I wrote this to them?”, it doesn’t anchor on whatever random stuff it guessed the first couple times.
The failure mode I’m concerned about is missing big chunks of content, so you only get 1⁄2 of the relevant stuff or something. It may not be that bad a failure mode, but like, for example, just asking a Fable chat probably would turn up far under 90% of the past convos between Wei / Zack / LW mods? CC would probably do better? (I have done a significant amount of using CC to “read” many papers, and I have to do nonzero poking CC to improve fetching methods; by default it gives up for various reasons even when there is a way.)
I agree it might not be totally comprehensive, but, that seems kinda fine? A lot of the concepts have gotten repeated. (Like, seems fine to try a lower effort version and see how it goes and try a higher effort version if it feels on-track-to-be-helpful but insufficient)
There are some difficulties with that because of system prompts and default tools.
Claude.ai/ClaudeCode by default read websites using the built-in WebFetch tool. The WebFetch tool loads the HTML, turns it into Markdown and feeds it into Haiku(! Edit: Claude.ai’s tool does not feed it into Haiku), which summarizes (with strong instructions for limiting verbatim quotes!) and only that output goes to Fable. (By contrast ChatGPT/Codex’s default tool gives the full text, but also has strong instructions for limiting verbatim quotes. For Codex this is only in the tool instruction.)
ClaudeCode/Codex can easily work around this by using e.g. cURL (especially if you tell them about lesswrong.com/api). Edit: Claude.ai can too, if you enable Network egress in the settings. Both can of course create you a re-usable skill. And with some prompting you can get around the quoting limitations.
Right, I’ve had cc download my whole LW history, and I had to make a system to actually download the actual entire whole paper. I think one can easily do it by asking cc, but one has to specifically ask.
I think if site-mods were actually close to free, in the way they would be if we could e.g. get Fable to handle moderation disputes, then I think I would want to at least try switching to it (possibly first in some partial way). To be clear, that might still involve something like “authors are given a substantial amount of deference when deciding whether someone is allowed to post on their content” as one of the things the third party mods would take into account when making moderation decisions. Or it might take the case of an appeals process where people can appeal a ban and then one of the third party mods reviews it as reasonable (maybe again with substantial but not ultimate deference to the author).
The big issue is of course that moderation is extremely far from free in this way. The actual moderation demand here would be several full-time people in order to actually make it a non-miserable experience, and that just runs into a lot of constraints. It’s just really hard to run a large organization of people.
It does really seem that in basically any world there would be some substantial overhead and management cost that is hard to compensate via funding. I think if we were in the “Fable could do moderation” scenario, I think that might still be worth it, since the upside would be substantial, but we are not.