[Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
[I will move this into meta in a few days, but this seemed important enough to have around on the frontpage for a bit]
Here is a short post with some of the moderation changes we are implementing. Ray, Ben and me are working on some more posts explaining some of our deeper reasoning, so this is just a list with some quick updates.
Even before the start of the open beta, I intended to allow trusted users to moderate their personal pages. The reasoning I outlined in our initial announcement post was as follows:
“We want to give trusted authors moderation powers for the discussions on their own posts, allowing them to foster their own discussion norms, and giving them their own sphere of influence on the discussion platform. We hope this will both make the lives of our top authors better and will also create a form of competition between different cultures and moderation paradigms on Lesswrong.”
And I also gave some further perspectives on this in my “Models of Moderation” post that I posted a week ago.
We now finally got around to implement the technology for this. But the big question that has been on my mind while working on the implementation has been:
How should we handle moderation on frontpage posts?
Me, Ray, Ben and Vaniver talked for quite a while about the pros and cons, and considered a bunch of perspectives, but the two major considerations on our mind were:
The frontpage is a public forum that should reflect the perspectives of the whole community, as opposed to just the views of the active top-level authors.
We want our best authors to feel safe posting to LessWrong, and us promoting a post from your private blog to the frontpage shouldn’t feel like a punishment (which it might if it also entails losing control over it)
After a good amount of internal discussion, as well as feedback from some of the top content contributors on LW (including Eliezer), we settled on allowing users above 2000 karma to moderate their own frontpage posts, and allow users above 100 karma to moderate their personal blogs. This strikes me as the best compromise between the different considerations we had.
Here are the details about the implementation:
Users above...
100 karma can moderate everything in their personal blog posts section,
This functionality should go live in about a week
2000 karma can moderate all of their posts, including frontpage and curated. (We’ll likely increase the ‘2000’ threshold once we import the votes from old LessWrong)
This should be live right now
Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles in their user settings:
Easy Going—I just delete obvious spam and trolling
Norm Enforcing—I try to enforce particular rules (See moderation guidelines)
Reign of Terror—I delete anything I judge to be annoying or counterproductive
Users can also specify more detailed moderation guidelines, which will be shown at the top of the comment section and at the bottom of the new comment form on the posts they can moderate
The specific moderation actions available are:
Delete comment
Optionally: with a public notice and reason
Delete thread without trace (deletes all comments and all its children)
Optionally: With a private reason sent to the author
Ban user from commenting on this post
Ban user from commenting on any of my posts
If a comment of yours is ever deleted, you will automatically receive a PM with the text of your comment, so you don’t lose the content of your comment.
I also want to allow users to create private comments on posts, that are only visible to themselves and the author of the post, and allow authors to make comments private (as an alternative to deleting them). But that will have to wait until we get around to implementing it.
We tested this reasonably thoroughly, but there is definitely a chance we missed something, so let us know if you notice any weird behavior around commenting on posts, or using the moderation tools, and we will fix it ASAP.
While I certainly have thoughts on all of this, let me point out one aspect of this system which I think is unusually dangerous and detrimental:
The ability (especially for arbitrary users, not just moderators) to take moderation actions that remove content, or prevent certain users from commenting, without leaving a clearly and publicly visible trace.
At the very least (if, say, you’re worried about something like “we don’t want comments sections to be cluttered with ‘post deleted’”), there ought to be a publicly viewable log of all moderation actions. (Consider the lobste.rs moderation log feature as an example of how such a thing might work.) This should apply to removal of comments and threads, and it should definitely also apply to banning a user from commenting on a post / on all of one’s posts.
Let me say again that I consider a moderation log to be the minimally acceptable moderation accountability feature on a site like this—ideally there would also be indicators in-context that a moderation action has taken place. But allowing totally invisible / untraceable moderation actions is a recipe for disaster.
Edit: For another example, note Scott’s register of bans/warnings, which is notable for the fact that Slate Star Codex is one guy’s personal blog and explicitly operates on a “Reign of Terror” moderation policy—yet the ban register is maintained, all warnings/bans/etc. are very visibly marked with red text right there in the comment thread which provokes them—and, I think, this greatly contributes to the atmosphere of open-mindedness that SSC is now rightly famous for.
I really like the moderation log idea—I think it could be really good for people to have a place where they can go if they want to learn what the norms are empirically. I also propose there be a similar place which stores the comments explaining why posts are curated.
(Also note that Satvik Beri said to me I should do this a few months ago and I forgot and this is my fault.)
I actually quite like the idea of a moderation log, and Ben and Ray also seem to like it. I hadn’t really considered that as an option, and my model is that Eliezer and other authors wouldn’t object to it either, so this seems like something I would be quite open to implementing.
I actually think some hesitation and thought is warranted on that particular feature. A naively-implemented auto-filled moderation log can significantly tighten the feedback loop for bad actors trying to evade bans. Maybe if there were a time delay, so moderation actions only become visible when they’re a minimum number of days old?
There is some sense in what you say, but… before we allow concerns like this to guide design decisions, it would be very good to do some reasonably thorough investigating about whether other platforms that implement moderation logs have this problem. (The admin and moderators of lobste.rs, for example, hang out in the #lobsters IRC channel on Freenode. Why not ask them if they have found the moderation log to result in a significant ban evasion issue?)
I’m also mystified at why traceless deletition/banning are desirable properties to have on a forum like this. But (with apologies to the moderators) I think consulting the realpolitik will spare us the futile task of litigating these issues on the merits. Consider it instead a fait accompli with the objective to attract a particular writer LW2 wants by catering to his whims.
For whatever reason, Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to have the ability to block commenters and have the ability to do traceless deletion on his own work, and he’s been quite clear this is a condition for his participation. Lo and behold precisely these features have been introduced, with suspiciously convenient karma thresholds which allow EY (at his current karma level) to traceless delete/ban on his own promoted posts, yet exclude (as far as I can tell) the great majority of other writers with curated/front page posts from being able to do the same.
Given the popularity of EY’s writing (and LW2 wants to include future work of his), the LW2 team are obliged to weigh up the (likely detrimental) addition of these features versus the likely positives of his future posts. Going for the latter is probably the right judgement call to make, but let’s not pretend it is a principled one: we are, as the old saw goes, just haggling over the price.
Yeah, I didn’t want to make this a thread about discussing Eliezer’s opinion, so I didn’t put that front and center, but Eliezer only being happy to crosspost things if he has the ability to delete things was definitely a big consideration.
Here is my rough summary of how this plays into my current perspective on things:
1. Allowing users to moderate their own posts and set their own moderation policies on their personal blogs is something I wanted before we even talked to Eliezer about LW2 the first time.
2. Allowing users to moderate their own front-page posts is not something that Eliezer requested (I think he would be happy with them just being personal posts), but is a natural consequence of wanting to allow users to moderate their own posts, while also not giving up our ability to promote the best content to the front-page and to curated
3. Allowing users to delete things without a trace was a request by Eliezer, but is also something I thought about independently to deal with stuff like spam and repeated offenders (for example, Eugine has created over 100 comments on one of Ozy’s posts, and you don’t want all of them to show up as deleted stubs). I expect we wouldn’t have built the future as it currently stands without Eliezer, but I hadn’t actually considered a moderation logs page like the one Said pointed out, and I actually quite like that idea, and don’t expect Eliezer to object too much to it. So that might be a solution that makes everyone reasonably happy.
As usual Greg, I will always come to you first if I ever need to deliver well-articulated sick burn that my victim needs to read twice before they can understand ;-)
Edit: Added a smiley to clarify this was meant as a joke.
Let’s focus on the substance, please.
I’m just a lurker, but as an FYI, on The Well, hidden comments were marked <hidden> (and clickable) and deleted comments were marked <scribbled> and it seemed to work out fine. I suppose with more noise, this could be collapsed to one line: <5 scribbled>.
I agree. There are a few feairly simple ways to implement this kind of transparancy.
When a comment is deleted, change it’s title to [deleted] and remove any content. This at least shows when censorship is happening and roughly how much.
When a comment is deleted, do as above but give users the option to show it by clicking on a “show comment” button or something similar.
Have a “show deleted comments” button on users profile pages. Users who want to avoid seeing the kind of content that is typically censored can do so. Those who would prefer to see everything can just enable the option and see all comments.
I think these features would add at least some transparancy to comment moderation. I’m still unsure how to make user bans transparent. I’m worried that without doing so, bad admins can just bad users they dislike and give the impression of a balanced discussion with little censorship.
User bans can be made transparent via the sort of centralized moderation log I described in my other comment. (For users banned by individual users, from their own personal blogs, there should probably also be a specific list, on the user page of the one who did the banning, of everyone they’ve banned from their posts.)
A central log would indeed allow anyone to see who was banned and when. My concern is more that such a solution would be practically ineffective. I think that most people reading an article aren’t likely to navigate to the central log and search the ban list to see how many people have been banned by said articles author. I’d like to see a system for flagging up bans which is both transparent and easy to access, ideally so anyone reading the page/discussion will notice if banning is taking place and to what extent. Sadly, I haven’t been able to think of a good solution which does that.
Yeah, I agree it doesn’t create the ideal level of transparency. In my mind, a moderation log is more similar to an accounting solution than an educational solution, where the purpose of accounting is not something that is constantly broadcasted to the whole system, but is instead used to backtrack if something has gone wrong, or if people are suspicious that there is some underlying systematic problem going on. Which might get you a lot of the value that you want, for significantly lower UI-complexity cost.
I believe it was Eliezer who (perhaps somewhere in the Sequences) enjoined us to consider a problem for at least five minutes, by the clock, before judging it to be unsolvable—and I have found that this applies in full measure in UX design.
Consider the following potential solutions (understanding them to be the products of a brainstorm only, not a full and rigorous design cycle):
A button (or other UI element, etc.) on every post, along the lines of “view history of moderation actions which apply to this post”.
A flag, attached to posts where moderation has occurred; which, when clicked, would take you to the central moderation log (or the user-specific one), and highlight all entries that apply to the referring post.
The same as #2, but with the flag coming in two “flavors”—one for “the OP has taken moderation actions”, and one for “the LW2 admin team has taken moderation actions”.
This is what I was able to come up with in five minutes of considering the problem. These solutions both seem to me to be quite unobtrusive, and yet at the same time, “transparent and easy to access”, as per your criteria. I also do not see any fundamental design or implementation difficulties that attach to them.
No doubt other approaches are possible; but at the very least, the problem seems eminently solvable, with a bit of effort.
(Just for the historical record, there is a moderation log visibile at lesswrong/moderation which does this, though it’s not the single most beautiful page on the site)
Does the log only display some subset of action, e.g. recent ones? I can only see 10 deleted comments. And the “Users Banned From Users” is surprisingly short, and doesn’t include some bans that I saw on there years ago (which I’d be surprised if the relevant author had bothered to undo). It would be good if the page itself clarified this.
Oops, sorry, there should be load more buttons there! We recently did a rework of some associated functionality, and I made sure it updates with the recent, but apparently lost the load more buttons.
I’ll fix it sometime today or tomorrow.
Why exactly do you find it to be unusually dangerous and detrimental? The answer may seem obvious, but I think that it would be valuable to be explicit.
I think giving people the right and responsibility to unilaterally ban commenters on their posts is demanding too much of people’s rationality, forcing them to make evaluations when they’re among most likely to be biased, and tempting them with the power to silence their harshest or most effective critics. I personally don’t trust myself to do this and have basically committed to not ban anyone or even delete any comments that aren’t obvious spam, and kind of don’t trust others who would trust themselves to do this.
Banning someone does not generally silence their harshest critics. It just asks those critics to make a top-level post, which generally will actually have any shot at improving the record and discourse in reasonable ways compared to nested comment replies.
The thing that banning does is make it so the author doesn’t look like he is ignoring critics (which he hasn’t by the time he has consciously decided to ban a critic).
It’s a localized silencing, which discourages criticism (beyond just the banned critic) and makes remaining criticism harder to find, and yes makes it harder to tell that the author is ignoring critics. If it’s not effective at discouraging or hiding criticism, then how can it have any perceived benefits for the author? It’s gotta have some kind of substantive effect, right? See also this.
The thing that it changes is the degree to which the author’s popularity or quality is being used to give a platform to other people, which I think makes a lot of sense to give the author some substantial control over. If you have a critique that people care about, you can make a top-level post, and if it’s good it can stand on its own and get its own karma.
If it’s really important for a critique to end up directly associated with a post, you can just ask someone who isn’t banned to post a link to it under that post. If you can’t find anyone who thinks it’s worth posting a link to it who isn’t yourself, then I think it’s not that sad for your critique to not get seen.
Yes, this puts up a few trivial inconveniences, but the alternative of having people provide a platform to anyone without any choice in the matter, whose visibility gets multiplied proportional to their own reach and quality, sucks IMO a lot more.
My engagement with LW is kind of weird and causes me to not write as many top-level posts as I like, and the ones I do write are site announcements, but if I was trying to be a more standard author on LW, I wouldn’t use it without the ability to ban (and for example, would almost certainly ban Said, who has been given multiple warnings by the moderation team, is by far the most heavily complained user on the site, and I would actively encourage many authors to ban if they don’t want to have a kind of bad time, but I think is providing enough value to the site in other contexts that I don’t think a site-wide ban would make sense).
On the contrary, this is an actively good thing, and should be encouraged. “If you write about your ideas on a public discussion forum, you also thereby provide a platform to your critics, in proportion to the combination of your own reach and the critics’ popularity with the forum’s membership[1]” is precisely the correct sort of dynamic to enable optimal truth-seeking.
Think about it from the reader’s perspective: if I read some popular, interesting, apparently-convincing idea, the first thing—the first thing!—that I want to know, after doing a “first-pass” evaluation of the idea myself, is “what do other people think about it”? This is not a matter of majoritarianism, note, but rather:
something akin to “many eyes make all bugs shallow” (are there problems I missed, but that other people have pointed out?)
other people are often more knowledgeable than I am, and more qualified to notice and point out serious problems with an idea or a work
heuristic evaluation on the basis of seeing how the author responds to serious criticism
And various similar considerations. I am well served if all of this is available to me as a reader, and as easily accessible as the work itself. The harder you make it for readers to access this information, the greater a disservice you do to readers.
(This is why Wikipedia pages about ideas have “Criticisms” sections—and this is a good thing. This is why the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy enumerates major critiques of ideas, and rebuttals to them, on the pages describing said ideas—and this is also a good thing.)
We want serious, effective critics to be given visibility in proportion to a work itself. That is unambiguously a positive good!
(Of course this assumes that the critics in question aren’t engaging in vulgar name-calling / doxxing / spamming / whatever. I think we can take all of those basics of online interaction as a given.)
Via some combination of the LW karma system and comment sorting in the forum UI, visibility enabled by linking, visibility enabled by comment activity, etc., etc.
I agree with many of these things, but of course, bad commenters have driven away many more commenters and authors than banning has driven good commenters away. I don’t think the current ban-system is generally causing serious, effective critics to be banned, and on-net is increasing the number of serious and effective critics.
If we had a better karma system, I think there are some tools that I might want to make available to people that are better than banning. Maybe things like karma thresholds, or some other way of making it so a user needs to be in particular good standing to leave a comment. But unfortunately, our current karma system is not robust enough for that, and indeed, leaving many bad comments, is still unfortunately a way to get lots of karma.
You can’t possibly know that. (Especially since “driven away” includes “discouraged from posting in the first place”.)
I think there are few people who have beliefs as considered on this topic as I do! And maybe no one who has as much evidence as I do (which doesn’t mean I am right, people come to dumb beliefs while being exposed to lots of evidence all the time).
I’ve conducted informal surveys, have done hundreds of user interviews, have had conversations about their LessWrong posting experienes with almost every core site contributor over the years, have had conversations with hundreds of people who decided not to post on LW but instead post somewhere else, conversations with people who moved from other platforms to LW, conversations with people who moved from LW to other platforms, and many more.
I have interviewed people in charge of handling these tradeoffs at many of the other big content platforms out there, as well as dozens of people who run smaller forums and online communities. I have poured over analytics and stats and graphs trying to understand what causes people to write here instead of other places, and what causes them to grow as both a commenter and writer.
All of these form a model of how things work that suggests to me that yes, it is true that bad commenters drive away many more good critics than our current threat of banning does.
I have been working on understanding the dynamics here now for almost a full decade, with really a lot of my time. I absolutely could know that, in the same way we know many many things that we cannot directly observe.
I didn’t put an explicit probability on this, and the exact probability would differ based on the exact operationalization, but IDK, it’s my current belief with like 85% probability.
Again, I don’t really want to continue this conversation with you, so please choose somewhere else to make this kind of comment.
I really don’t get the psychology of people who won’t use a site without being able to unilaterally ban people (or rather I can only think of uncharitable hypotheses). Why can’t they just ignore those they don’t want to engage with, maybe with the help of a mute or ignore feature (which can also mark the ignored comments/threads in some way to notify others)?
Gemini Pro’s verdict on my feature idea (after asking it to be less fawning): The refined “Mute-and-Flag” system is a functional alternative, as it solves the author’s personal need to be shielded from unwanted interactions and notifications.
The continued preference for a unilateral block, then, is not driven by a personal requirement that the Mute-and-Flag system fails to meet. Instead, it stems from a differing philosophy about an author’s role and responsibilities for the space they create. The conflict centers on whether an author is simply a participant who can disengage personally, or if they are the primary curator of the conversational environment they initiate.
An author who prefers a block is often motivated by this latter role. They may want to actively “garden” the discussion to maintain quality for all readers, prevent reputational damage by proxy, or because they lack confidence in the community’s ability to effectively moderate a disruptive user, even with flags.
Ultimately, the choice between these systems reflects a platform’s core design trade-off. A Mute-and-Flag system prioritizes public transparency and community-led moderation. A Unilateral Block system prioritizes authorial control and the ability to directly shape a discussion environment, while accepting the inherent risks of censorship and abuse.
My response to this is that I don’t trust people to garden their own space, along with other reasons to dislike the ban system. I’m not going to leave LW over it though, but just be annoyed and disappointed at humanity whenever I’m reminded of it.
I get a sense that you (and Said) are really thinking of this as a 1-1 interaction and not a group interaction, but the group dynamics are where most of my crux is.
I feel like all your proposals are like “have a group convo but with one person blanking another person” or “have a 6-person company where one person just ignores another person” and all of my proposals are “have 2 group convos where the ignored isn’t with the person they’re ignoring”, and I feel like the former is always unnatural and never works and the latter is entirely natural and works just fine.
If you ignore a person in a group convo, it’s really weird. Suppose the person makes some additional comment on a topic you’re discussing and now other people continue it. You are still basically interacting with that person’s comment; you couldn’t ignore it, because it directed the flow of conversation. Or instead perhaps you randomly stop engaging with threads and then ppl learn not to reply to that person because you won’t engage, and then they start to get subtly socially excluded in ways they didn’t realize were happening. These are confusing and unnatural and either can make the conversation “not worth it” or “net costly” to one of the participants.
My proposal can be viewed as two distinct group conversations happening in the same place. To recap, instead of a ban list, the author would have a mute list, then whenever the muted people comment under their post, that comment would be hidden from the author and marked/flagged on some way for everyone else. Any replies to such muted and flagged comments would themselves be muted and flagged. So conversation 1 is all the unflagged comments, and conversation 2 is all the flagged comments.
If this still seems a bad idea, can you explain why in more detail?
TBC, I think the people demanding unilateral bans will find my proposal unacceptable, due to one of my “uncharitable hypotheses”, basically for status/ego/political reasons, or subconsciously wanting to discourage certain critiques or make them harder to find, and the LW team in order to appeal to them will keep the ban system in place. One of my purposes here is just to make this explicit and clear (if it is indeed the case).
We’ve considered something similar to this, basically having two comment sections below each post, one sorted to the top one sorted to the bottom. And authors can move things to the bottom comment section, and there is a general expectation that authors don’t really engage with the bottom comment section very much (and might mute it completely, or remove author’s ability to put things into the top comment section).
I had a few UI drafts of this, but nothing that didn’t feel kind of awkward and confusing.
(I think this is a better starting point than having individual comment threads muted, though explaining my models would take a while, and I might not get around to it)
Maybe your explanation will change my mind, but your proposal seems clearly worse to me (what if a muted person responds to a unmuted comment? If it gets moved to the bottom, the context is lost? Or they’re not allowed to respond to anything on the top section? What epistemic purpose does it serve to allow a person in a potentially very biased moment to unilaterally decide to make a comment or commenter much harder for everyone else to see, as few people would bother to scroll to the bottom?) and also clearly harder to implement.
I feel like you’re not providing much evidence against my hypothesis in the sibling thread, that LW team is forced to appeal to epistemically irrational/statusy motivations by allowing unilateral bans or other schemes that appeal to such motivations to the detriment of epistemics, and coming up with rationalizations to avoid admitting this.
ETA: TBC, I’m not asking for an explicit admission. If you have to appeal to irrational/statusy motivations to attract certain authors, then you probably can’t admit that since it would hurt their status and drive them away. I just want you to make a conscious calculation about this if you haven’t already, and find out for myself and others whether there’s other reasonable hypotheses.
I am not sure I am understanding your proposal then. If you want people to keep track of two conversations with different participants, you need the comment threads to be visually separated. Nobody will be able to keep track of who exactly is muted when in one big comment thread, so as long as this statement is true, I can’t think of any other way to implement that but to move things into fully separate sections:
And then the whole point of having a section like this (in my mind) is to not force the author to give a platform to random bad takes proportional to their own popularity without those people doing anything close to proportional work. The author is the person who attracted 95% of the attention in the first place, almost always by doing good work, and that control is the whole reason why we are even considering this proposal, so I don’t understand what is to gain by doing this and not moving it to the bottom.
In general it seems obvious to me that when someone writes great content this this should get them some control over the discussion participants and culture of the discussion. They obviously always have that as a BATNA by moving to their own blog or Substack or wherever, and I certainly don’t want to contribute to a platform and community that gives me no control over its culture, given that the BATNA of getting to be part of one I do get to shape is alive and real and clearly better by my lights (and no, I do not consider myself universally conflicted out of making any kind of decision of who I want to talk to or what kind of culture I want to create, I generally think discussions and cultures I shape are better than ones I don’t, and this seems like a very reasonable epistemic state to me).
The point of my proposal is to give authors an out if there are some commenters who they just can’t stand to interact with. This is a claimed reason for demanding a unilateral ban, at least for some.
If the author doesn’t trust the community to vote bad takes down into less visibility, when they have no direct COI, why should I trust the author to do it unilaterally, when they do? Writing great content doesn’t equate to rationality when it comes to handling criticism.
LW has leverage in the form of its audience, which most blogs can’t match, but obviously that’s not sufficient leverage for some, so I’m willing to accept the status quo, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be happy about it.
Comments almost never get downvoted. Most posts don’t get that many comments. Karma doesn’t reliably work as a visibility mechanism for comments.
I do think a good karma system would take into account authors banning users, or some other form of author feedback, and then that would be reflected in the default visibility of their comments. I don’t have a super elegant way of building that into the site, and adding it this way seems better than none at all, since it seems like a much stronger signal than normal aggregate upvotes and downvotes.
I do think the optimal version of this would somehow leverage the karma system and all the voting information we have available into making it so that authors have some kind of substantial super-vote to control visibility, but that is balanced against votes by other people if they really care about it, but we don’t have that, and I don’t have a great design for it that wouldn’t be super complicated.
Overall, I think you should model karma as currently approximately irrelevant for managing visibility of comments due to limited volume of comments, and the thread structure making strict karma sorting impossible, so anything of the form “but isn’t comment visibility handled by the karma system” is basically just totally wrong, without substantial changes to the karma system and voting.
On the other hand karma is working great for sorting posts and causing post discoverability, which is why getting critics to write top-level posts (which will automatically be visible right below any post they are criticizing due to our pingback system) is a much better mechanism for causing their content to get appropriate attention. Both for readers of the post they are criticizing, and for people who are generally interested in associated content.
Here’s my understanding of the situation. The interested parties are:
Prominent authors: Contribute the most value to the forum and influence over the forum’s long term trajectory. They will move to other platforms if they think it will be better for their messages.
Readers: Don’t want to see low quality comments that are hard to filter out (though I think when there are a lot of comments, comment karma helps a lot and I’m a lot more concerned about prominent authors leaving than about needing to skim over comments)
Prominent authors concerned with fairness: Authors like Wei who have equally or more valuable content and will prefer a forum that shows that the writer is allowing non-biased commenting from readers even if the reader (like me) needs to be willing to do a little more work to see this.
Suspected negative value commenters: Think their comments are valuable and being suppressed due to author bias
Intelligent automated systems: Should probably just get everything since they have unlimited patience for reading low quality, annotated comments
Forum developers: Their time is super valuable
Does this sound about right?
[Update: The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is the information recorded but not displayed? (I’m looking at Eliezer’s profile. If it’s displayed somewhere then this seems good enough to me.)]
You forgot readers who also want to see debunkings of bad posts (without having to maintain a separate list of people who usually debunk bad posts).
I think the group that is missing the most are other active commenters. Maybe you meant to include them in “authors” but I think it makes sense to break them out.
The thing that IMO burns people the most is trying to engage in good faith with someone, or investing a lot of effort into explaining things, only to end up in a spot where they feel like that work ended up being mostly used against them in weird social ways, or their reward for sticking their head out and saying anything was being met with sneering. This applies to authors, but it also applies a lot to commenters.
One of the most central value propositions that makes people want to be on LW instead of the rest of the internet is the fact they don’t have to do moderation themselves. Commenters want to participate in curated environments. Commenters love having people engage with what they say with serious engagement (even if combined with intense disagreement) and hate having things rudely dismissed or sneered at.
Commenters hate having to do norm enforcement themselves, especially from an authority-less position. Indeed, maybe the most common problem I hear from people about other forums, as well as community engagement more general, is that they feel like they end up spending a lot of their time telling other people to be reasonable, and then this creates social drama and a feeling of needing to rile up troops via a badly codified mechanism of social enforcement, and this is super draining and exhausting, and so they leave. Moderator burnout is also extremely common, especially when the moderators do not feel like they get to act with authority.
By having both the LW moderation team do lots of active opinionated moderation, and allowing authors to do the same, we can create spaces that are moderated and can have any kind of culture, as opposed to just what happens by default on the internet. Realistically, you cannot settle norm disputes in individual comment threads, especially not with a rotating cast of characters on each post, so you need a mixture of authors and site-moderators work on codifying norms and think hard about cultural components.
The argument this statement is a part of does not logically follow. Commenters also want to participate in echo chambers and circlejerk over woo sometimes. That doesn’t mean LW should be the spot for it. It does mean other places on the internet should probably supply that need, and indeed there is no shortage of such spaces.
All else equal, creating an environment a part of the commenters hate is indeed bad. Here, all else is not equal, as has been repeatedly explained.
Are you referring to yourself and the LW team here? You have certainly acted with a ton of authority in the past, are more than welcome to do so in the future, and the community largely has your backs and believes in you. I have a hard time thinking of another major forum where moderators are respected more than on LW.
Except for the most important kind of culture, the culture which sits at the heart of what allows LW to be an epistemically productive environment (to the extent it is), namely one where applause lights, semantic stopsigns, nonsensical woo, vaguely religion-inspired obscurantism, etc. written by the authors get called out by commenters quickly, rapidly, and reliably.
You are empowering authors to set the culture of the commentary on their posts. This gets things precisely backwards, as has been repeatedly pointed out on this and related threads in the past few days. The culture this site has aspired to and hopefully continues to aspire to is the one that allows for fundamental epistemic norms (i.e., rules of reason as opposed to social rules, i.e., what the first book of the Sequences, Map and Territory, is all about) to be upheld. Sometimes this means empowering authors, sometimes this means empowering commenters. Sometimes this means enforcing certain social rules, sometimes it means making it clear in advance that policing of supposed social norms will not happen if certain conditions are met. Etc.
The culture that matters is one that does not unilaterally cede control to authors over who is allowed to point out their errors or how they can do that. This is rather obvious, so it is deeply unfortunate I have to be retreading this ground yet again.
At the risk of falling into the same kind of behavior you seem to dislike, this is locally invalid reasoning, and (yet again) obviously so. The first clause has nothing to do with the second.
The fact that you need more than one individual comment thread to figure out what is going on (also a highly proposition by itself) implies moderator involvement is more important than ever, as a reasonable, non-hot-headed outside figure that can make a holistic assessment of what is going on and what rules of the site have been broken.
When there is repeated as opposed to one-off conflict between users is precisely the time for a neutral outsider to step in, instead of empowering one of the sides to unilaterally cut off the other.
I will be bowing out of this conversation now. What I’ve written thus far, in this and 2 other related threads, speaks for itself.
Your engagement in these discussions, @habryka, has been terribly disappointing and your assessment of what is going on certainly falls well below the standards I’d expect from somebody who has been moderating this site for so long.
Perhaps I should be taking a short vacation from LW for a bit.
Not sure if this is a big crux, just stoping by to note a disagreement here: I think often the reason that Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob can be because Bob was very unpleasant toward Alice in off-site contexts. This is not something that the mods are able to see, but is a valid reason for Alice to find Bob’s (otherwise reasonable seeming) comments very unpleasant.
Nope, I think we have plenty of authority. I was here referring to authors trying to maintain any kind of discussion quality in the absence of our help, and unfortunately, we are very limited in the amount of moderation we can do, as it already takes up a huge fraction of our staff time.
Yes, we all agree on that. Posts are a great tool for pointing out errors with other posts, as I have pointed out many times. Yes, comments are also great, but frequently discussions just go better if you move them to the top level, and the attention allocation mechanisms work so much better.
Also de-facto people just almost never ban anyone else from their posts. I agree we maybe should just ban more people ourselves, though it’s hard and I prefer the world where instead of banning someone like Said site-wide, we have a middle ground where individual authors who are into his style of commenting can still have him around. But if there is only one choice on this side, then clearly I would ban Said and other people in his reference class, as this site would quickly fall into something close to full abandonment if we did not actively moderate that.
Like, I don’t believe you that you want the site moderators to just ban many more people from the whole site. It just seems like a dumb loss for everyone.
Ok, then tell me, what do you propose we do when people repeatedly get into unproductive conversations, usually generated by a small number of users on the site? Do you want us to just ban them from the site in general? Many times they have totally fine interactions with many sub-parts of the site, they just don’t get along with some specific person. Empowering the users who have a history of contributing positively to the site (or at least a crude proxy of that in the form of karma) to have some control their own seems like the most economical solution.
We could also maintain a ban list where authors can appeal to us to ban a user from their posts, though honestly, I think there are almost no bans I would not have approved this way. I agree that if we had lots of authors who make crazy to me seeming bans then we should change something about this system, but when I look at the register of bans, I don’t think I see approximately any ban where it to me as a moderator does indeed not just seem better for these people to keep distance from each other.
Do you think anything is ever bad enough that it deserves to be rudely dismissed or sneered at? Or is that unacceptable to you in any possible context?
I don’t think “how bad something is” is the right dimension that determines whether sneering is appropriate, so I don’t think there is a strict level of “badness” that makes sneering OK. I do think there are situations where it’s appropriate, though very few on LW. Brainstorming some hypothetical situations:
An author showed up posting some LLM slop that didn’t get caught in our content review. A user explains why the LLM slop doesn’t make any sense. The author responds with more LLM slop comments. It seems pretty reasonable to rudely dismiss the author who posted the LLM slop (though my guess is culturally it would still be better to do it with less of a sneering motion, but I wouldn’t fault someone very much for it, and rudeness seems very appropriate).
If an organizational account was around that kept posting comments and posts that said things like “we (organization X) do not support this kind of work” and did other kind of markety things, and someone had already written about why intellectual discourse with organizational accounts doesn’t really make much sense, then I think I can imagine reacting with sneering to be appropriate (though mostly the right choice is of course to just ban that kind of stuff at the moderation level)
Maybe that helps? I don’t know, there are not that many circumstances where it feels like the right choice. Mostly where I’ve seen cultures of sneering things tend to go off the rails quite badly, and it’s one of the worst attractors in internet culture space.
Not Habryka, but I find that dismissal is regularly appropriate, and sometimes will be rude in-context (though the rudeness should not itself be the goal).
I think sneering is often passive-aggressive whereas I think it’s healthy for aggression to be overt / explicit rather than hidden behind plausible-deniability / pretense. Obfuscation is anti-communication, and I think it’s common that sneering is too (e.g. one bully communicating to other bullies that something is worth of scorn all-the-while seeming relatively innocuous to a passerby).
The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is “Norm Enforcing” or “Reign of Terror” displayed anywhere? Also I don’t think “Easy Going” really captures the “I Don’t Put Finger on Scales” position.
If the author’s policy is displayed somewhere and I just didn’t find it then this seems good enough to me as a Reader. I hope there is a solution that can make authors both like Eliezer and Wei happy. It will be nice to make Commenters happy also and I’ve thought less about that.
The place where it gets displayed is below the comment box when you start typing something:
It’s confusing for it to say “profile”. It should ideally say “user settings”, as the goal of that sentence was to explain to authors where they can set these and not to explain to readers where to find these. I’ll edit it.
Do the readers not want to see low quality comments, or is it more so the authors who don’t want to see them? And do the readers care primarily about the comments, or more so about the posts? The answer is probably “both” to both questions. Or at least, there are subsets of both groups that care about each.
There is also another important party, which I think people like Said, Zack M Davis, me, (maybe?) Viliam, etc. belong to, which is “commenters/authors concerned with the degradation of epistemic standards” caused by happy death spirals over applause lights, semantic stopsigns, postrationalist woo, etc.
Brainstorming: I wonder if it will be possible to have a subtle indicator at the bottom of the comment section for when comments have been silently modified by the author (such as a ban triggered). I think this may still be unfair to party 1, so perhaps there could instead be badges in prominent author profiles that indicate whether they fall into the “gardener” or “equal scales” position (plus perhaps a setting for users that is off by default but will allow them to see a note for when an article has silent moderations/restrictions by author) or a way for authors to display that they haven’t made any silent edits/restrictions?
Said’s comment that triggered this debate is 39⁄34, at the top of the comments section of the post and #6 in Popular Comments for the whole site, but you want to allow the author to ban Said from future commenting, with the rationale “you should model karma as currently approximately irrelevant for managing visibility of comments”. I think this is also wrong generally as I’ve often found karma to be very helpful in exposing high quality comments to me, and keeping lower quality comments less visible toward the bottom, or allowing me to skip them if they occur in the middle of threads.
I almost think the nonsensical nature of this justification is deliberate, but I’m not quite sure. In any case, sigh...
For the record, I had not read that instance of banning, and it is only just at this late point (e.g. after basically the whole thread has wrapped [edit: the whole thread, it turned out, had not wrapped]) did I read that thread and realize that this whole thread was downstream of that. All my comments and points so far were not written with that instance in mind but on general principle.
(And if you’re thinking “Surely you would’ve spoken to Habryka at work about this thread?” my response is “I was not at work! I am currently on vacation.” Yes, I have chosen to — and enjoyed! — spending my vacation arguing the basic principles of moderation, criticism, and gardening.)
Initial impressions re: that thread:
For the record I had read Said’s comment in “Top Comments” and not the original post (I’d read the opening 2-3 paragraphs), and had hit weak-agree-vote on Said’s comment. I was disappointed to see a post endorsing religions and was grateful for a comment that made a good point (I especially agree with the opening sentence) that I could agree with and express my continued anti-religion stance.
I don’t think Said’s comment was otherwise good at engaging with the post (note that I agree-upvoted but didn’t karma-upvote), and I think it was fine for Gordon to ban him for being a repeatedly obtuse yet snide commenter.
This is not the sort of comment that nobody but Said can make! I was even forming an intention to write my own until I saw that there was one already there.
I think Gordon is someone who is quite willing to engage with critics (e.g. he links to other examples of doing so with Said). I suspect that Said has such confidence in his comments that the only hypothesis he will consider is that this is someone unwilling to engage with an excellent critic, but I do not believe this hypothesis.
(Apologies in advance for extreme slowness of replies; I am currently rate-limited such that I can only post one comment per day, on the whole site.)
Well… I hate to criticize when someone’s saying good things about me, but… frankly, I think that you shouldn’t’ve done that (vote on a comment without reading what it’s responding to, that is). I certainly disapprove of it.
Indeed, I think that this highlights a serious mistake in the design of the “Top Comments” feature. For comparison, GreaterWrong’s Recent Comments view does not allow you to vote on the comments (the vote buttons are not displayed at all, although the current karma and agreement totals are); you must click through to the comment (either in context, or as a permalink) in order to vote on it.
(This is no accident; @clone of saturn and I discussed this particular design choice, and we agreed not to display vote buttons in Recent Comments—nor in search results listings, nor when viewing comments from a user’s page, etc.—because we did not want to encourage users to vote on comments without having seen them in their conversational context. It seemed to us that allowing users to vote from such auxiliary views, where comments were displayed shorn of their context, would create unfortunate dynamics, contribute to the development of echo chambers, etc.)
If you would have written the same comment, then why is it bad when I write it? And if it wouldn’t’ve been as bad, because you’d’ve written it differently… then what makes you sure that it would’ve been as good?
(EDIT: In other words: if you say something differently, then you’ve said something different. This isn’t an ironclad rule—there are such things as logically equivalent statements with no difference in connotation or valence; and there are also such things as ideas that, in order to be communicated effectively, must be described from multiple angles. But it is a strong heuristic. This is also why I am so intensely skeptical of “interpretive labor” as a tool of communication.)
Anyhow, I just don’t believe this claim of “in Said’s absence, all requisite criticisms will be written by other people”. I routinely read terrible posts or comments on Less Wrong, think to myself “I should reply… hm, no, I’ll let other people take up the slack, surely there are plenty of other people here who see the problems with this, and aren’t afraid to say something”, wait, and then… nothing. And I keep waiting, and… nothing. And I never comment, and… nobody else does, either.
(Another thing that often happens—not as often as “nobody bothers to make any serious criticisms”, but often—is that other people post critical comments, but none of them get to the heart of the matter, none of them make the important points, etc.)
As far as I can tell, this “there are plenty of substitutes available” view is just straightforwardly false. (I very much wish it were true! But it’s not. Indeed, this is a big part of why I find the LW of today to be so frustrating—there’s a dire lack of good criticism. Things aren’t as bad as the EA Forum… yet… but they’re surely heading in that direction.)
But of course you’re wrong about this. Of course I consider other hypotheses. It’s just that the other hypotheses are so very, very easy to falsify.
The problem, basically, is that you are treating “willing to engage with critics” as basically a binary property (or, at best, a single dimension of variation). But it’s nothing of the sort.
Plenty of authors are “willing to engage” with “critics”—as long as the “critics” are the sort that take as an axiom that the author’s work is valuable, important, and interesting, and that the author himself is intelligent, well-intentioned, well-informed, and sane; and as long as their “criticism” is of the sort that says “how very fascinating your ideas are; I would love to learn more about your thinking, but I have not yet grasped your thesis in its fullness, and am confused; might you deign to enlighten me?” (in other words, “here’s a prompt for you to tell us more about your amazing ideas”). (You might call this “intellectual discussion as improv session”—where, as in any improv, the only allowed replies are “yes, and…”.)
But of course those are terrible axioms to adopt, for the simple reason that they are very often false.
You say that Gordon links to examples of him engaging with my criticism. Did you follow those links? Did you read those comment threads? Perhaps you did, but for the benefit of other readers, let’s take a look: Gordon links to this comment, where he claims that he is using technical language; I reply briefly to ask a very simple question—which of his terms does he claim are “technical language”? could he link to definitions of them?—and he… well, I think @sunwillrise put it well: Gordon ran away. Just a flat refusal to answer the most trivial of questions (made in response to a straightforward claim which seemed like it outright invited such a question!).
And this is what you call “quite willing to engage with critics”?
It is challenging and unpleasant to be in an interaction with someone who is exuding disgust and contempt for you, and it’s not a major weakness in people that they disprefer conversations like that.
A good thing to do in such situations is to do post-level responses rather than comment-level replies. I’ve seen many post-level back-and-forths where people disrespect the other person’s opinions (e.g. Scott Alexander / Robin Hanson on healthcare, Scott Alexander / Current Affairs on whether republicans are literal monsters, Scott Alexander / Tyler Cowen on multiple topics, etc). This gives people more space for slower replies and to take time to put in the effort to consider the points the other person is making with more space to get over immediate emotional responses and digging-in-one’s-heels.
It also makes sense to save your limited energies for those critics only if they meet a slightly higher bar of worthiness of engaging with. Not all critics are born equal. Just because someone has shown up to criticize you doesn’t make their criticism good or worth engaging with.
I want to push back on any notion that all people should be able to engage with all critics with ease regardless of time/energy and as though disgust/contempt was magically not a factor. I think it’s important to be able to engage with quality critics, but it’s reasonable to want a certain level of distance from people who act with contempt and disgust toward you (flavors of both I regularly read into your comments).
(To clarify, I am not defending the position you gave in the quote above, about everyone having interesting things to say and conversations requiring “yes-and”. I think that is probably a position that, were you to move in the direction of, would push against the contempt/disgust that I suspect many users feel from you, but I am just defending that the contempt/disgust is unpleasant to interface with, not that one is supposed to respect other people’s opinions. I regularly have little respect for people’s opinions on this site, and say so!)
There are two mistakes here, I’d say.
First: no, it absolutely is a “major weakness in people” that they prefer to avoid engaging with relevant criticism merely on the basis of the “tone”, “valence”, etc., of the critics’ words. It is, in fact, a huge weakness. Overcoming this particular bias is one of the single biggest personal advances in epistemic rationality that one can make.
(Actually, I recently read a couple of tweets by @Holly_Elmore, with whom I certainly haven’t always agreed, but who describes this sort of thing very aptly.)
Second: you imply a false dichotomy between the “improv session” sort of faux-criticism I describe, and “exuding disgust and contempt”. Those are not the only options! It is entirely possible to criticize someone’s ideas, very harshly, while exhibiting (and experiencing) no significant emotionally-valenced judgment of the person themselves.
One of the best things that I’ve read recently was “ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up” by Philip Greenspun, which is a sort of postmortem of Ars Digita (a company that played a major role in the rise of the web, the dot-com bubble, etc.). I recommend the essay in its entirety; it’s quite entertaining, despite the seemingly dry subject matter (the background to an ongoing corporate lawsuit). A particularly relevant section, however, is this one, where Greenspun describes a period when the executives and board members at ArsDigita were ignoring all of his advice:
Now, do you think that this professor “exuded disgust and contempt” for young Philip?
No, this is not a good thing at all. The disadvantages are legion:
It’s much harder to get into details. A back-and-forth of posts is necessarily serial; I post, you post in response, I post in response. This throws away all of the advantages of a threaded comment system, which is that we can discuss two, or three, or fifteen, different aspects of your post in parallel, in the comments. If I have to write a whole post, should I discuss every separate thing I have to say about your post? In your response, should you do the same for my post? How readable is this going to be? (Not at all.)
It’s much less discoverable for readers, and much less convenient to follow the discussion. I read your post; now I need to go and read… how many? five? twelve? more? other posts, by how many other people, to get a sense of the conversation? Who’s replying to whom? What points are being made in response to what?
As a corollary to the above, it’s much harder for someone to join the conversation. I have something to say that doesn’t deserve a whole post—now what? Do I just not write it? If I do write it, where should it go? Discussions in comments have much lower activation energy, which means that people who have something relevant to say but would never write a whole post will definitely make a comment. Heck, you must know this! Look at how many excellent contributions to this site were written as comments, and then think about whether the author of the comment would have bothered to write a whole post—“My Thoughts On A Post That Someone Else Recently Wrote”. Almost none!
It discourages brevity. This is extremely bad. (We’ve had this discussion in the past, multiple times—do I need to dredge it up? I will if I have to, but I expect that you remember.)
It works against clarity, and encourages strawmanning. In a comment back-and-forth, if someone mischaracterizes your ideas, or says something clearly mistaken, they can be corrected immediately. (And not just by you! This is another of the great values of using comments instead of posts: it doesn’t privilege one participant in a discussion. So if I write something wrong in a comment on your post, someone other than you can correct me just as easily as you can.) With posts, if I strawman you, well, sure you can write a post calling me out for it, but is everyone who reads my post going to read your counter-post? Not even close—especially because the delay between me posting my error and you posting the correction will be much greater than if we were commenting back and forth.
Using comments for discussions means that things are posted when they are fresh in the commenter’s mind; this is tremendously important both to maintain depth (with time, ideas lose specificity unless written down, and transform into vaguer, lower-resolution versions of themselves) and motivation to reply (after some time passes, one often says: “eh, is it even worth it to engage? meh”). (This last is especially a problem if you are also, simultaneously, increasing the effort required to write the reply, by forcing it to be a post instead of a comment.)
A conversation carried on via dueling posts is just inherently lower-resolution, more lacking in details, poorer by virtue of making it harder for people to contribute, more wordy but less contentful, harder to follow, and worse along dimensions of clarity, accuracy, depth, and even existence.
(Frankly, if you wanted to discourage criticism, while also ensuring that any criticism that does get posted probably won’t make much of an impact, you could hardly do worse than the idea of “make critics write top-level posts”. This suggests an obvious hypothesis w.r.t. your motivations. Obviously, this hypothesis is quite an uncharitable one, and also I don’t really believe it of you in particular—so how about a less obvious alternative: that despite your genuinely well-meaning motivations, your suggested remedy makes you the natural ally of those who do want to discourage criticism, and to blunt its effects.)
See above: “slower replies” is more bad than good. As for getting over immediate emotional responses… look, there’s not really a “nice” way to say this, but… participants in intellectual discussion should be expected to have a certain degree of emotional continence and self-control. If a person cannot manage this, then they should simply not participate in such discussions, until and unless they learn to manage their emotions.
(I hear that various techniques exist to aid one in this task—like, say, meditation. Perhaps it might benefit folks here to try such things.)
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Note, however, that this consideration does not at all suggest that unworthy critics should be banned from commenting on your posts. (Perhaps you did not intend to suggest otherwise? But it’s very important to keep explicit track of which arguments do and do not serve to support which claims.)
With ease? Perhaps not. For that matter—engage? Also perhaps not. (Although see above re: the importance of overcoming this particular bias.)
But remember: we are discussing whether it’s acceptable to allow authors, not only to not engage with certain critics, but to ban them from commenting on their posts (thus preventing everyone else from engaging with those critics, too!). The claim is that the discomfort of even seeing a person’s comments under your posts, just having their comments exist on the same page as your post and the discussions that you’re having, is too much to be asked to tolerate.
And I think that all people who expect to engage in any kind of even remotely serious intellectual discussion absolutely should be able to tolerate this. They should be able to tolerate it with ease, even.
Well-chosen words! Yes, exactly: you read these things into my comments. I think you know quite well that I don’t use vulgar language; I don’t resort to petty personal insults or name-calling; I don’t make claims about my interlocutors being stupid or evil or any such thing (heck, I generally don’t even call people’s ideas “stupid”, or anything similar). And you also know that I’ve said quite explicitly that I don’t “hate” anyone here, or really have any strong feelings about any particular person on Less Wrong. So why read such negative valence into my comments? I don’t see any good reason to do so…
Look, Said, you obviously call people stupid and evil. Maybe you have successfully avoided saying those literal words, but your comments frequently drip of derision, and that derision is then indeed followed up with calls for the targets of that derision to leave and to stop doing things.
Those preferences are fine, I think there do indeed exist many stupid and evil people, but it just seems absurd to suggest that paragraphs like this is not equivalent to calling people “stupid” or “evil”:
This is in direct reference to the preferences of the other people in the conversation! This is not some kind of far-mode depiction of humanity. This is you representing the preferences of your fellow commenters and posters.
You obviously do not respect these preferences! You obviously think they are dumb and stupid! And IDK, I think if you owned that and said it in straightforward words the conversation might go better, but it seems completely and absurdly farcical to pretend these words do not involve those judgements.
It’s… obviously not equivalent to saying people are dumb or evil?
It is equivalent to saying people have soft egos. But that doesn’t mean they are dumb or evil. I know plenty of smart and good people who have trouble receiving any meaningful criticism. Heck, I used to (in my opinion) be one of those people when I was younger!
I suspect the proportion of people with soft egos is significantly larger than the proportion of people who are stupid and evil.
No, if you meant to say that they have soft egos without implying that they are dumb and stupid you would use different words. Seriously, actually imagine someone standing in front of you saying these words. Of course they are implying the recipients of those words are at least stupid!
It is generally universally considered a mark of derision and implication of stupidity to frame your interlocutors preferences in exaggerated tones, using superlatives and universals. “They prefer to not have obvious gaps in their reasoning pointed out”, “they prefer that people treat all of their utterances as deserving of nothing less”.
If someone wanted to just communicate that people have a complicated and often sensitive relationship to criticism, without judging them as stupid or evil, they would at the very least omit those superlatives. The sentences would say:
“People are often hesitant to have gaps in their reasoning pointed out, and they almost universally prefer others treating what they say with curiosity, kindness and collaboration, instead of direct and un-veiled criticism...”.
That sentence does not drip with derision! It’s not hard! And the additional words and superlatives do exactly one thing, they communicate that derision.
Indeed, it is exactly this extremely frustrating pattern, where passive aggressiveness gets used to intimidate conversational partners and force them into dumb comment threads of attrition, while somehow strenuously denying any kind of judgement is being cast that makes all of these conversations so frustrating. People aren’t idiots. People can read the subtext. I can read the subtext, and I really have very little patience for people trying to claim it isn’t there.
Yes—the words communicate what Achmiz actually means: not just the fact that people often have a sensitive relationship to criticism, but that he judges them negatively for it.
Is that a banned opinion? Is “I think less of people who have a sensitive relationship to criticism” not something that Less Wrong commenters are allowed to think?
No, but it’s a thing that Said for some reason was denying in his comments above:
It is clear that Said has and expresses strong negative feelings about the people he is writing to. This is totally fine, within reasonable means. However, writing paragraphs and whole comments like the above, and then somehow trying to claim that he does not make claims about his interlocutor being “stupid or evil or any such thing”, seems just totally absurd to me.
I disagree with your characterization (and am entirely willing to continue defending my position on this matter), but see my other just-written comment about why this may be irrelevant. I thus defer any more substantive response on this point, for now (possibly indefinitely, if you agree with what I say in the linked comment).
What does this have to do with anything I wrote in my previous comment? I said he means people have “soft egos.” What relation is to between them having a “complicated and often sensitive relationship to criticism?”
I don’t think Said believes people have a “complicated and often sensitive relationship to criticism”; I think they generally cannot receiving any meaningful criticism. “You have a complicated relationship to criticism” simply has a completely different meaning than “You can’t take criticism.”
You are reading subtext… that isn’t there? Obviously?
Frankly, for all you’re commenting about frustrating patterns and lack of patience, from my perspective it’s a lot more frustrating to deal with someone that makes up interpretations of words that do not align with the text being used (as you are doing here) than with someone who thinks everyone has weak egos.
“He thinks I’m stupid or evil” vs “He thinks I can’t engage with people who say I have obvious gaps in my reasoning” have both different connotations and different denotations.
FWIW I regularly read a barely-veiled contempt/derision into Said’s comments for many people on LessWrong, including in the passage that Habryka quotes. My guess is that we should accept that some people strongly read this and some people do not, and move on with the conversation, rather than insist that there is an ‘obvious’ reading of intent/emotion.
(To be clear I am willing to take the side of the bet that the majority of people will read contempt/derision for other commenters into Said’s comments, including the one you mention. Open to setting up a survey on this if you are feel confident it will not show this.)
Given the current situation, I think it’s understandable for me not to commit to anything beyond the immediate short-term as relates to this site. I’d rather not write this comment either, but you’ve made a good-faith and productive offer, so it’d be rude of me to go radio silence (even though I should,[1] and will, after this one).
But as long as I’m here...
I also read something-describable-as-contempt in that Said comment, even though it’s not the word I’d ideally use for it.
But, most importantly, I think it’s “contempt for their weak egos”[2] and not “contempt for their intelligence or morality.” And this is both the original point of discussion and the only one I have presented my case on, because it’s the only one I care about (in this convo).
Or might have to
Because of how this prevents them from having good epistemics/ contributing meaningfully to a truth-seeking forum
Look, man, it’s definitely “contempt for them” not just “contempt for their weak egos’”.
It’s not like Said is walking around distinguishing between people’s ego’s and the rest of their personality or identity. If someone wanted to communicate “contempt for your weak ego, because of how it prevents you from having good epistemic/contributing meaningfully to a truth-seeking forum” you would use very different words. You would say things like “I have nothing against you as a whole, but I do have something against this weak ego of yours, which I think is holding you back”.
In as much as you are just trying to say “contempt for them, because of their weak egos”, then sure, whenever someone acts contemptuous they will have some reason. In this case the reason is “I judge your ego to be weak” but that doesn’t really change anything.
No, I don’t really think that is how communication works. I think if we have a conversation in which different people repeatedly interpret the same word to have drastically different meaning, then the thing to do is to settle on the meaning of those words, and if necessary ask participants in conversations to disambiguate and use new words, not to just ignore this and move on.
I do not think much hope and good conversations are along the path of trying to just accept that for some people the words “grube” means “a large golden sphere” and to another person means “an imminent threat to punch the other person”, if “grube” is a common topic of discussion. At the very least both parties need to mutually recognize both interpretations, even if they do not come naturally to them.
Yes, I agree it’s not crucial to settle what the “most obvious” reading is in all circumstances, but it’s actually really important that people in the conversation have at least some mutual understanding of how other people interpret what they say, and adjust accordingly.
(In this case, I don’t think any actual communication failure at the level that sunwillrise is describing is happening.)
Seriously, if you are incapable of understanding and parsing the subtext that is present in that comment, I do not think you are capable of participating productively in at least this online discussion.
I am really really not making things up here. I am confident if you run the relevant sections of text by any remotely representative subset of the population, you will get close to full consensus that the relevant section invokes substantial judgement about both the intelligence and moral character of the people involved. It’s really not hard. It’s not a subtle subtext.
I think I am capable of understanding what’s present in that comment, and I’m also capable of understanding why you read a subtext into it that’s not there.[1] As a result of this, I think I can (and will, and already have) contribute very productively to this discussion.
By contrast, merely repeating the word “really” and the same quasi-arguments you have employed before doesn’t make your conclusion any stronger. In the spirit of Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence, the takeaway from your weak defense of your position is that’s it’s evidence your position and interpretation does not have any strong basis. After all, if it did, it’s likely you would have found it and actually written it out instead of merely repeating your conclusion with slightly different verbiage.
But in the spirit of anti-Bulverism and anti-mind-reading, I won’t write it out unless I’m explicitly asked to
I… am done with this conversation. Please stop being weirdly dense. I hope it really is just a skill issue on your part and not some weird ploy to gaslight people around you. We might also just ban you. I don’t think I care about your contributions to this site, but I’ll ask other mods to make that decision who weren’t as involved in this specific conversation.
And over on my end, I hope (and believe) your reaction to this is just a heat-of-the-moment spur that happens to everyone at some point as opposed to a deliberate, considered decision to shut down discussion by banning a user who disagrees respectfully[1] with a mod.
More respectfully than you have engaged in this thread, at least
Please stop it with the random snide remarks. It isn’t helping you, and yes, it is a serious threat of a ban, though I will not be the one making the final call.
The point was to write a judgement-neutral version of the statement. I don’t love the use of the word “complicated”, but the whole point of it is to distinguish an analytical statement about what people de-facto prefer, from a statement that largely serves as a platform to insult the people who have those preferences.
That is how it relates to the things you wrote. Yes, a bit of denotative meaning was lost because I wrote a quick comment and didn’t think hard about the best translation, but I think you are capable of understanding the point of the exercise.
I was trying to choose a framing that was intentionally neutral on judgement as to not beg the question on my underlying argument that the statement involves substantial judgement. If I had written an opinionated statement like “people can’t take criticism”, this would have muddles the exact distinction I was hoping to point to.
Of course I understand the point of the exercise, but I think I also understand the deep irony of you saying “of denotative meaning was lost because I wrote a quick comment and didn’t think hard about the best translation” in a discussion about semantics.
Moreover, a discussion about semantics you were not pressured into, where you had full control over what language you used, and yet also a spot where the example you personally chose to supposedly illustrate what Said really means fails on its own terms.
I think we need to disambiguate “stupid” here. It’s not implying that they’re low-IQ. It’s implying that their ego is interfering with their intellectual performance, effectively making them stupid.
You can of course make a point about something making someone worse without implying they are evil and stupid in the judgement-related meanings of those words, which are clearly being invoked here.
I am not calling people “stupid” in the relevant sense if I say that they are sleep deprived, even if yes, the sleep deprivation is making them currently less smart.
We are talking here about the degree to which Said and other commenter invoke derision as part of their writing. Your comment… seems weirdly intentionally dense at trying to somehow redefine those words to be about their purely denotative meaning, which is indeed the exact thing I am complaining about here. Please stop.
To be clear, I agree that the comment in question is expressing judgement and derision! I can see how you might think I was playing dumb by commenting on the denotation of stupid without clarifying that, but hopefully the fact that I am willing to clarify that after it’s been pointed out counts for something?
But I don’t think you clarified. You offered the distinction between two separate value-neutral definition of stupidity, which I think we both knew were not what the topic at hand was about.
If you had said “I think we need to disambiguate between the object-level effects of people shielding themselves from criticism, which might in effect make them stupider, and the underlying judgement of people as ‘unworthy of engagement with’ and associated derision”, then I would not have objected at all. Indeed, I think that distinction seems helpful!
But coming into a discussion where the topic at hand is clearly the judgement and derision dimension, and proposing a distinction orthogonal to that, reads to me as an attempt at making the pointing at the judgement and derision dimension harder. Which is a very common tactic, indeed it is the central tactic associated with passive aggression.
You are the one who is trying to label Said’s words as saying his interlocutors are “stupid” or “evil.” You are the one who is trying to bring the connotations of those words into play when the most (and frankly, only) reasonable interpretation of Said’s literal language, which you quoted[1], is not aligned with what a neutral outside observer would understand as being “people are stupid/evil.”
Frankly, I really don’t like doing this kind of thing generally because it kinda sucks, but since I lack a lab setup where I can ask this question to 100 different volunteers and do some empirical study on it, the next-best alternative was this:
Asking GPT-4o about this (feel free to replicate it, I tried different prompts and ran it multiple times with the same general answer)
Me: “Of course people have such preferences! Indeed, it’s not shocking at all! People prefer not to have their bad ideas challenged, they prefer not to have obvious gaps in their reasoning pointed out, they prefer that people treat all of their utterances as deserving of nothing less than “curious”, “kind”, “collaborative” replies (rather than pointed questions, direct and un-veiled criticism, and a general “trial by fire”, “explore it by trying to break it” approach)?! Well… yeah. Duh. Humans are human. No one is shocked.”
Consider the following two interpretations:
1. the writer is saying (most) people are stupid or evil
2. the writer is saying (most) people have soft egos
Which interpretation seems more likely?
GPT-4o: Between the two interpretations:
The writer is saying (most) people are stupid or evil
The writer is saying (most) people have soft egos
Interpretation 2 — that the writer is saying most people have soft egos — is much more likely.
Here’s why:
The tone of the passage isn’t moralizing (calling people evil) or condescending (labeling them as stupid). Instead, it takes a matter-of-fact, even somewhat sympathetic view: “Humans are human. No one is shocked.”
The focus is on emotional comfort and social dynamics — people not wanting their ideas challenged, desiring kind responses, avoiding harsh critique. These are traits tied to emotional sensitivity or ego, not to intelligence or morality.
Phrases like “prefer not to have their bad ideas challenged” and “treat all of their utterances as deserving” suggest that the writer sees these tendencies as natural human biases, not as signs of stupidity or malevolence.
Summary:
The writer isn’t condemning people as evil or stupid — they’re observing that people don’t enjoy confrontation or criticism, and that’s a normal part of being human. So interpretation 2 (soft egos) fits best.
Nobody forced you to, nobody referred to that particular paragraph in this very discussion until you selected your own example
Moreover, saying this (as a mod) to an outsider who tried meaningfully to help the discussion out by pointing out how words can have multiple meanings seems to be in really bad taste.
Calling it “intentionally dense” is also… very strange and doesn’t make sense in context?
Sometimes rationalists try to actively avoid paying attention to dynamics that are irrelevant to truthseeking (e.g. try to avoid paying attention to status dynamics when discussing whether a claim is true or false), but active ignorance can be done in an appropriate, healthy way, and also in an inappropriate, pathological way.
Here, in trying to ignore subtext and focus on the denotative meaning, Zack here basically failed to respond to Habryka’s request to focus on the implicit communication, and then Habryka asked him to not do that.
(By Zack’s reply I believe he is also non-zero self-aware of what cognitive tactic he was employing. I think such self-awareness is healthy.)
The cognitive tactics go both ways.
Team Said has an incentive to play dumb about the fact that comments from our team captain often feature judgemental and derisive subtext. It makes sense for Habryka to point that out. (And I’m not going to deny it after it’s been pointed out, gross.)
But at the same time, Team Hugbox Censorship Cult has an incentive to misrepresent the specifics of the judgement and derision: “called people stupid and evil” is a more compelling pretext for censorship (if you can trick stakeholders into believing it) than “used a contemptuous tone while criticizing people for evading criticism.”
@Ben Pace And the question of whether Said, in that (and other) comments, was calling people “stupid or evil,” is the only point of discussion in this thread. As Habryka said at the beginning:
Which I responded to by saying:
Then the whole thing digressed into whether there is “contempt” involved, which seems to be very logically rude from the other conversation participants (in particular, one of the mods), the following dismissive paragraph in particular:
It… doesn’t change anything if Said is calling people “stupid or evil” or if he’s calling them something else? That’s literally the only reason this whole argumentative thread (the one starting here) exists. Saying “sure” while failing to acknowledge you’re not addressing the topic at hand is a classic instance of logical rudeness.
I suppose it is “absurd”, showcases “you are [not] capable of participating productively in at least this online discussion”, “weirdly dense,” “intentionally dense,” a “skill issue,” “gaslighting,” etc, to focus on whatever is being actually debated and written instead of on long-running grievances mods have against a particular user.
Habryka is free to express whatever views he has on the Said matter, but I would have hoped and expected that site norms would not allow him to repeatedly insult (see above) and threaten to ban another user who has (unlike Habryka) followed those conversational norms instead of digressing into other matters.
Look, I gave you an actual moderator warning to stop participating in this conversation. Please knock it off, or I will give you at least a temporary ban for a week until some other moderators have time to look at this.
The whole reason why I am interested in at least giving you a temporary suspension from this thread is because you are not following reasonable conversational norms (or at least in this narrow circumstance appear to be extremely ill-suited for discussing the subject-matter at hand in a way that might look like being intentionally dense, or could just be a genuine skill issue, I don’t know, I feel genuinely uncertain).
It is indeed not a norm on LessWrong to not express negative feelings and judgements! There are bounds to it, of course, but the issue of contention is passive-aggression, not straightforward aggression.
In any case, I think after reviewing a lot of your other comments for a while, I think you are overall a good commenter and have written many really helpful contributions, and I think it’s unlikely any long-term ban would make sense, unless we end up in some really dumb escalation on this thread. I’ll still review things with the other mods, but my guess is you don’t have to be very worried about that.
I am however actually asking you as a mod to stay out of this discussion (and this includes inline reacts), as I do really think you seem much worse on this topic than others (and this seems confirmed by sanity-checking with other people who haven’t been participating here).
What would be some examples of permissible “straightforward aggression”?
I am not interested in answering this question (as I don’t see any compelling reason given for why it would be worth my time, or why it would benefit others), though maybe someone else is!
In general, please motivate your questions. There is a long-lasting pattern of you failing to do so, and this causing many many many burnt hours of effort as people try to guess what your actual aims are, and what causes you to ask the questions they are asking.
I personally am unlikely to answer this question even with motivation, as I have been burnt too many times by this pattern, though maybe others still have stamina for it.
(It’s not clear to me what profit there is in elaborating on a question that you’ve already said you won’t answer, but I guess I can ignore that you said this, as a sort of writing exercise, and a good opportunity to make some relevant general points…)
Needless to say, I disagree with your characterization re: “long-lasting pattern”, etc. But let’s set that aside for now. To the main point:
Firstly, while some questions do indeed benefit substantially from being accompanied by explanations of what motivates them, this is basically always because the question is in some way ambiguous; or because the question must be, in some meaningful sense, interpreted before it can be answered; or because it’s such an inherently weird question that it seems a priori very improbable that anyone would be interested in the literal answer; or due to some other circumstance that makes it hard to take the question at face value. Questions like “what are some examples of [thing that your interlocutor said]” don’t fall into any of those categories. They basically never require “motivation”.
Secondly, in my experience, “why do you ask that” is very often a way of avoiding answering. Alice asks a question, Bob asks “why do you ask”, Alice explains, and now Bob can start interrogating Alice about her motivation, criticizing it, going off on various tangents in response to something Alice said as part of her explanation of why she asks, etc., etc. Very common dynamic. This is why, when (as does sometimes happen) I find myself asking “why do you ask that”, I make a habit of assuring my interlocutor that I will answer their question in any case, am not looking for excuses to avoid answering, and am only asking in order to make my eventual answer more useful. (Thus I bind myself to answering, as if I avoid giving an answer after providing such assurance, this will look bad to any third parties. This, of course, is what gives the reassurance its force.)
You have, of course, not done that, but in some sense, the assurance that you won’t answer in any event is similar in structure, in that I am not risking my efforts to provide a motivation for the question being wasted (since I know for sure that they’ll be wasted). The motivation, then:
You claimed that “the issue of contention is passive-aggression, not straightforward aggression”. This suggests (strictly speaking, implicates) that “straightforward aggression” would be unproblematic (otherwise, it makes no sense to take pains to make the distinction).
However, in the past, I’ve been the target of moderator action for what might be described (although not by me) as “straightforward aggression”; and, more generally, moderators have made statements to me that are totally at odds with the notion that “straightforward aggression” is permissible. (For example, this comment from a moderator, and see also this comment from a non-moderator, in the same comment thread, which is re: “straightforward” vs. “passive”.)
In general, the idea that “straightforward aggression” is permissible (and your earlier comments where you outright said that it would be better if I explicitly insulted people) seems to me to be wildly at odds with Less Wrong moderation policy as I have experienced and seen it applied. Hence the question, which is aimed at figuring out just what the heck you could possibly mean by any of this.
Well, let’s recap a bit, because it’s easy to get lost in a game of Telephone with long threads like this.
There was a claim about my comments:
I replied:
To which a response was:
And Zack wrote:
This whole tangent began with a claim that if someone’s comments on your posts are sufficiently unpleasant toward you personally, then it’s reasonable to “want a certain level of distance from” this person (which idea apparently justifies banning them from your posts—a leap of logic I remain skeptical about, but never mind).
And I’d started writing, in this reply to Zack, a comment about how I took issue with this or that characterization of my writing on LW, but then it occurred to me to ask a question (which is mostly for Ben, I guess, but also for anyone else who cares to weigh in on this) is:
Just how load-bearing is this argument? I mean, what if I banned someone because I just don’t like their face; or, conversely, because I disagree with their political views, even though I have absolutely no feelings about them personally, nor any opinions about their behavior? Is that ok? As I understand it, the LW system would have zero problem with this, right? I can ban literally any member from my posts for literally any reason, or for no reason at all—correct? I could ban some new guy who just joined yesterday and hasn’t written so much as a single comment and about whom I know absolutely nothing?
If all of the above is true, then what exactly is the point of litigating the subtle tonal nuances of my comments? I mean, we can keep arguing about whether I do or do not say this, or imply that, or whether this or the other descriptor can accurately be applied to my comments, and so on… by all means. But is there a purpose to it?
Or was this just a red herring?
Because I think it is more likely than not that I want to give you a site-wide ban and would like to communicate reasons for that, and hear counterarguments before I do it.
The other reason I am participating in this is to avoid a passive aggressive culture take hold on LessWrong. The combination of obvious passive aggression combined with denial of any such aggression taking place is one of the things that people have most consistently complained about from you and a few other commenters, and one way to push back on that is to point out the dynamic and enforce norms of reasonable discourse.
No, you can’t ban people for any reason. As we’ve said like 10+ times in this discussion and previous discussions of this, if someone was going completely wild with their banning we would likely step in and tell them to knock it off.
In general we will give authors a bunch of freedom, and I on the margin would like authors to moderate much more actively, but we are monitoring what people get banned for, and if things trend in a worrying direction, either adjust people’s moderation power, or tell individual authors to change how they do things, or stop promoting that authors posts to the frontpage.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wd8mNFof8o7EtoiLi/three-missing-cakes-or-one-turbulent-critic
The second sentence doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the first. What does “going completely wild with their banning” mean? The straightforward reading seems to be that it refers to quantity of bans, but of course that’s not at all what I was asking about.
Let me put it another way: I just went to my account settings page and banned, from my posts, a random user that I’ve never interacted with and about whom I know nothing. (Judging by this person’s total karma, they seem to be very new.) The UI didn’t prompt me to enter a reason for the ban. So what happens now? Will I be contacted by a moderator and interviewed about my reason for the ban? Is that what happened in the case of each of the currently active bans listed on the moderation log? Or does nothing at all happen, and the ban just stand unchallenged and unremarked-on?
For example, here is a comment where one user says:
Presumably, nobody had asked him anything about the bans, or else the mistake would have been uncovered then. This would seem to be at odds with the claim that you are “monitoring what people get banned for”.
I am confident you can figure out how the second sentence relates to the first.
I look over the user bans every week or so. I wouldn’t pay attention to a random ban like this, as indeed I see no previous discussions between the two of you, and would just ignore it. Maybe you have some good reason, maybe you don’t.
However, if you had banned a particularly active commenter who is providing pushback on exactly the kind of post you tend to write, or feels like the kind of voice I think is missing in posts of yours or discussion with you on the site, I would take notice. I probably wouldn’t do anything for an isolated ban, but if you made multiple bans, and tended to attract active discussion, I would probably reach out and ask for the reasons. I would probably first reach out to the person banned and ask them whether they know they are banned, just because that feels easier for some reason.
Centrally, the thing we would be doing is seeing how overall things develop in terms of site culture and banning decisions. I would not end up focused or demanding justification for each ban, which indeed would almost certainly guarantee the feature goes unused, but if as I said, if we see things going off the rails, either site wide, or in the relationship between some specific commenters or clusters of commenters, I would step in. What we would do would depend on what thing is going wrong, but I listed some of the tools that seem obvious to use.
Or put another way, “Your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes more Charisma to persuade you of false things, and less Charisma to persuade you of true things”
I do think many people could be served by trying to find the truth in harsh criticisms, to wonder if part of the sting is the recognition the critic was right. You’re example of ArsDigita was quite helpful in getting a concrete demonstration of the value of that kind of critique.
The thing is, Greenspun failed.
People are not empty-machines of perfect reasoning. There’s an elephant in our brains. If the critique is to land, if it is to change someone’s mind or behavior, it has to get through to the elephant.
Indeed. It is also possible (I claim) to give pointed criticism while remaining friendly. The elephant doesn’t like it when words look like they come from an enemy. If you fail to factor in the elephant, and your critique doesn’t land, that is your own mistake. Just as they have failed to see the value of the critique, you have failed to see the weight of the elephant.
The executives and other board members of ArsDigita failed, but if Greenspun could have kept their ear by being friendlier, and thereby increased the chances of changing their minds or behavior, Greenspun also failed at rationality.
If it is rational to seek the truth of criticism even when it hurts, then it is also rational to deliver your criticism in a friendly way that will actually land. Or put another way, your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes less Wisdom to notice your plans will fail.
FWIW, I mostly don’t buy this framing. I think people being passively-aggressively hostile towards you in the way some LW commenters seem to valorize is I think reasonably well-correlated with indeed just not understanding your core points, not being valuable to engage with, and usually causing social dynamics in a space to go worse.
To be clear, this is a very small minority of people! But I think mostly when people get extremely frustrated at this extremely small minority of people, they pick up on it indeed being very rarely worth engaging with them deeper, and I don’t think the audience ends up particularly enlightened either (the associated comments threads are ones I glance over most reliably, and definitely far far underperform the marginal top-level posts in terms of value provided to the reader, which they usually trade off against).
I think people definitely have some unhealthy defensiveness, but the whole framing of “oh, you just need to placate the dumb elephant in people’s brains” strikes me as a very bad way to approach resolving that defensiveness successfully. It matters whether you surround yourself with sneering people, it really has a very large effect on you and your cognition and social environment and opportunities to trade.
Agreed. I was trying to point out how refusing to be friendly, even from a cynical point of view, is counterproductive.
(I had drafted a long reply to this which still needed more work, but I’ve rather gone over the limit of how much time to spend arguing about moderation on LessWrong this month, so I decided not to finish it. Nonetheless, FWIW, I thought this was a good comment and made some good counterpoints and I upvoted it. I think you’re right that it is often a weakness to be strongly affected by it, and that post-replies have many weakness compared to arguing in the comments, but I would want to defend that there are many worthy environments for public writing about how the world works where it makes sense for people with that weakness to optimize at-all for comfort over criticism, and also that it’s not a weakness in many contexts to use contempt/disgust to track real threats and people who aren’t worth talking to, it’s just accurate.)
We luckily have shortform for that!
No apology necessary! I am grateful for the slowdown in rate of replies, I am becoming busier again. But thanks for flagging.
Just noting briefly that I’ve gone back and read the whole post; I stand by the agree-react on your comment, and think I was correct in my assumption that his post did not provide a strong counterargument to the point you made at the top of your comment.
I agree it’s working fine for that specific comment thread! But it’s just not really true for most posts, which tend to have less than 10 comments, and where voting activity after 1-2 rounds of replies gets very heavily dominated by the people who are actively participating in the thread, which especially as it gets heated, causes things to then end up being very random in their vote distribution, and to not really work as a signal anymore.
The popular comments section is affected by net karma, though I think it’s a pretty delicate balance. My current guess is that indeed the vast majority of people who upvoted Said’s comment didn’t read Gordon’s post, and upvoted Said comment because it seemed like a dunk on something they didn’t like, irrespective of whether that actually applied to Gordon’s post in any coherent way.
I think the popular comment section is on-net good, but in this case seems to me to have failed (for reasons largely unrelated to other things discussed in this thread), and it has happened a bunch of times that it promoted contextless responses to stuff that made the overall discussion quality worse.
Fundamentally, the amount of sorting you can do in a comment section is just very limited. I feel like this isn’t a very controversial or messy point. On any given post you can sort maybe 3-4 top-level threads into the right order, so karma is supplying at most a few bits of prioritization for the order.
In the context of post lists, you often are sorting lists of posts hundred of items long, and karma is the primary determinant whether something gets read at all. I am not saying it has absolutely no effect, but clearly it’s much weaker (and indeed, does absolutely not reliably prevent bad comments from getting lots of visibility and does not remotely reliably cause good comments to get visibility, especially if you wade into domains where people have stronger pre-existing feelings and are looking for anything to upvote that looks vaguely like their own side, and anything to downvote that looks vaguely like the opposing side).
BTW my old, now defunct user script LW Power Reader had a feature to adjust the font size of comments based on their karma, so that karma could literally affect visibility despite “the thread structure making strict karma sorting impossible”. So you could implement that if you want, but it’s not really relevant to the current debate since karma obviously affects visibility virtually even without sorting, in the sense that people can read the number and decide to skip the comment or not.
We did that on April 1st in 2018 I believe.
Assuming your comment was serious (which on reflection I think it probably was), what about a modification to my proposed scheme, that any muted commenter gets an automatic downvote from the author when they comment? Then it would stay at the bottom unless enough people actively upvoted it? (I personally don’t think this is necessary because low quality comments would stay near the bottom even without downvotes just from lack of upvotes, but I want to address this if it’s a real blocker for moving away from the ban system.)
I don’t currently like the muted comment system for many practical reasons, though I like it as an idea!
We could go into the details of it, but I feel a bit like stuff is getting too anchored on that specific proposal, and explaining why I don’t feel excited about this one specific solution out of dozens of ways of approaching this feels like it would both take a long time, and not really help anyone. Though if you think you would find it valuable I could do it.
Let me know if you want to go there, and I could write more. I am pretty interested in discussing the general principles and constraints though, I’ve just historically not gotten that much out of discussions where someone who hasn’t been trying to balance a lot of the complicated design considerations comes in with a specific proposal, but have gotten a lot of value out of people raising problems and considerations (and overall appreciate your thoughts in this thread).
Yeah I think it would help me understand your general perspective better if you were to explain more why you don’t like my proposal. What about just writing out the top 3 reasons for now, if you don’t want to risk investing a lot of time on something that might not turn out to be productive?
In my mind things aren’t neatly categorized into “top N reasons”, but here are some quick thoughts:
(I.) I am generally very averse to having any UI element that shows on individual comments. It just clutters things up quickly and requires people to scan each individual comment. I have put an enormous amount of effort into trying to reduce the number of UI elements on comments. I much prefer organizing things into sections which people can parse once, and then assume everything has the same type signature.
(II.) I think a core thing I want UI to do in the space is to hit the right balance between “making it salient to commenters that they are getting more filtered evidence” and “giving the author social legitimacy to control their own space, combined with checks and balances”.
I expect this specific proposal to end up feeling like a constant mark of shame that authors are hesitant to use because they don’t feel the legitimacy to use it, and most importantly, make it very hard for them to get feedback on whether others judge them for how they use it, inducing paranoia and anxiety, which I think would make the feature largely unused. I think in that world it isn’t really helping anyone, though it will make authors feel additionally guilty by having technically handed them a tool for the job, but one that they expect will come with social censure after being used, and so we will hear fewer complaints and have less agency to address the underlying problems.
(III.) I think there is a nearby world where you have n-directional muting (i.e. any user can mute any other user), and I expect people to conceptually confuse that with what is going on here, and there is no natural way to extend this feature into the n-directional direction.
I generally dislike n-directional muting for other reasons, though it’s something I’ve considered over the years.
(IV.) I think it’s good to have different in-flows of users into different conversations. I think the mute-thread structure would basically just cause every commenter to participate in two conversations, one with the author, and one without the author, and I expect that to be a bunch worse than to have something like two separate comment sections, or a top-level response post where the two different conversations can end up with substantially non-overlapping sets of participants.
(V.) The strongest argument against anything in the space is just the complexity it adds. The ban system IMO currently is good because mostly you basically don’t have to track it. Almost nobody ever gets banned, but it helps with the most extreme cases, and the moderators keep track of things not getting out of control with lots of unreasonable seeming bans. Either this or an additional comment section, or any of the other solutions discussed is one additional thing to keep track off for how LessWrong works, and there really is already a lot to keep track off, and we should have a very very strong prior that we should generally not add complexity but remove it.
(VI.) Relatedly, I think the mark of a good feature on LessWrong is something that solves multiple problems at once, not just one problem. Whenever I’ve felt happy about a feature decision it’s usually been after having kept a bag of problems in the back of my mind for many months or years, and then at some point trying to find a solution to a new problem, and noticing that it would also solve one or multiple other problems at the same time. This solution doesn’t have that hallmark, and I’ve mostly regretted whenever I’ve done that, ending up adding complexity to both the codebase and the UI that didn’t pay off.
To reduce clutter you can reuse the green color bars that currently indicate new comments, and make it red for muted comments.
Authors might rarely ban commenters because the threat of banning drives them away already. And if the bans are rare then what’s the big deal with requiring moderator approval first?
I would support letting authors control their space via the mute and flag proposal, adding my weight to its social legitimacy, and I’m guessing others who currently are very much against the ban system (thus helping to deprive it of social legitimacy) would also support or at least not attack it much in the future. I and I think others would be against any system that lets authors unilaterally exert very strong control of visibility of comments such as by moving them to a bottom section.
But I guess you’re actually talking about something else, like how comfortable does the UX make the author, thus encouraging them to use it more. It seems like you’re saying you don’t want to make the muting to be too in your face, because that makes authors uncomfortable and reluctant to use it? Or you simultaneously want authors to have a lot of control over comment visibility, but don’t want that fact to be easily visible (and the current ban system accomplishes this)? I don’t know, this just seems very wrong to me, like you want authors to feel social legitimacy that doesn’t actually exist, ie if most people support giving authors more control then why would it be necessary to hide it.
No, the whole point of the green bars is to be a very salient indicator that only shows in the relatively rare circumstance where you need it (which is when you revisit a comment thread you previously read and want to find new comments). Having a permanent red indicator would break in like 5 different ways:
It would communicate a temporary indicator, because that’s the pattern that we established with colored indicators all across the site. All color we have is part of dynamic elements.
It would introduce a completely new UI color which has so far only been used in the extremely narrow context of downvoting
Because the color has only been used in downvoting it would feel like a mark of shame making the social dynamics a bunch worse
How would you now indicate that a muted comment is new?
The green bar is intentionally very noticeable, and red is even more attention grabbing, making it IMO even worse than a small icon somewhere on the comment in terms of clutter.
To be clear, I still appreciate the suggestion, but I don’t think it’s a good one in this context.
I’ve received much more pushback for mute-like proposals than for ban-like proposals on LW (though this one is quite different and things might be different).
I appreciate the offer to provide social legitimacy, but I don’t really see a feasible way for you to achieve that, as authors will rightfully be concerned that the people who will judge them will be people who don’t know your opinions on this, and there is no natural way for them to see your support. As I mentioned one central issue with this proposal is that authors cannot see the reaction others have to the muted comments (whereas they know that if they ban someone then the state of knowledge they have about what conversation is going on on the site is the same as the state other people have, which makes the social situation much easier to model).
No, I don’t mind visibility at all really. I think public ban lists are great, and as I mentioned I wouldn’t mind having the number of people banned and comments deleted shown at the bottom of the comment section for each author (as well as the deleted content and the author names themselves still visible via the moderation log).
But legitimacy is a fickle thing on the internet where vigorous calls against censorship are as easy to elicit as friendly greetings at your neighborhood potluck, and angry mobs do frequently roam the streets, and you have to think about how both readers and authors will think about the legitimacy of a tool in a situation where you didn’t just have a long multi-dozen paragraph conversation about the merits of different moderation systems.
I think this specific proposal fails on communicating the right level of legitimacy. I think others fare better (like the ban system with a visible moderation log), though are also not ideal. I think we can probably do something better than both, which is why I am interested in discussing this, but my intuitions about how these things go say this specific proposal probably will end up in the wrong social equilibria (and like, to be clear, I am not super confident in this, but understanding these social dynamics is among the top concerns for designing systems and UI like this).
As an aside, I think one UI preference I suspect Habryka has more strongly than Wei Dai does here is that the UI look the same to all users. For similar reasons why WYSIWYG is helpful for editing, when it comes to muting/threading/etc it’s helpful for ppl to all be looking at the same page so they can easily model what others are seeing. Having some ppl see a user’s comments but the author not, or key commenters not, is quite costly for social transparency, and understanding social dynamics.
My proposal was meant to address the requirement that some authors apparently have to avoid interacting with certain commenters. All proposals dealing with this imply multiple conversations and people having to model different states of knowledge in others, unless those commenters are just silenced altogether, so I’m confused why it’s more confusing to have multiple conversations happening in the same place when those conversations are marked clearly.
It seems to me like the main difference is that Habryka just trusts authors to “garden their spaces” more than I do, and wants to actively encourage this, whereas I’m reluctantly trying to accommodate such authors. I’m not sure what’s driving this difference though. People on Habryka’s side (so far only he has spoken up, but there’s clearly more given voting patterns) seem very reluctant to directly address the concern that people like me have that even great authors are human and likely biased quite strongly when it comes to evaluating strong criticism, unless they’ve done so somewhere I haven’t seen.
Maybe it just comes down to differing intuitions and there’s not much to say? There’s some evidence available though, like Said’s highly upvoted comment nevertheless triggering a desire to ban Said. Has Habryka seen more positive evidence that I haven’t?
No, what are you talking about? The current situation, where people can make new top level posts, which get shown below the post itself via the pingback system, does not involve any asymmetric states of knowledge?
Indeed, there are lots of ways to achieve this without requiring asymmetric states of knowledge. Having the two comment sections, with one marked as “off-topic” or something like that also doesn’t require any asymmetric states of knowledge.
Unmoderated discussion spaces are not generally better than moderated discussion spaces, including on the groupthink dimension! There is no great utopia of discourse that can be achieved simply by withholding moderation tools from people. Bandwidth is limited and cultural coordination is hard and this means that there are harsh tradeoffs to be made about which ideas and perspectives will end up presented.
I am not hesitant to address the claim directly, it is just the case that on LessWrong, practically no banning of anyone ever takes place who wouldn’t also end up being post-banned by the moderators and so de-facto this effect just doesn’t seem real. Yes, maybe there are chilling effects that don’t produce observable effects, which is always important to think about with this kind of stuff, but I don’t currently buy it.
The default thing that happens is when you leave a place unmoderated is just that the conversation gets dominated by whoever has the most time and stamina and social resilience, and the overall resulting diversity of perspectives trends to zero. Post authors are one obvious group to moderate spaces, especially with supervision from site moderators.
There are lots of reasonable things to try here, but a random blanket “I don’t trust post authors to moderate” is simply making an implicit statement that unmoderated spaces are better, because on the margin LW admins don’t have either the authority or the time to moderate everyone’s individual posts. Authors are rightly pissed if we just show up and ban people from their posts, or delete people’s content without checking in with them, and the moderator-author communication channel is sufficiently limited that if you want most posts to be moderated you will need to give the authors some substantial power to do that.
There maybe are better ways of doing it, but I just have really no patience or sympathy for people who appeal to some kind of abstract “I don’t trust people to moderate” intuition. Someone has to moderate if you want anything nice. Maybe you would like the LW admins to moderate much more, though I think the marginal capacity we have for that is kind of limited, and it’s not actually the case that anyone involved in this conversation wouldn’t also go and scream “CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP” if the site admins just banned people directly instead.
Overall the post authors having more moderation control means I will ban fewer people because it means we get to have more of an archipelago. If you want a more centralized culture, we can do that, but I think it will overall mean more people getting banned because I have blunter tools and much much less time than the aggregate of all LessWrong post authors. In my ideal world post authors would ban and delete much more aggressively so that we would actually get an archipelago of cultures and perspectives, but alas, threads like this one, and constant social attacks on anyone who tries to use any moderation tools generally guarantee that nobody wants to deal with the hassle.
And to be clear, I really value the principle of “If anyone says anything wrong on LessWrong, you can find a refutation of it right below the post”, and have always cared about somehow maintaining it. But that principle is just achieved totally fine via the pingback system. I think de-facto again almost no one is banned from almost anywhere else so things end up via the comment system, and I would probably slightly change the UI for the pingback system to work better in contexts like mobile if it became more load-bearing, but it seems to me to work fine as an escape valve that maintains that relationship pretty well.
I do think there is a bit of a hole in that principle for what one should do if someone says something wrong in a comment. I have been kind of into adding comment-level pingbacks for a while, and would be kind of sold that if more banning happens, we should add comment-level pingbacks in some clear way (I would also find the information otherwise valuable).
In the discussion under the original post, some people will have read the reply post, and some won’t (perhaps including the original post’s author, if they banned the commenter in part to avoid having to look at their content), so I have to model this.
Sure, let’s give people moderation tools, but why trust authors with unilateral powers that can’t be overriden by the community, such as banning and moving comments/commenters to a much less visible section?
“Not being able to get the knowledge if you are curious” and “some people have of course read different things” are quite different states of affairs!
I am objecting to the former. I agree that of course any conversation with more than 10 participants will have some variance in who knows what, but that’s not what I am talking about.
It would be easy to give authors a button to let them look at comments that they’ve muted. (This seems so obvious that I didn’t think to mention it, and I’m confused by your inference that authors would have no ability to look at the muted comments at all. At the very least they can simply log out.)
I mean, kind of. The default UI experience of everyone will still differ by a lot (and importantly between people who will meaningfully be “in the same room”) and the framing of the feature as “muted comments” does indeed not communicate that.
The exact degree of how much it would make the dynamics more confusing would end up depending on the saliency of the author UI, but of course commenters will have no idea what the author UI looks like, and so can’t form accurate expectations about how likely the author is to end up making the muted comments visible to them.
Contrast to a situation with two comment sections. The default assumption is that the author and the users just see the exact same thing. There is no uncertainty about whether maybe the author has things by default collapsed whereas the commenters do not. People know what everyone else is seeing, and it’s communicated in the most straightforward way. I don’t even really know what I would do to communicate to commenters what the author sees (it’s not an impossible UI challenge, you can imagine a small screenshot on the tooltip of the “muted icon” that shows what the author UI looks like, but that doesn’t feel to me like a particularly elegant solution).
One of the key things I mean by “the UI looking the same for all users” is maintaining common knowledge about who is likely to read what, or at least the rough process that determines what people read and what context they have. If I give the author some special UI where some things are hidden, then in order to maintain common knowledge I now need to show the users what the author’s UI looks like (and show the author what the users are being shown about the author UI, but this mostly would take care of itself since all authors will be commenters in other contexts).
I’m not certain that this is the crux, but I’ll try again to explain that why I think it’s good to give people that sort of agency. I am probably repeating myself somewhat.
I think incompatibilities often drive people away (e.g. at LessOnline I have let ppl know they can ask certain ppl not to come to their sessions, as it would make them not want to run the sessions, and this is definitely not due to criticism but to conflict between the two people). That’s one reason why I think this should be available.
I think bad commenters also drive people away. There are bad commenters who seem fine when inspecting any single comment but when inspecting longer threads and longer patterns they’re draining energy and provide no good ideas or arguments. Always low quality criticisms, stated maximally aggressively, not actually good at communication/learning. I can think of many examples.
I think it’s good to give individuals some basic level of agency over these situations, and not require active input from mods each time. This is for cases where the incompatibility is quite individual, or where the user’s information comes from off-site interactions, and also just because there are probably a lot of incompatibilities and we already spend a lot of time each week on site-moderation. And furthermore ppl are often quite averse to bringing up personal incompatibilities with strangers (i.e. in a DM to the mods who they’ve never interacted with before and don’t know particularly well).
Some people will not have the principles to tend their garden appropriately, and will inappropriately remove people with good critiques. That’s why it’s important that they cannot prevent the user from writing posts or quick takes about their content. Most substantial criticisms on this site have come in post and quick takes form, such as Wentworth’s critiques of other alignment strategies, or the sharp left turn discourse, or Natalia’s critiques of Guzey’s sleep hypotheses / SMTM’s lithium hypothesis, or Eliezer’s critique of the bioanchors report.
So it seems to me like it’s needed for several reasons, and basically won’t change the deep character of the site where there’s tons of aggressive and harsh criticism on LW. And I also basically expect most great and critical users not to get restricted in this particular way (e.g. Gwern, Habryka, Wentworth, more). So while I acknowledge there will be nonzero inappropriate uses of it that increase the friction of legitimate criticism, I think it won’t be a big effect size overall on the ability and frequency of criticism, and it will help a great deal with a common class of very unpleasant scenarios that drive good writers away.
This is something I currently want to accommodate but not encourage people to use moderation tools for, but maybe I’m wrong. How can I get a better sense of what’s going on with this kind of incompatibility? Why do you think “definitely not due to criticism but to conflict”?
It seems like this requires a very different kind of solution than either local bans or mutes, which most people don’t or probably won’t use, so can’t help in most places. Like maybe allow people to vote on commenters instead of just comments, and then their comments get a default karma based on their commenter karma (or rather the direct commenter-level karma would contribute to the default karma, in addition to their total karma which currently determines the default karma).
I’m worried about less “substantial” criticisms that are unlikely to get their own posts, like just pointing out a relatively obvious mistake in the OP, or lack of clarity, or failure to address some important counterargument.
I mean I’ve mostly gotten a better sense of it by running lots of institutions and events and had tons of complaints bubble up. I know it’s not just because of criticism because (a) I know from first-principles that conflicts exist for reasons other than criticism of someone’s blogposts, and (b) I’ve seen a bunch of these incompatibilities. Things like “bad romantic breakup” or “was dishonorable in a business setting” or “severe communication style mismatch”, amongst other things.
You say you’re not interested in using “moderation tools” for this. What do you have in mind for how to deal with this, other than tools for minimizing interaction between two people?
It’s a good idea, and maybe we should do it, but I think doesn’t really address the thing of unique / idiosyncratic incompatibilities. Also it would be quite socially punishing for someone to know that they’re publicly labelled net negative as a commenter, rather than simply that their individual comments so-far have been considered poor contributions, and making a system this individually harsh is a cost to be weighed, and it might make it overall push away high-quality contributors more than it helps.
This seems then that making it so that a short list of users are not welcome to comment on a single person’s post is much less likely to cause these things to be missed. The more basic mistakes can be noticed by a lot of people. If it’s a mistake that only one person can notice due to their rare expertise or unique perspective, I think they can get a lot of karma by making it a whole quick take or post.
Like, just to check, are we discussing a potential bad future world if this feature gets massively more use? Like, right now there are a ton of very disagreeable and harsh critics on LessWrong and there’s very few absolute bans. I’d guess absolute bans being on the order of 30-100 author-commenter pairs over the ~7 years we’ve had this, and weekly logged-in users being ~4,000 these days. The effect size so far has been really quite tiny. My guess is that it could probably increase like 10x and still not be a very noticeable friction for criticism on LessWrong for basically all good commenters.
I think better karma systems could potentially be pretty great, though I’ve historically always found it really hard to find something much better, mostly for complexity reasons. See this old shortform of mine on a bunch of stuff that a karma system has to do simultaneously:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQJfdqSaMcJyR5k73/habryka-s-shortform-feed?commentId=8meuqgifXhksp42sg
Uh… no. No, I absolutely do not think of this as a 1-1 interaction.
No, in a threaded comment system, each subthread (at the very least, each thread starting with a top-level comment!) is its own group conversation.
But it is one that a user the author finds unpleasant may join at any time, and suddenly become a conversation with them in it. Users from different threads regularly cross-pollinate.
It spawns a sub-conversations with that person in it. The author is free to ignore that sub-conversation. (Or even just that person’s posts!)
More generally… frankly, I think we’re getting into rather absurd scenarios here. You’re positing a person who is posting things that aren’t, like… vulgarity, or personal insults, or anything bad or crazy like that (because if he were doing that, then the mods would presumably ban him outright—or should, anyway!). And he’s not doing anything else that is rightly ban-worthy (like, say, persistently lying about his interlocutors’ claims, or something along those lines). Yet, despite this, there are authors who find this person’s very presence in a discussion so “unpleasant” that… it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether?
And yet, despite this, these authors somehow are capable of making useful contributions to the site? Who are these authors??
Like Wei Dai, I cannot understand this sort of mindset at all. (Or, to be precise: I can come up with all sorts of hypotheses for what is behind it, but… none of them are remotely flattering. But such things aren’t what you have in mind… are they?)
Can you give some examples of such people? (Are you one of them?)
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others. This is not a rare position. I would have to dig to give you an exact list, but the list is not short, and it includes large fractions of almost everyone who one might consider strong contributors to the site.
We have had this conversation many times. I have listed examples of people like this in the past. If you find yourself still incapable of modeling more than 50% of top authors on the site whose very moderation guidelines you are opining on, after many many many dozens of hours of conversation on the topic, maybe you should just stay out of these conversations, as you are clearly incapable of modeling the preferences of the majority of people who would be affected by your suggested changes to the moderation guidelines.
A good start, if you actually wanted to understand any of this at all, would be to stop strawmaning these people repeatedly by inserting random ellipses and question marks and random snide remarks implying the absurdity of their position. Yes, people have preferences about how people interact with them that go beyond obvious unambigious norm violations, what a shocker! Yes, it is of course completely possible to be hostile in a plausible deniable way. Indeed, the most foundational essay for the moderation guidelines on this site, mentions this directly (emphasis mine):
Well-kept gardens do not tend to die by accepting obviously norm-violating content. They usually die by people being bad discourse participants in plausible deniable ways, just kind of worse, but not obviously and unambiguously worse, than what has come before. This is moderation 101. Yes, of course authors, and everyone else, will leave, if you fill a space with people just kind of being bad discourse participants, even if they don’t do anything egregious. How could reality work any other way.
You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.
I reached out to Scott Alexander via Discord on 11 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:
Separately, as I mentioned to you in our meeting of 26 June 2025, in a public comment of 9 October 2018, Jacob Falkovich wrote (bolding added):
Thanks for the follow-up! 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 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.
Roll to disbelieve.
I share something like Achmiz’s incredulity, but for me, I wouldn’t call it an inability to model preferences so much as disapproval of how uninterested people are in arguing that their preferences are legitimate and should be respected by adults who care about advancing the art of human rationality.
Achmiz has argued quite eloquently at length for why his commenting style is conducive to intellectual progress. If someone disagrees with that case on the intellectual merits, that would be interesting. But most of the opposition I see seems to appeal not to the intellectual merits, but to feelings: that Achmiz’s comments make authors feel bad (in some way that can’t be attributed to a breach of etiquette rules that could be neutrally enforced), which makes them not want to use the website, and we want people to use the website.
I’m appalled that the mod team apparently takes this seriously. I mean, okay, I grant that you want people to use the website. If almost everyone who might use your website is actually that depraved (which sounds outlandish to me, but you’re the one who’s done dozens of user interviews and would know), I guess you need to accommodate their mental illness somehow for pragmatic reasons. But normatively (dealing with the intellectual merits and not feelings), you see how the problem is with everyone else, not Achmiz, right?
Disagree!
About what? Well specifically the last paragraph. But also I think we fundamentally disagree on what the gradient toward better rationality looks like. As in, what kind of norms should be promoted and selected for.
My view is something like: it’s very important to have a good model for how emotions (like annoyance, appreciation, liking, disliking, that kind of thing) work, and one should take on significant efforts to optimize communication for that, both in personal writing style and with respect to how a community is moderated.
I think your view is probably something like: this is an atrocious idea, WTAF, we should instead try to get away from focusing on feelings since they are the noise rather than the signal, and should judge everything on intellectual merit insofar as that is possible. (Plus a whole bunch of nuance, we probably don’t want to do things that intentionally make other people angry, maybe a bit of hedging is appropriate, maybe taking our own emotions into account to the extent that we can correct for them is good, etc. Idk how exactly you feel about e.g. Leaving a line of Retreat)
Assuming this is roughly correct, I’d first want to pose a hypothetical. Suppose it were in fact the case that my vision of rationality works better, in the sense that communities which are built around the kind of culture I’m envisioning lead to better outcomes. (Not better outcomes as in “people are more coddled and feel better” but in terms of epistemic performance, however that would be measured.) Would this actually be a crux?
I’m starting with this because I’m noticing that your last paragraph-
-does not actually ask this question, but just takes it for granted that not coddling is better. So if coddling were in fact better, would this actually make a difference, or would you still just reject the approach?
Assuming it is a crux, the second thing I’d ask is, why are you confident in this? Wouldn’t your experience suggest that most people on this site aren’t particularly good at this rationality thing? Why did Eliezer get the trans thing wrong? Why did not everyone agree with you immediately when you tried to fix it? (I hope this doesn’t open a huge rabbit hole.)
My estimate would be something like, there are around 2-4 people on this site who are actually capable of the kind of rationality that you’re envisioning, and since one of them is you, there’s like 1-3 others. The median LW person—and not just the median but up to the 80th percentile, at least—is strongly influenced by style/vibes/kindness/fluff/coddling in what they engage with, how long they continue engaging with it, and in how much they update their beliefs. This view seems to me to be very compatible with the drama around Said, everything that happened to you, with which posts are well-received, and really everything I can observe on this site. (I don’t think it’s incompatible with the community’s achievements or the amount of mind-changing that does take place.)
And even if there are more people who are capable of not letting vibes affect their judgment/beliefs/etc (though I’m not conceding that there are), it would still take significantly more effort, and effort is absolutely an important bottleneck. It is important (importantly bad) if something zaps people’s energy. Energy (in the sense of willpower/motivation/etc.) is the relevant currency for getting stuff done, for most people.
Since I think you think that my vision would be terrible if it were realized, one point I want to make is that being nice/considerate/coddling does not actually require you to lie, at all. I know this because I tend to try much harder than most to not make someone feel bad (I think), and I can do it without lying. I was kind of giggling when thinking about how to do that in this comment because in some sense, trying to be nice to you is insulting (because it implies that I don’t respect your ability to be unaffected by vibes). But I decided to do it anyway just because then I can use it an illustration of the kinds of things my model entails. So, here’s an incomplete list of things I’ve done in this comment to make it feel nicer.
Listing my view first rather than yours first (bc the natural flow was list one position and then open the second one with how much it disagrees with the first position—so the default version would have been “here’s what I think you believe, but I think that would actually be very bad because xyz”, but by flipping around I get to trash talk my view rather than yours)
Using derogatory language for my position (“coddling”)
Including a compliment
Lots of other details about how I write to make it sound less arrogant, which have become even more automatic at this point than the stuff above and it’d actually take significant effort to not do them. (Using ! rather than . for some sentences is an example, it tends to be status-lowering.)
This is all I think pretty typical stuff that I do all the time when I communicate with people via text on important things (usually without calling attention to it). I used to not do any of it, and in my experience, my current style of communicating works vastly better. (It works tremendously better outside LW, but I still think it works significantly better on LW as well.) And it didn’t require me to lie, or even water down my argument. A nice feature about how most humans work is that their emotions are actually determined more by platitudes and status comparisons than your actual position, which means you can usually even tell them that you think they’re completely wrong without making them feel bad, if you package it right. In fact, I believe that the kind of norms you’re envisioning would be a disaster if they were enforced by the mod team, but given how I’ve written my remaining comment, I think I could get away with saying this even if I were talking to the median LW user, without making them feel animosity toward me.
(I realize that I’ve just been talking about 1-1 interactions but this is a public forum, will get to that now.)
So when having a model like the one I’ve sketched out, the idea that we should step in if a user makes other users uncomfortable seems completely reasonable on first glance. (Like, most people aren’t in fact that good at rationality, it’ll make them annoyed, less rational, zap their energy, seems like a clear net negative.) Now Said said here that the value of his comments isn’t about what the author feels like, it’s about the impact on the whole forum. Very good point, but...
… these things aren’t actually separate. It’s not like vibes exist independently between any two people in a discussion. They are mostly independent for each top-level comment thread. But if A makes a post, B leaves a top-level comment that’s snarky and will hurt the feelings of A, then I’m not gonna go in there and to talk to B as if A didn’t exist. I know (or at least am always assuming) that A is present in the conversation whether they reply or not because it’s their post (and I know I care a ridiculous amount about comments on (most of) my posts). This completely colors the subsequent conversation.
As for Said specifically, I have no memories of being upset about his comments on my posts (it’s possible it happened and I forgot), but I have many (non-specific) memories of seeing his comments on different posts and being like, “ohh no this is not going to be helpful :(” even though iirc I agree with him more often than not. My brutally honest estimate as for the total impact of these comments is that it lands below neutral. I’m not super confident in this—but I’m very confident that the net impact would be a lot more positive if he articulated identical points in a different style. The claim that a lot of people had issues with him strikes me as plausible. As I said, I think there’s just not much of a tradeoff here. I mean there’s a tradeoff for the commenter since it takes effort to be nice. But there’s not much of a tradeoff for the product (the comment). Maybe it’ll be longer, but, I mean.
Counterpoint: I’m much more vibe-sensitive than the median LW user, so even if most people’s rationality will be damaged by having an unfriendly comment directed at them, maybe most of them won’t care if they just see B being unfriendly to A. My response: definitely directionally true; this is why I’m not confident that Said’s comments are a net negative. Maybe they’re a net positive because of effect on other people.
Another counterpoint: maybe B being rude to A colors the vibe initially but not if it spawns a huge comment thread between D and E about something only vaguely related to the original post; and that point it doesn’t matter whether B was nice to A (but B made it happen with their initial response). My response: also true, still not enough to overturn my conclusion.
(More just explaining my model.)
I don’t think there is altogether much evidence that the instrumental rationality part of the sequences is effective. (Like How To Actually Change Your Mind.) I completely grant that LW is vastly better than the rest of the internet at people changing their mind, but that can be equally explained by people who are already much better at changing their mind being drawn into one community.
One reason is that LW still sucks at this, even if the rest of the internet sucks way more. But the more important reason is that if you observe how mind change happens when it does happen, well it rarely looks like someone applying a rationality technique from the sequence—and when it does look like that, it’s probably either a topic that the person wasn’t that invested in in the first place, or the person is you.
I think the overarching problem here is that Eliezer didn’t have a good model of how the brain works, and LW still doesn’t have it today, and because of that, rationality techniques as taught in the sequences are just not going to be a very effective; you’re not going to be good at manipulating a system if all your models for how the system works are terrible. (Ironically beliefs about how the brain works a prime example of the category of belief that is now very sticky and almost impossible to change with those tools.) There was a tweet, I don’t have a link anymore, where someone said that the main thing people got out of the sequences was just this vibe that a lot more was possible. I think this is true, the discussion on LW about it that I remember seemed to take it seriously, but like, what a gigantic indictment of the entire project! His understanding of the brain sucked so bad that his entire collection of plans operating in his framework was less effective than a single out-of-model effect that he didn’t understand or optimize for! If this is even slightly true, it clearly means that we should care a hell of a lot more about vibes than we currently do, not less! (Though, obligatory disclaimer that even if the sequences functioned 100% only as a community-building tool, which is a more extreme claim than what I think is true, they would probably still have been worth it.)
In case it wasn’t clear, I think all the caring about vibes is entirely justified as an instrumental reason. I do think it’s also terminally good if people feel better, but I think everything I said holds if we assign that 0 weight.
I agree that it’s important to optimize our vibes. They aren’t just noise to be ignored. However, I don’t think they exist on a simple spectrum from nice/considerate/coddling to mean/callous/stringent. Different vibes are appropriate to different contexts. They don’t only affect people’s energy but also signal what we value. Ideally, they would zap energy from people who oppose our values while providing more energy to those who share our values.
Case in point, I was annoyed by how long and rambly your comment was and how it required a lot of extra effort to distill a clear thesis from it. I’m glad you actually did have a clear thesis, but writing like that probably differentially energizes people who don’t care.
Thanks for this interesting comment!—and for your patience. I really appreciate it.
I absolutely agree with that statement; the problem is that I think not-lying turns out to be a surprisingly low standard in practice. Politicians and used car salesmen are very skilled at achieving their desired changes on people’s beliefs and behavior without lying, by listing a bunch of true positive-vibe facts about the car and directing attention away from the algorithm they’re using to decide what not to say—or what evidence not to look for, prior to even saying anything.
The most valuable part of the Sequences was the articulation of a higher standard than merely not-lying—not just that the words you say are true, but that they’re the output of a search process that would have returned a different answer if reality were different. That’s why a key thing I aspire to do with my writing is to reveal (a cleaned-up refinement of) my thought process, not just the conclusion I ended up at. On the occasions when I’m trying to sell my readers a car, I want them to know that, so that they know that they need to read other authors to learn about reasons to not buy the car (which I haven’t bothered to come up with). The question to be asking is not, “Is this lying?—if not, it’s permissible”, but, “Is this maximally clear?—if not, maybe I can do better.”
All this to say that I’m averse to overtly optimizing the vibes to be more persuasive, because I don’t want to persuade people by means of the vibes. That doesn’t count! The goal is to articulate reasoning that gets the right answer for the right reasons, not to compute actions to cause people to agree with what I currently think is the right answer.
But you know all that already. I think you’re trying to advocate not so much for making the vibes persuasive, but for making sure the vibes aren’t themselves anti-persuasive in a way that prevents people from looking at the reasoning. I think I’m in favor of this! That’s why I’m so obsessed with telling abstract parables with “timeless” vibes—talk about bleggs and rubes, talk about the Blue and Green teams, talk about Python programs that accept each other’s outputs as inputs—talk about anything but real-world object-level disputes that motivate seeking recourse in philosophy, which would be distracting. (I should mention that this technique has the potential failure mode of obfuscating object-level details that are genuinely relevant, but I’m much less worried about that mattering in practice than some of my critics.)
But that kind of “avoid unnecessarily anti-persuasive vibes” just doesn’t seem to be what’s at issue in these repeated moderation blow-ups?
Commenters pointed out errors in my most recent post. They weren’t overtly insulting; they just said that my claim was wrong because this-and-such. I tried to fix it, but still didn’t get it right. (Embarrassing!) I didn’t take it personally. (The commenters are right and my post as written is wrong.) I think there’s something pathological about a standard that would have blamed the commenters for not being nice enough if I had taken it personally, because if I were the type to take it personally, them being nicer wouldn’t have helped.
Crucially, I don’t think this is this a result of me having genetically rare superhuman rationality powers. I think my behavior was pretty normal for the subject matter: you see, it happened to be a post about mathematics, and the culture of mathematics is good at training people to not take it personally when someone says “Your example doesn’t work because this-and-such.” If I’m unusually skilled at this among users of this website, I think that speaks more to this website being a garbage dump rather than me being great. (I think I want to write a top-level post about this aspect of math culture.)
Sneaky! (I’m embarrassed that I didn’t pick up on this being a deliberate conciliatory tactic until you flagged it.)
Only under a pretty generous interpretation of knowing. I certainly didn’t have a good model for this standard of communication when I wrote my comment, which I agree is much higher than just not lying. (And I’ve been too lazy to read your posts on this in the past, even though I’ve seen them a few times.)
But, I think caring for vibes is compatible with this standard as well. The set of tools you have to change vibes is pretty large, and imE it’s almost always possible to adjust them not just without lying, but while still explaining the actual reasons for why you believe the thing you’re arguing for.
I do think that’s the issue.
So, this is the comment that was causally upstream of all the recent discussion under this post here.
The vibes of this comment are, imo, very bad, and I think that’s the reason why Gorden complained about it. Four people voted it as too combative (one of them being Gorden himself).
habryka said that Said triggers a sizeable part of all complaints on this site, so I guess there’s not really a way to talk about this in non-specific terms, so I’ll just say that I think this is a very central example, and most other cases of where people complain about Said are like this as well.
Could one have written a comment that achieves the same things but has better vibes? In my opinion, absofuckinglutely! I could easily write such a comment! (If that’s a crux, I’m happy to do it.) I have many disagreements with Said (as demonstrated in the other comment thread), but maybe the biggest one is that changing presentation is changing content. Sure that’s literally true in a very narrow sense, but I think practically it’s just completely wrong. (I mean now I’m just repeating my claim from the second paragraph.)
(I agree that the religion post had issues and imo Said pointed out one of them. Conversely, I saw the post, figured I’d disagree with it, and deliberately declined to read and write a response, as I often do. Which is to say, I agree that there was some value to Said writing it, whether it’s a net positive or not.)
Right, but this example looks highly dissimilar to me. Gurkenglas was being very brief/minimalistic, which could be considered a little rude, but the (a) context is completely different (this was a low-stakes situation in terms of emotional investment, what he said doesn’t invalidate the post at all, and he was correcting an objective error—all of this different from Gorden’s post), and (b) Said’s comment still has actively worse vibes. (And Gurkenglas’ comment seems to be the only one that could even be in considered rude; the other two people who commented were being actively nice.) So, I agree that any standard that would make these comments not okay would be extremely bad. I also agree that your reaction, while good, is not particularly special, in the sense that probably most people would have dealt with this just fine.
I don’t think you can. The reason why the comment in question has aggressive vibes is because it’s clearly stating things that Worley predictably won’t want to hear. The way you write something that includes the same denotative claims with softer vibes is by means of obfuscation: adding a lot of puffy hedging veribage that makes it easier for a distracted or conflict-averse reader to skim over the comment’s literal words without noticing what a rebuke is intended. The obfuscated version only achieves the same things in the minds of sufficiently savvy readers who can reverse the vibe-softening distortion and infer the original intent.
Strong disagree. Said’s comment does several things that have almost no function except to make vibes worse, which means you can just take those out, which will make the comment shorter. I will in fact add in a little bit of hedging and it will still be shorter overall because the hedging will require fewer words than the unnecessary rudeness.
Here’s Said’s comment. Here’s a not-unnecessarily-rude-but-still-completely-candid-version-that’s-actually-166-characters-shorter-than-the-original-and-that-I-genuinely-think-achieves-the-same-thing-and-if-not-I’d-like-to-hear-why-not
This takes it down from about an 8⁄10 rudeness to maybe a 4 or 5. Is anyone going to tell me that this is not sufficiently blunt or direct? Will non-savvy readers have to read between the lines to figure out that this is a rebuttal of the code idea? I think the answer is clearly no; if people see this comment, they will immediately view it as a rebuttal of the post’s thesis.
The original uses phrases like
This is not any more direct than saying
These two messages convey exactly the same information, the first just has an additional layer of derision/mockery which the second doesn’t. (And again, the second is shorter.) And I know you know this difference because you navigate it in your own writing, which is why I’m somewhat irritated that you’re talking as if Said’s comments were just innocently minimalistic/direct.
edit: corrected typo
Thanks, that was better than most language-softening attempts I see, but …
Similar information, but not “exactly” the same information. Deleting the “very harmful false things” parenthetical omits the claim that the falsehoods promulgated by organized religion are very harmful. (That’s significant because someone focused on harm rather than epistemics might be okay with picking up harmless false beliefs, but not very harmful false beliefs.) Changing “very quickly you descend” to “you can descend” alters the speed and certainty with which religious converts are claimed to descend into nebulous and vague anti-epistemology. (That’s significant, because a potential convert being warned that they could descend into anti-epistemology might think, “Well, I’ll be extra careful not to do that, then,” whereas a warning that one very quickly will descend is less casually brushed off.)
That’s what I meant by “obfuscation” in the grandparent: the softer vibes of no-assertion-of-harmfulness versus “very harmful false things”, and of “can descend” versus “very quickly descend”, stem from the altered meanings, not just from adjusting the vibes while keeping the meanings constant.
It’s not that I don’t know the difference; it’s that I think the difference is semantically significant. If I more often use softer vibes in my comments than Said, I think that’s probably because I’m a less judgemental person than him, as an enduring personality trait. That is, we write differently because we think differently. I don’t think website moderators should require commenters to convincingly pretend to have different personalities than they actually have. That seems like it could be really bad.
Okay—I agree that the overall meaning of the comment is altered. If you have a categorical rule of “I want my meaning to be only this and exactly this, and anything that changes it is disqualified” then, yes, your object is valid. So consider my updated position to be something like, “your standard (A) has no rational justification, and also (B) relies a false model of how people write comments.” I’ll first argue (A), then (B).
It is logically coherent to have the () reactions. But do you think it’s plausible? What would be your honest probability assessment that a religious person reads this and actually goes that route—as in, they accept the claims of the comment but take the outs you describe in () -- whereas if they had read Said’s original comment instead, they’d still accept the premises, and this time they’d be convinced?
Conversely, one could imagine that a religious person reads Said’s version and doesn’t engage with it because they feel offended, whereas they would have engaged with it, and that the same person would have engaged with my version. (Which, obviously, I’d argue is more likely.)
At this point, my mental model of you responds with something like
To which I say, okay. Fine. I don’t think there is a slippery slope here, but I think arguing this is a losing battle. So I’ll stop with (A) here.
My case for (B) is that the algorithm which produced Said’s message didn’t take of these details into account, so changing them doesn’t censor or distort the intent behind the message. Said didn’t run an assessment of how harmful the consequences are exactly, determined that they’re most accurately described as “very harmful” rather than “harmful” or “extremely harmful”, and then posted it. Ditto with the other example.
I’m not sure if how much of any evidence I need here to make this point, but here are some ways in which you can see that the above is true
if you did consider the meaning to this level of detail, then you wouldn’t write “very quickly you descend” because well, you might not descend, it’s not 100%, so you’d have to qualify this somehow.[2]
Thinking this carefully about the content of your messages takes a lot of time. Said doesn’t take this much time for his comments, which is how he can respond so quickly.
If you thought about the actual merits of the proposal, then you’d scrap the entire second half of the comment, which is only tangentially relevant to the actual crux. You would be far more likely to point out that a good chunk of the post relies on this sentence
… which is not justified in the post at all. This would be a vastly more useful critique!
So, you’re placing this extreme importance on the precise semantic meaning of Said’s comment, when the comment wasn’t that well thought-out in the first place. I’d be much more sympathetic to defending details of semantic meaning if those details had been carefully selected.
The thing that’s frustrating to me—not just this particular point in this conversation but the entire vibes debate—and which I should have probably pointed out much earlier—is that being more aware of vibes makes your messages less dependent on them, not more. Because noticing the influence allows you to adjust. If you realize a vibe is pushing you to write X, you can then be like, hold on that’s stupid, let me instead re-assess how whatever I’m responding to right now actually impacts the reasons why I believe the thing I believe. And then you’ll probably notice that what you’re pushed to write doesn’t really hit the crux at all and instead scrap it and write something else. (See the footnote[3] for examples in this category.)
To put it extremely bluntly, the thing that was actually causally upstream of the details in Said’s message was not a careful consideration of the factual details; it was that he thinks religion is dumb and bad, which influenced a parameter sent to the language-generation module that output the message, which made it choose language that sounded more harsh. This is why it says “perfect example” and not “example”, why the third paragraph sounds so dismissive, why the message contains no !s, why he said “very quickly you descend” rather than “you can descend”, and so on. The vibe isn’t an accidental by-product, it’s the optimization target! Which you can clearly observe by the changes I’ve pointed out here.
… and on a very high level, to just give a sense of my actual views on this, the whole thing just seems ridiculously backwards in the sense that it doesn’t engage with what our brains are actually doing. Like I think it happens to be the case that not listening to vibes is often better (although this is a murky distinction because a lot of good thought relies on what are essentially vibes as well—it’s ultimately a form of computation), but the broader point is that, whatever you want to improve, more awareness of what’s actually going going to be good. Knowledge is power and all that.
If you don’t think this, then that would be a crux, but also I’d be very surprised and, not sure how I’d continue the conversion then, but for now I’m not thinking too much about this.
This is absurdly nit-picky but as are the changes you pointed out.
Alright for example, the first thing I wrote when responding to your comment was about you quoting me saying “These two messages convey exactly the same information”. I actually meant to refer to the specific line I quoted only, where this statement was more defensible. But I asked myself, “does this actually matter for the crux” and the answer was no, so I scrapped it. The same thing is true for me quoting Gordon’s response and pointing out that it fits better with my model than yours, and a snide remark about how your () ascribes superhuman rationality powers to religious people in particular.
Now you may be like, well those are good things, but that’s different from vibes. But it’s not really, it’s the same skill of, notice what your brain is actually doing, and if it’s dumb, interfere and make it do something else. More introspection is good.
I guess the other difference is that I’m changing how I react here rather than how someone else reacts. I guess some people may view one as super good and the other as super bad (e.g., gwern’s comment gave off that vibe to me). To me these are both good for the same reason. Deliberately inserting unhelpful vibes into your comment is like uploading a post with formatting that you know will break the editor and then being like “well the editor only breaks because this part here is poorly programmed, if it were programmed better then it would do fine”. In any other context this would-pattern match to obviously foolish behavior. (“I don’t look before crossing the sidewalk because cars should stop.”) It’s only taken seriously because people are deluded about the degree to which vibes matter in practice.
Anyway, I think you get the point. In retrospect I should have probably structured a lot of my writing about this differently, but can’t do that now.
Sorry, phrasing it in terms of “someone focused on harm”/”a potential convert being warned” might have been bad writing on my part, because what matters is the logical structure of the claim, not whether some particular target audience will be persuaded.
Suppose I were to say, “Drug addiction is bad because it destroys the addict’s physical health and ability to function in Society.” I like that sentence and think it is true. But the reason it’s a good sentence isn’t because I’m a consequentialist agent whose only goal is to minimize drug addiction, and I’ve computed that that’s the optimal sentence to persuade people to not take drugs. I’m not, and it isn’t. (An addict isn’t going to magically summon the will to quit as a result of reading that sentence, and someone considering taking drugs has already heard it and might feel offended.) Rather, it’s a good sentence because it clearly explains why I think drug addiction is bad, and it would be dishonest to try to persuade some particular target audience with a line of reasoning other than the one that persuades me.
I don’t think those are good metaphors, because the function of a markup language or traffic laws is very different from the function of blog comments. We want documents to conform to the spec of the markup language so that our browsers know how to render them. We want cars and pedestrians to follow the traffic law in order to avoid dangerous accidents. In these cases, coordination is paramount: we want everyone to follow the same right-of-way convention, rather than just going into the road whenever they individually feel like it.
In contrast, if everyone writes the blog comment they individually feel like writing, that seems good, because then everyone gets to read what everyone else individually felt like writing, rather than having to read something else, which would probably be less informative. We don’t need to coordinate the vibes. (We probably do want to coordinate the language; it would be confusing if you wrote your comments in English, but I wrote all my replies in French.)
Right, exactly. He thinks religion is dumb and bad, and he wrote a comment that expresses what he thinks, which ends up having harsh vibes. If the comment were edited to make the vibes less harsh, then it would be less clear exactly how dumb and bad the author thinks religion is. But it would be bad to make comments less clearly express the author’s thoughts, because the function of a comment is to express the author’s thoughts.
Absolutely. For example, if everyone around me is obfuscating their actual thoughts because they’re trying to coordinate vibes, that distortion is definitely something I want to be tracking.
The feeling is mutual?!
Oh. Oh. So you agree with me that the details weren’t that well thought out (or at least didn’t bother arguing against it), and ditto about the net effects, but you don’t think it matters (or at any rate, isn’t the important point) because you’re not trying to optimize positive effects, but just honest communication...?
This is not what I thought your position was, but I guess it makes sense if I try to retroactively fit it. This means most (all?) of my objections don’t apply anymore. Like, yeah, if you terminally value authentically representing the author’s emotional state of mind, then of course deliberately adjusting vibes is a net negative for your values.
(I think this completely misses the point I was trying to make, which is that “I will do X which I know will have bad effects, but I’ll do it anyway because the reason it has bad effects is that other people are making mistakes, so it’s not me who should change X, but other people who should change” is recognized as dumb for almost all values of X, especially on LW—but I also think this doesn’t matter anymore, either, because the argument is again about consequences, which you just demoted as the optimization target. If you agree that it doesn’t matter anymore, then no need to discuss this more.)
I guess now I have a few questions
Why do you have this position? (i.e., that comments aren’t about impact). Is this supposed to be, like, the super obvious message that was clearly the main point of the sequences, or something like that?
Is your default model of LWians that most of them have this position?
You said earlier that the repeated moderation blow-ups aren’t about bad vibes. I feel like what you’ve said since justifies why you think Said’s comments are good, but not that they aren’t about vibes—like even with everything you said here, it still seems like the causal stream here is clearly bad vibes → people complain to harbyka → Said gets in trouble? (This isn’t super important, but still felt worth asking.)
Because naïvely optimizing for impact requires concealing or distorting information that people could have used to make better (more impactful) decisions in ways that can’t realistically be anticipated by writers naïvely optimizing for impact.
Here’s an example from Ben Hoffman’s “The Humility Argument for Honesty”. Suppose my neck hurts (coincidentally, after trying a new workout routine), and after some internet research, I decide I have neck cancer. The impact-oriented approach would call for me to do my best to convince my doctor I have neck cancer, to make sure that I get the chemotherapy I’m sure I need. The honesty-oriented approach would call for me to explain to my doctor the evidence and reasoning for why I think I have neck cancer.
Maybe there’s something to be said for the impact-oriented approach if my self-diagnoses are never wrong. But if there’s a chance I could be wrong, the honesty-oriented approach is much more robust. If I don’t really have neck cancer and describe my actual symptoms, the doctor has a chance to help me discover my mistake.
No. But that’s OK with me, because I don’t regard “other people who use one of the same websites as me” as a generic authority figure.
Yes, that sounds right. As you’ve gathered, I want to delete the second arrow rather than altering the value of the “vibes” node.
Was definitely not going to make an argument from authority, just trying to understand your world view.
Iirc we’ve touched on four (increasingly strong) standards for truth
Don’t lie
(I won’t be the best at phrasing this) something like “don’t try to make someone believe things for reasons that have nothing to do with why you believe it”
Use only the arguments that convinced you (the one you mentioned here
Make sure the comment accurately reflects your emotional state[1] about the situation.
For me, I endorse #1, and about 80% endorse #2 (you said in an earlier comment that #1 is too weak, and I agree). #3 seems pretty bad to me because the most convincing arguments to me don’t have to be the most convincing arguments the others (and indeed, they’re often not), and the argument that persuaded me initially especially doesn’t need to be good. And #4 seems extremely counter-productive both because it’ll routinely make people angry and because so much of one’s state of mind at any point is determined by irrelevant variables. It seems only slightly less crazy than—and in fact very similar to—the radical honesty stuff. (Only in the most radical interpretation of #4 is like that, but as I said in the footnote, the most radical interpretation is what you used when you applied it to Said’s commenting style, so that’s the one I’m using here.)
This is not a useful example though because it doesn’t differentiate between any two points on this 1-4 scale. You don’t even need to agree with #1 to realize that trying to convince the doctor is a bad idea; all you need to do is realize that they’re more competent than you at understanding symptoms. A non-naive purely impact based approach just describes symptoms honestly in this situation.
My sense is that examples that prefer something stronger than #2 will be hard to come up with. (Notably your argument for why a higher standard is better was itself consequentialist.)
Idk, I mean we’ve drifted pretty far off the original topic and we don’t have to talk any more about this if you’re not interested (and also you’ve already been patient in describing your model). I’m just getting this feeling—vibe! -- of “hmm no this doesn’t seem quite right, I don’t think Zack genuinely believed #1-#4 all this time and everything was upstream of that, this position is too extreme and doesn’t really align with the earliest comment about the moderation debate, I think there’s still some misunderstanding here somewhere”, so my instinct is to dig a little deeper to really get your position. Although I could be wrong, too. In any case, like I said, feel free to end the conversation here.
Re-reading this comment again, you said ‘thought’, which maybe I should have criticized because it’s not a thought. How annoyed you are by something isn’t an intellectual position, it’s a feeling. It’s influenced by beliefs about the thing, but also by unrelated things like how you’re feeling about the person you’re talking to (RE what I’ve demonstrated with Said).
Right. Sorry, I think I uncharitably interpreted “Do you think others agree?” as an implied “Who are you to disagree with others?”, but you’ve earned more charity than that. (Or if it’s odd to speak of “earning” charity, say that I unjustly misinterpreted it.)
Right. I tried to cover this earlier when I said “(a cleaned-up refinement of) my thought process” (emphasis added). When I wrote about eschewing “line[s] of reasoning other than the one that persuades me”, it’s persuades in the present tense because what matters is the justifactory structure of the belief, not the humdrum causal history.
There’s probably a crux somewhere near here. Your formulation of #4 seems bad because, indeed, my emotions shouldn’t be directly relevant to an intellectual discussion of some topic. But I don’t think that gives you license to say, “Ah, if emotions aren’t relevant, therefore no harm is done by rewriting your comments to be nicer,” because, as I’ve said, I think the nicewashing does end up distorting the content. The feelings are downstream of the beliefs and can’t be changed arbitrarily.
I want to note that I dispute that you demonstrated this.
FWIW, I absolutely do not think that the “softened” version would be more likely to be persuasive. (I think that the “softened” version is much worse, even more so than Zack does.)
Wrong:
I’ve refrained from asking this question until now, but at this point, I really have to:
What, exactly, do you mean when you say “vibes”?
There’s maybe a stronger definition of “vibes” than Rafael’s “how it makes the reader feel”, that’s something like “the mental model of the kind of person who would post a comment with this content, in this context, worded like this”. A reader might be violently allergic to eggplants and would then feel nauseous when reading a comment about cooking with eggplants, but it feels obvious it wouldn’t then make sense to say the eggplant cooking comment had “bad vibes”.
Meanwhile if a poster keeps trying to use esoteric Marxist analysis to show how dolphin telepathy explains UFO phenomena, you’re might start subconsciously putting the clues together and thinking “isn’t this exactly what a crypto-Posadist would be saying”. Now we’ve got vibes. Generally, you build a model, consciously or unconsciously, about what the person is like and why they’re writing the things they do, and then “vibes” are the valence of what the model-person feels like to you. “Bad vibes” can then be things like “my model of this person has hidden intentions I don’t like”, “my model of this person has a style of engagement I find consistently unpleasant” or “my model is that this person is mentally unstable and possibly dangerous to be around”.
This is still somewhat subjective, but feels less so than “how the comment makes the reader feel like”. Building the model of the person based on the text is inexact, but it isn’t arbitrary. There generally needs to be something in the text or the overall situation to support model-building, and there’s a sense that the models are tracking some kind of reality, even though inferences can go wrong, different people can pay attention to very different things. There’s still another complication that different people also disagree on goals or styles of engagement, so they might be building the same model and disagree on the “vibes” of it. This still isn’t completely arbitrary, most people tend to agree that the “mentally unstable and possibly dangerous to be around” model has bad vibes.
Basically the sum of what a post or comment will make the reader feel. (This is not the actual definition because the actual definition would require me to explain what I think a vibe is at the level of the brain, but it’s good enough.)
Technically this is a two-place function of post and reader because two different people can feel very different things from reading the same thing, so strictly speaking it doesn’t make sense to say that a comment has bad vibes. But in practice it’s highly correlated. So when I say this comment has bad vibes, it’s short for, “it will have bad vibes for most readers”, which I guess is in turn short for, “most people who read this will feel things that are detrimental for having a good discussion”.
To give the most obvious example in the specific comment, the sentence
sounds very combative (i.e., will generally will evoke adversarial feelings). And tbc this will also be true for people who aren’t the author because we’ve evolved to simulate how others feel; that’s why you can feel awkward watching an awkward scene in a movie.
BTW I think asking me what I mean by vibes is completely reasonable. Someone strong-downvoted your comment I guess because it sounds pedantic but I don’t agree with this, I don’t think this is a case where the concept so obvious that you shouldn’t ask for a definition. (I strong-upvoted back to 0.)
I see, thanks.
Well, I think that the concept of “vibes” (of a comment), as you are using the term to mean, is fundamentally a broken one, because it abstracts away from highly relevant causal factors.
Here’s why I say that. You say:
And there are two problems with this.
First, you correctly acknowledge that different readers can have different reactions, but your dismissal of this objection with the claim that “it’s highly correlated” is a mistake, for the simple reason that the variation in reactions is not randomly distributed across readers along relevant dimensions. On the contrary, it’s highly correlated with a variety of qualities which we have excellent reason to care about (and which we might collectively summarize as “likelihood of usefully contributing to advancement of rationality and the accomplishment of useful goals”).
Second, whether there is in fact some connection (and what that connection is) between whether some comment “sounds very combative”, and whether that comment “will generally evoke adversarial feelings” (these are in fact two different things, not one thing phrased in two different ways!), and between the latter and whether a good discussion ensues, are not immutable facts! They are amenable to volitional alteration, i.e. you can choose how (or if!) these things affect one another, because you do in fact (I assume) have control of your actions, your words, your reasoning process, etc. (And to the extent that you do not have such control—well, that is a flaw, which you ought to be trying to fix. Or so I claim! Perhaps you disagree; but in order for us to resolve this disagreement, we must be able to refer to it—which we cannot do if we simply encode, in the term “vibes”, the assumption that the model I describe here is wrong.)
To speak of the “vibes” of a comment abstracts away from (and thus obscures) this critical structure in the patterns of how people react to comments.
P.S.:
It’s not “someone”, it’s very obviously @habryka. (Who else would strong-downvote all of my comments on this post, so consistently and so quickly after they get posted, and with a vote weight of 10—if not the person who gets notifications whenever comments get posted on this post, and who in fact has a vote weight of 10?)
I definitely don’t agree with this. Especially in this particular case, I think almost everyone will have the same reaction, and I don’t think people who don’t have this reaction are meaningfully better at rationality. (In general, I don’t think the way to improve your rationality is to make yourself as numb as possible.)
that’s because I phrased it poorly. I was trying to gesture at the same feeling with both, I just don’t know what to call it. Like, the feeling that the situation you’re in has become adversarial. I think it’s a weaker version of what you’d feel if you were in a group conversation and suddenly one person insults someone else, or something like that.
I completely agree with this, but “you can theoretically train yourself to not be bothered by it” is true for a lot things, and no one thinks that we should therefore give people a free pass to do them. You can train yourself to have equanimity to physical pain; presumably this wouldn’t make it okay for me to inflict physical pain on you. You need more pieces to argue that we should ask people to self-modify to not have the reaction, rather than avoid triggering the reaction.
In this case, that strikes as not reasonable. This particular reaction (i.e., having this adversarial feeling that I failed to describe well in response to the line I quoted) seems both very hard to get rid of, and probably not desirable to get rid of. There’s a very good evolutionary reason why we have it, to detect conflict, and still seems pretty valuable today. I think I’m unusually sensitive to this vibe, and I think this is pretty useful to navigate social situations. Spotting potential conflict early is useful, this stuff is relevant information.
This may well be true, but surely you see that the “almost” is doing quite a bit of work here, yes?
I mean, think of all the true statements we might make, of the form “Almost everyone will X”. And now consider how many of them stop being true if we quantify “everyone” not over the population of the Earth, but over the commentariat of this forum. There’s a lot of those!
So, is your claim here one of the latter sort? Surely we can’t assume that it isn’t, right?
And even supposing that it’s not, we still have this—
What makes one better at rationality is behaving as if one does not have said reaction (or any reaction at all). Whether that’s because the reaction is absent, or because it’s present but controlled, is not really important.
I wholly reject this framing. This is just a thoroughly tendentious way of putting things. We are not talking about some important information which you’re being asked to ignore. We’re talking about having an emotional reaction which interferes with your ability to consider what is being said to you. The ability to not suffer that detrimental effect is not “numbness”.
Right, but the key point here is that the sentence you quoted isn’t actually anything like one person insulting someone else. You say “weaker version”, but that’s underselling the difference, which is one of kind, not merely of degree.
I’ve said something like this before, but it really bears repeating: if someone reads a paragraph like this one—
—and experiences this as something akin to a personal insult, which seriously impacts their ability to participate in the conversation, then this person is simply not ready to participate in any kind of serious discussion, period. This is the reaction of a child, or of someone who hasn’t ever had to have any kind of serious adult conversation. Being able to deal with straightforward statements like this is a very low bar. It’s a low bar even for many ordinary professional contexts, never mind for Less Wrong (where the bar should be higher).
Of course, but the pieces in question seem rather obvious to me. But sure, let’s make them explicit:
You punching me doesn’t meaningfully contribute anything to the discussion; it doesn’t communicate anything of substance. Conversely, the sort of comment we’re discussing is the most effective and efficient way of communicating the relevant object-level point.
You punching me is a unilateral action on your part, which I cannot avoid (presumably; if I consent to the punch then that’s a very different matter, obviously). On the other hand, nobody’s forcing you to read anything on Less Wrong.
There’s no “theoretically” about it; it’s very easy to not be bothered by this sort of thing (indeed, I expect that when being bothered by comments like the example at hand is not rewarded with status, most people simply stop being bothered by them, without any effort on their part). (Contrast this with “train[ing] yourself to have equanimity to physical pain”, which is, as far as I know, not easy.)
Not being bothered by this sort of thing is good (cf. the earlier parts of this comment); being bothered by it is bad. Conversely, not being bothered by pain is probably bad (depending on what exactly that involves).
Finally, please note that “we should ask people to self-modify to not have the reaction” is a formulation which presupposes a corrective approach. I do not claim that corrective approaches are necessarily the wrong ones in this case, but there is no reason to assume that they’re the best ones, much less the only ones. Selective (and, to a lesser extent, structural) approaches are at least as likely as corrective ones to play a major role.
I strongly disagree with both parts of this claim. (See above.)
But that’s just the thing: you shouldn’t be thinking of object-level discussions on LW as “social situations” which you need to “navigate”. If that’s how you’re approaching things, then of course you’re going to have all of these reactions—and you’ve doomed the whole enterprise right from the start! You’re operating on too high a simulacrum level. No useful intellectual work will get done that way.
I was actually already thinking about just people on LessWrong when I wrote that. I think it’s almost everyone on LessWrong.
Right, I mean, you’re repeatedly and categorically framing the problem as solely lying with the person who gets bothered by emotions. You’ve done the same in the previous post where I opted out of the discussion.
It’s not my view at all. I think a community will achieve much better outcomes if being bothered by the example message is considered normal and acceptable, and writing the example message is considered bad.
I don’t know how to proceed from here. Note that I’m not trying to convince you, I’m only responding. What I can say is, if you are trying to convince me, you have to do something other than in this comment, because I felt like you primarily told me things that I already understood from the other comment thread (where I truncated the discussion). In particular, there are a lot of times where you’re just stating something as if you expect me to agree with it (like all the instances I quoted), but I don’t—and again I feel like I already knew that you think this from the other comment.
For completeness:
This argues that the pain thing is different; I agree it’s different; it doesn’t mean that self-modificaiton (or selection) is desirable here.
I already said that I think ~everyone is bothered by it, so obviously, disagree. (I don’t even believe that you’re not bothered by this kind of thing;[1] I think you are and it does change your conduct as well, although I totally believe that you believe you’re not bothered.)
Actually I technically do agree with this—in the sense that, if you could flip a switch where you’re not bothered by it but you still notice the vibe, that would be good—but I think it’s not practically achievable so it doesn’t really matter.
This is something I usually wouldn’t say out of politeness/vibe protection, but since you don’t think I should be doing that, saying it kind of feels more respectful, idk.
That’s a strange position to hold on LW, where it has long been a core tenet that one should not be bothered by messages like that. And that has always been the case, whether it was LW2, LW1 (remember, say, ‘babyeaters’? or ‘decoupling’? or Methods of Rationality), Overcoming Bias (Hanson, ‘politics is the mindkiller’), SL4 (‘Crocker’s Rules’) etc.
I can definitely say on my own part that nothing of major value I have done as a writer online—whether it was popularizing Bitcoin or darknet markets or the embryo selection analysis or writing ‘The Scaling Hypothesis’—would have been done if I had cared too much about “vibes” or how it made the reader feel. (Many of the things I have written definitely did make a lot of readers feel bad. And they should have. There is something wrong with you if you can read, say, ‘Scaling Hypothesis’ and not feel bad. I myself regularly feel bad about it! But that’s not a bad thing.) Even my Wikipedia editing earned me doxes and death threats.
And this is because (among many other reasons) emotional reactions are inextricably tied up with manipulation, politics, and status—which are the very last things you want in a site dedicated to speculative discussion and far-out unpopular ideas, which will definitionally be ‘creepy’, ‘icky’, ‘cringe’, ‘fringe’, ‘evil’, ‘bad vibes’ etc. (Even the most brutal totalitarian dictatorships concede this when they set up free speech zones and safe spaces like the ‘science cities’.)
Someone once wrote, upon being newly arrived to LW, a good observation of the local culture about how this works:
Many of our ideas and people are (much) higher status than they used to be. It is no surprise people here might care more about status than they used to, in the same way that rich people care more about taxes than poor people.
But they were willing to be status-blind and not prize emotionality, and that is why they could become high-status. And barring the sudden discovery of an infallible oracle, we can continue to expect future high-status things to start off low-status...
This doesn’t feel like it engages with anything I believe. None of the things you listed are things I object to. I don’t object to how you wrote the the Scaling Hypothesis post, I don’t object to the Baby Eaters, I super don’t object to decoupling, and I super extra don’t object to ‘politics is the mind-killer’. The only one I’d even have to think about is Crocker’s Rules, but I don’t think I have an issue with those, either. They’re notably something you opt into.
I claim that Said’s post is bad because it can be rewritten into a post that fulfills the same function but doesn’t feel as offensive.[1] Nothing analogous is true for the Scaling Hypothesis. And it’s not just that you couldn’t rewrite it to be less scary but convey the same ideas; rather the whole comparison in a non-starter because I don’t think that your post on the scaling hypothesis has bad vibes, at all. If memory serves (I didn’t read your post in its entirety back then, but I read some of it and I have some memory of how I reacted), it sparks a kind of “holy shit this is happening and extremely scary ---(.Ó﹏Ò.)” reaction. This is, like, actively good. It’s not in the same category as Said’s comment in any way whatsoever.
I agree that it is better to to not be bothered. My position is not “you should be more influenced by vibes”, it’s something like “in the real world vibes are about 80% of the causal factors behind most people’s comments on LW and about 95% outside of LW, and considering this fact about how brains work in how you write is going to be good, not bad”. In particular, as I described in my latest response to Zack, I claim that the comments that I actually end up leaving on this site are significantly less influenced by vibes than Said’s because recognizing what my brain does allows me to reject it if I want to. Someone who earnestly believes to be vibe-blind while not being vibe-blind at all can’t do that.
This honestly just doesn’t seem related, either. Status-blindness is more specific than vibe-blindness, and even if vibe-blindness were a thing, it wouldn’t contradict anything I’ve argued for.
it is not identical in terms of content, as Zack pointed out, but here I’m using function in the sense of the good thing the post comment achieves, which is to leave a strongly worded and valid criticism of the post. (In actual fact, I think my version is significantly more effective at doing that.)
This description of ‘bad vibes’ vs ‘good vibes’ and what could be ‘be rewritten into a post that fulfills the same function’, is confusing to me because I would have said that that is obviously untrue of Scaling Hypothesis (and as the author, I should hope I would know), and that was why I highlighted it as an example: aside from the bad news being delivered in it, I wrote a lot of it to be deliberately rude and offensive—and those were some of the most effective parts of it! (And also, yes, made people mad at me.) Just because the essay was effective and is now high-status doesn’t change that. It couldn’t’ve been rewritten and achieved the same outcome, because that was much of the point.
(To be clear, my take on all of this is that it is often appropriate to be rude and offensive, and often inappropriate. What has made these discussions so frustrating is that Said continues to insist that no rudeness or offensiveness is present in any of his writing, which makes it impossible to have a conversation about whether the rudeness of offensiveness is appropriate in the relevant context.
Like, yeah, LessWrong has a culture, a lot of which is determined by what things people are rude and offensive towards. One of my jobs as a moderator is to steer where that goes. If someone keeps being rude and offensive towards things I really want to cultivate on the site, I will tell them to stop, or at least provide arguments for why this thing that I do not think is worth scorn, deserves scorn.
But if that person then insists that no rudeness or offensiveness was present in any of their writing, despite an overwhelming fraction of readers reading it as such, then they are either a writer so bad at communication as to not belong on the site, or trying to avoid accountability for the content of their messages, both of which leave little room but to take moderation action that limits their contributions to the site)
When you say that “it is often appropriate to be rude and offensive”, and that LW culture admits of things toward which it is acceptable to be “rude and offensive”, this would seem to imply that the alleged rudeness and offensiveness as such is not the problem with my comments, but rather that the problem is what I am supposedly being rude and offensive towards; and that the alleged “rudeness and offensiveness” would not itself ever be used against me (and that if a moderator tried to claim that “rudeness and offensiveness” is itself punishable regardless of target, or if a user tried to claim that LW norms forbid being rude and offensive, then you’d show up and say “nope, wrong, actually being rude and offensive is fine as long as it’s toward the right things, so kindly withdraw that particular criticism; Said has violated no rules or norms being being rude and offensive as such”). True? Or not?
Yep, though of course there are priors. The thing I am saying is that there are at least some things (and not just an extremely small set of things) that it is OK to be rude towards, not that the average quality/value-produced of rude and non-rude content is the same.
For enforcement efficiency reasons, culture schelling point reasons, and various other reasons, it might still make sense to place something like a burden of proof on the person who claims that in this case rudeness and offensiveness is appropriate, so enforcement for rudeness without justification might still make sense, and my guess is does indeed make sense.
Also, for you in-particular, I have seen the things that you tend to be rude and offensive towards, at least historically, and haven’t been very happy about that, and so the prior is more skewed against that. My guess is I would tell you in-particular that you have a bad track of aiming it well, and so would request additional justification on the marginal case from your side (similar to how we generally treat repeat criminal offenders different from first-time offenders, and often declare whole sets of actions that are otherwise completely legal from their option pool in prevention of future harm).
Ok, cool, I’ll definitely…
… ah. So, less “yep” and more “nope”.
On the other hand, maybe this “burden of proof” business isn’t so bad. Actually, I was just reading your comments on the recent post about eating honey, including this top-level comment where you say that the ideas in the OP “sound approximately insane”, that they’re “so many orders of magnitude away from what sounds reasonable” that you cannot but seriously entertain the notion that said ideas were not motivated by reasonably thinking about the topic, but rather by “social signaling madness where someone is trying to signal commitment to some group standard of dedication”.
I thought that it was a good comment, personally. (Actually, I found basically all your comments on that post to be upvote-worthy.) That comment is currently at 47 karma, so it would seem that there’s more or less a consensus among LW users that it’s a good comment. I did see that you edited the comment (after I’d initially read and upvoted it) to include somewhat of a disclaimer:
Is this the sort of thing that you have in mind, when you talk about burden of proof?
If I include disclaimers like this at the end of all of my comments, does that suffice to solve of all of the problems that you perceive in said comments? (And can I then be as “rude and offensive” as I like? Hypothetically, that is. If I were inclined to be “rude and offensive”.)
Yes-ish, though I doubt we have a shared understanding of what “that sort of thing” is.
No, of course not. As I explained, as moderator and admin I will curate or at least apply heavy pressure on which things receive scorn and rudeness on LW.
A disclaimer is the start of an argument. If the argument is wrong by my lights, you will still get told off. The standard is not “needs to make an argument”, it’s (if anything) “needs to make an argument that I[1] think is good”. Making an argument is not in itself something that does something.
(Not necessarily just me, there are other mods, and a kind of complicated social process that involves many stakeholders that can override me, or I will try to take into account and integrate, but for the sake of conversation we can assume it’s “me”)
Who decides if the argument suffices? You and the other mods, presumably? (EDIT: Confirmed by subsequent edit to parent comment.)
If so, then could you explain how this doesn’t end up amounting to “the LW mods have undertaken to unilaterally decide, in advance, what are the correct views on all topics and the correct positions in all arguments”? Because that’s what it seems like you have to do, in order for your policy to make any sense.
EDIT: Could you expand on “a kind of complicated social process that involves many stakeholders that can override me”? I don’t know what you mean by this.
At the end of the day, I[1] have the keys to the database and the domain, so in some sense anything that leaves me with those keys can be summarized as “the LW mods have undertaken to unilaterally decide, in advance, what are the correct views on all topics and the correct positions in all arguments”.
But of course, that is largely semantic. It is of course not the case that I have or would ever intend to make a list of allowed or forbidden opinions on LessWrong. In contrast, I have mostly procedural models about how LessWrong should function, including the importance of LW as a free marketplace of ideas, a place where contradicting ideas can be discussed and debated, and many other aspects of what will cause the whole LW project to go well. Expanding on all of them would of course far exceed this comment thread.
On the specific topic of which things deserve scorn or ridicule or rudeness, I also find it hard to give a very short summary of what I believe. We have litigated some past disagreements in the space (such as whether people using their moderation tools to ban others from their blogpost should be subject to scorn or ridicule in most cases), which can provide some guidance, though the breadth of things we’ve covered is fairly limited. It is also clear to me that the exact flavor of rudeness and aggressiveness matters quite a bit. I favor straightforward aggression over passive aggression, and have expressed my model that “sneering” as a mental motion is almost never appropriate (though not literally never, as I expanded on).
And on most topics, I simply don’t know yet, and I’ll have to figure it out as it comes up. The space of ways people can be helpfully or unhelpfully judgmental and aggressive is very large and big, and I do not have most of it precomputed. I do have many more principles I could expand on, and would like to do sometime, but this specific comment thread does not seem like the time.
Again, not just me, but also other mods and stakeholders and stuff
It seems clear that your “in some sense” is doing pretty much all the work here.
Compare, again, to Data Secrets Lox: there, I have the keys to the database and the domain (and in the case of DSL, it really is just me, no one else—the domain is just mine, the database is just mine, the server config passwords… everything), and yet I don’t undertake to decide anything at all, because I have gone to great lengths to formally surrender all moderation powers (retaining only the power of deleting outright illegal content). I don’t make the rules; I don’t enforce the rules; I don’t pick the people who make or enforce the rules. (Indeed the moderators—which were chosen via to the system that I put into place—can even temp-ban me, from my own forum, that I own and run and pay for with my own personal money! And they have! And that is as it should be.)
I say this not to suggest that LW should be run the way that DSL is run (that wouldn’t really make sense, or work, or be appropriate), but to point out that obviously there is a spectrum of the degree to which having “the keys to the database and the domain” can, in fact, be meaningfully and accurately talked about as “the … mods have undertaken to unilaterally decide, in advance, what are the correct views on all topics and the correct positions in all arguments”—and you are way, way further along that spectrum than the minimal possible value thereof. In other words, it is completely possible to hold said keys, and yet (compared to how you run LW) not, in any meaningful sense, undertake to unilaterally decide anything w.r.t. correctness of views and positions.
Yes, well… the problem is that this is the central issue in this whole dispute (such as it is). The whole point is that your preferred policies (the ones to which I object) directly and severely damage LW’s ability to be “a free marketplace of ideas, a place where contradicting ideas can be discussed and debated”, and instead constitute you effectively making a list of allowed or forbidden opinions on this forum. Like… that’s pretty much the whole thing, right there. You seem to want to make that list while claiming that you’re not making any such list, and to prevent the marketplace of ideas from happening while claiming that the marketplace of ideas is important. I don’t see how you can square this circle. Your preferred policies seem to be fundamentally at odds with your stated goals.
I don’t see where I am making any such list, unless you mean “list” in a weird way that doesn’t involve any actual lists, or even things that are kind of like lists.
I don’t think that’s an accurate description of DSL, indeed it appears to me that what the de-facto list of the kind of policy you have chosen is is pretty predictable (and IMO does not result in particular good outcomes). Just because you have some other people make the choices doesn’t change the predictability of the actual outcome, or who is responsible for it.
I already made the obvious point that of course, in some sense, I/we will define what is OK on LessWrong via some procedural way. You can dislike the way I/we do it.
There is definitely no “fundamentally at odds”, there is a difference in opinion about what works here, which you and me have already spent hundreds of hours trying to resolve, and we seem unlikely to resolve right now. Just making more comments stating that “I am wrong” in big words will not make that happen faster (or more likely to happen at all).
Seems like we got lost in a tangle of edits. I hope my comment clarifies sufficiently, as it is time for me to sleep, and I am somewhat unlikely to pick up this thread tomorrow.
Sure, I appreciate the clarification, but my last question still stands:
Who are these stakeholders, exactly? How might they override you?
Not going to go into this, since I think it’s actually a pretty complicated situation, but at a very high level some obvious groups that could override me:
The Lightcone Infrastructure board (me, Vaniver, Daniel Kokotajlo)
If Eliezer really wanted, he can probably override me
A more distributed consensus among what one might consider the leadership of the rationality community (like, let’s say Scott Alexander and Ryan Greenblatt and Buck and Nate and John Wentworth and Gwern all roughly agree on me messing up really badly)
There would be lots more to say on this topic, but as I said, I am unlikely to pick this thread up again, so I hope that’s good enough!
(This is a tangent to the thread and so I don’t plan to reply further on this, but I just wanted to mention that while I view Greenblatt and Shlegeris as stakeholders in LessWrong, a space they’ve made many great contributions to and are quite active in, I don’t view them as leadership of the rationality community.)
Rudeness and offensiveness are, in the general case, two-place functions: text can be offensive to some particular reader, but short of unambiguous blatant insults, there’s not going to be a consensus about what is “offensive”, because people vary widely (both by personal disposition and vagarious incentives) in how easy they are to offend.
When it is denied that Achmiz’s comments are offensive, the claim isn’t that no one is offended. (That would be silly. We have public testimony from people who are offended!) The claim is that the text isn’t rude in a “one-place” sense (no personal insults, &c.).
The reason that “one-place” rudeness is the relevant standard is because it would be bad if a fraction of easily-offended readers (even a substantial fraction—I don’t think you can defend the adjective “overwhelming”) could weaponize their emotions to censor expressions of ideas that they don’t like.
For example, take Achmiz’s January 2020 comment claiming that, “There is always an obligation by any author to respond to anyone’s comment along these lines. If no response is provided to (what ought rightly to be) simple requests for clarification [...] the author should be interpreted as ignorant.”
The comment is expressing an opinion about discourse norms (“There is always an obligation”) and a belief about what Bayesian inferences are warranted by the absence of replies to a question (“the author should be interpreted as ignorant”). It makes sense that many people disagree with that opinion and that belief (say, because they think that some of the questions that Achmiz thinks are good, are actually bad, and that ignoring bad questions is good). Fine.
But beyond mere disagreement, to characterize such a comment as offensive (because it criticizes people who don’t respond to questions), is something I find offensive. (If you’re thinking of allegedly worse behavior from Achmiz than this January 2020 comment, you’re going to need to provide the example.) Sometimes people who use the same website as you have opinions or beliefs that imply that they disapprove of your behavior! So what? I think grown-ups should be able to shrug this off without calling for draconian and deranged censorship policies. The mod team should not be pandering to such pathetic cry-bullying.
The comment is offensive because it communicates things other than its literal words. Autistically taking it apart word by word and saying that it only offends because it is criticism ignores this implicit communication.
Gwern himself refers to the “rude and offensive” part in this subthread as a one-place function:
I have no interest in doing more hand-wringing about whether Said’s comments are intended to make people feel judged or not, and don’t find your distinction of “no personal insults” as somehow making the rudeness more objective compelling. If you want we can talk about the Gwern hypothetical in which he clearly intended to be rude and offensive towards other people.
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!
I don’t think the relevant dispute about rudeness/offensiveness is about one-place and two-place functions, I think it’s about passive/overt aggression. With passive aggression you often have to read more of the surrounding context to understand what is being communicated, whereas with overt aggression it’s clear if you just locally inspect the statement (or behavior), which sounds like one / two place functions (because ppl with different information states look at the same message and get different assessments), but isn’t.
For instance, suppose Alice doesn’t invite Bob to a party, and then Bob responds by ignoring all of Alice’s texts and avoiding eye contact most of the time. Now any single instance of “not responding to a text” isn’t aggression, but from the context of a chance in a relationship where it was typical to reply same-day, to zero replies, it can be understood as retalliation. And of course, even then it’s not provable, there are other possible explanations (such as Bob is taking a GLP-1 inhibitor and is quite low-energy at the minute don’t think too hard about why I picked that example), which makes it a great avenue for hard-to-litigate retaliation.
Does everyone here remember and/or agree with my point in The Nature of Offense, that offense is about status, which in the current context implies that it’s essentially impossible to avoid giving offense while delivering strong criticism (as it almost necessarily implies that the target of criticism deserves lower status for writing something seriously flawed, having false/harmful beliefs, etc.)? @habryka @Zack_M_Davis @Said Achmiz
This discussion has become very long and I’ve been travelling so I may have missed something, but has anyone managed to write a version of Said’s comment that delivers the same strength of criticism while avoiding offending its target? (Given the above, I think this would be impossible.)
Not a direct response, but I want to take some point in this discussion (I think I said this to Zack in-person the other day) to say that, while some people are arguing that things should as a rule be collaborative and not offensive (e.g. to varying extents Gordon and Rafael), this is not the position that the LW mods are arguing for. We’re arguing that authors on LessWrong should be able to moderate their posts with different norms/standards from one another, and that there should not reliably be retribution or counter-punishment by other commenters for them moderating in that way.
I could see it being confusing because sometimes an author like Gordon is moderating you, and sometimes a site-mod like Habryka is moderating you, but they are using different standards, and the LW-mods are not typically endorsing the author standards as our own. I even generally agree with many of the counterarguments that e.g. Zack makes against those norms being the best ones. Some of my favorite comments on this site are offensive (where ‘offensive’ is referring to Wei’s meaning of ‘lowering someone’s social status’).
What is currently the acceptable range of moderation norms/standards (according to the LW mod team)? For example if someone blatantly deletes/bans their most effective critics, is that acceptable? What if they instead subtly discourage critics (while being overtly neutral/welcoming) by selectively enforcing rules more stringently against their critics? What if they simply ban all “offensive” content, which as a side effect discourages critics (since as I mentioned earlier, criticism almostly inescapably implies offense)?
And what does “retribution or counter-punishment” mean? If I see an author doing one of the above, and question or criticize that in the comments or elsewhere, is that considered “retribution or counter-punishment” given that my comment/post is also inescapably offensive (status-lowering) toward the author?
I think the first answer is “Mostly people aren’t using this feature, and the few times people have used it it has not felt to us like abuse or strongly needing to be pushed back on” so I don’t have any examples to point to.
But I’ll quickly generate thoughts on each of the hypothetical scenarios you briefly gestured to.
It’d depend on how things played out. If Andrew writes a blogpost with a big new theory of rationality, and then Bob and Charlie and Dave all write decisive critiques and then their comments are deleted and banned from commenting on his posts, I think it’s quite plausible that they’ll write a new post together with the copy-paste of their comments and it’ll get more karma than the original. This seems like a good-enough outcome to me. On the other hand if Andrew only gets criticism from Bob, and then deletes Bob’s comments and bans him from commenting on his posts, and then Bob leaves the site, I would take more active action, such as perhaps removing Andrew’s ability to ban people, and reaching out to Bob to thank him for his comments and encourage him to return.
That sounds like there’d be some increased friction on criticism. Hopefully we’d try to notice it and counteract it, or hopefully the commenters who were having annoying experience being moderated would notice and move to shortform or posts and do their criticism from there. But plausibly there’d just be some persistent additional annoyances or costs that certain users would have to pay.
I mean, again, probably this would just be very incongruous with LessWrong and it wouldn’t really work and they’d have to ban like 30+ users because everyone wouldn’t get this and would keep doing things the author didn’t like, and the author wouldn’t eventually leave if they needed that sort of environment, or we’d step in after like 5 and say “this is kind of crazy, you have to stop doing this, it isn’t going to work out, we’re removing your ability to ban users”. So many of the good comments on LessWrong lower their interlocutor’s status in some way.
It means actions that predictably make the author feel that them using the ban feature in general is illegitimate or that using it will cause them to have their reputation attacked, regardless of reason or context, in response to them using the ban feature.
Many many writers on LessWrong are capable of critiquing a single instance of a ban while taking care to communicate that they are not pushing back on all instances of banning, and can also credibly offer support in other instances that are more reasonable.
Generally it is harder to signal this when you are complaining about your own banning. For in-person contexts (e.g. events) I generally spend effort to ensure that people do not feel any cost for not inviting me to events or spaces, and not expect that I will complain loudly or cause them to lose social status for it, and a similar (but not identical) heuristic applies here. If someone finds interacting with you very unpleasant and you don’t understand quite why, it’s often bad form to loudly complain about it every time they don’t want to interact with you any more, even if you have an uncharitable hypothesis as to why.
There is still good form and bad form to imposing costs on people for moderating their spaces, and costs imposed on people for moderating their spaces (based on disagreement or even trying to fix biases in the moderation) are the most common reason for good spaces not existing; moderation is unpleasant work, lots of people feel entitled to make strong social bids on you for your time and to threaten to attack your social standing, and I’ve seen many spaces degrade due to unwillingness to moderate. You should of course think about this if you are considering reliably complaining loudly every time anyone uses a ban feature on people.
Added: I hope you get a sense from reading this that your questions don’t have simple answers, but that the scenarios you describe require active steering depending on the dynamics at play. I am somewhat wary you will keep asking me a lot of short questions that, due to your inexperience moderating spaces, you will assume have simple answers, and I will have to do lots of work generating all the contexts to show how things play out, else Said or someone allied with him against him being moderated on LW will claim I am unable to answer the most basic of questions and this shows me to be either ignorant or incompetent. And, man, this is a lot of moderation discussion.
If I was in this circumstance, I would be pretty worried about my own biases, and ask neutral or potentially less biased parties whether there might be more charitable and reasonable hypotheses why that person doesn’t want to interact with me. If there isn’t though, why shouldn’t I complain and e.g. make it common knowledge that my valuable criticism is being suppressed? (Obviously I would also take into consideration social/political realities, not make enemies I can’t afford to make, etc.)
But most people aren’t using this feature, so to the extent that LW hasn’t degraded (and that’s due to moderation), isn’t it mainly because of the site moderators and karma voters? The benefits of having a few people occasionally moderate their own spaces hardly seems worth the cost (to potential critics and people like me who really value criticism) of not knowing when their critiques might be unilaterally deleted or banned by post authors. I mean aside from the “benefit” of attracting/retaining the authors who demand such unilateral powers.
Aside from the above “benefit”, It seems like you’re currently getting the worst of both worlds: lack of significant usage and therefore potential positive effects, and lots of controversy when it is occasionally used. If you really thought this was an important feature for the long term health of the community, wouldn’t you do something to make it more popular? (Or have done it in the past 7 years since the feature came out?) But instead you (the mod team) seem content that few people use it, only coming out to defend the feature when people explicitly object to it. This only seems to make sense if the main motivation is again to attract/retain certain authors.
It seems like if you actually wanted or expected many people to use this feature, you would have written some guidelines on what people can and can’t do, or under what circumstances their moderation actions might be reversed by the site moderators. I don’t think I was expecting the answers to my questions to necessarily be simple, but rather that the answers already exist somewhere, at least in the form of general guidelines that might need to be interpreted to answer my specific questions.
I mean, mostly we’ve decided to give the people who complain about moderation a shot, and compensate by spending much much more moderation effort from the moderators. My guess is this has cost a large amount of counterfactual quality of the site, many contributors, etc.
In-general, I find argument of the form “so to the extend that LW hasn’t been destroyed, X can’t be that valuable” pretty weak. It’s very hard to assess the counterfactual, and “if not X, LessWrong would have been completely destroyed” is rarely the case for almost any X that is in dispute.
My guess is LW would be a lot better if more people felt comfortable moderating things, and in the present world, there are a lot of costs born by the site admins that wouldn’t be necessary otherwise.
What do you mean by this? Until I read this sentence, I saw you as giving the people who demand unilateral moderation powers a shot, and denying the requests of people like me to reduce such powers.
My not very confident guess at this point is that if it weren’t for people like me, you would have pushed harder for people to moderate their own spaces more, perhaps by trying to publicly encourage this? And why did you decide to go against your own judgment on it, given that “people who complain about moderation” have no particular powers, except the power of persuasion (we’re not even threatening to leave the site!), and it seems like you were never persuaded?
This seems implausible to me given my understanding of human nature (most people really hate to see/hear criticism) and history (few people can resist the temptation to shut down their critics when given the power and social license or cover to do so). If you want a taste of this, try asking DeepSeek some questions about the CCP.
But presumably you also know this (at least abstractly, but perhaps not as viscerally as I do, coming from a Chinese background, where even before the CCP, criticism in many situations was culturally/socially impossible), so I’m confused and curious why you believe what you do.
My guess is that you see a constant stream of bad comments, and wish you could outsource the burden of filtering them to post authors (or combine efforts to do more filtering). But as an occasional post author, my experience is that I’m not a reliable judge of what counts as a “bad comment”, e.g., I’m liable to view a critique as a low quality comment, only to change my mind later after seeing it upvoted and trying harder to understand/appreciate its point. Given this, I’m much more inclined to leave the moderation to the karma system, which seems to work well enough in leaving bad comments at low karma/visibility by not upvoting them, and even when it’s occasionally wrong, still provides a useful signal to me that many people share the same misunderstanding and it’s worth my time to try to correct (or maybe by engaging with it I find out that I still misjudged it).
But if you don’t think it works well enough… hmm I recall writing a post about moderation tech proposals in 2016 and maybe there has been newer ideas since then?
I mean, I have written like 50,000+ words about this at this point in various comment threads. About why I care about archipelagos, and why I think it’s hard and bad to try to have centralized control about culture, about how much people hate being in places with ambiguous norms, and many other things. I don’t fault you for not reading them all, but I have done a huge amount of exposition.
Because the only choice at this point would be to ban them, since they appear to be willing to take any remaining channel or any remaining opportunity to heap approximately as much scorn and snark and social punishment on anyone daring to do moderation they disagree with, and I value things like readthesequences.com and many other contributions from the relevant people enough that that seemed really costly and sad.
My guess is I will now do this, as it seems like the site doesn’t really have any other choice, and I am tired and have better things to do, but I think I was justified and right to be hesitant to do this for a while (though yes, in ex-post it would have obviously been better to just do that 5 years ago).
It seems to me there are plenty of options aside from centralized control and giving authors unilateral powers, and last I remember (i.e., at the end of this post) the mod team seems to be pivoting to other possibilities, some of which I would find much more reasonable/acceptable. I’m confused why you’re now so focused again on the model of authors-as-unilateral-moderators. Where have you explained this?
I have filled my interest in answering questions on this, so I’ll bow out and wish you good luck. Happy to chat some other time.
I don’t think we ever “pivoted to other possibilities” (Ray often makes posts with moderation things he is thinking about, and the post doesn’t say anything about pivoting). Digging up the exact comments on why ultimately there needs to be at least some authority vested in authors as moderators seems like it would take a while.
I meant pivot in the sense of “this doesn’t seem to be working well, we should seriously consider other possibilities” not “we’re definitely switching to a new moderation model”, but I now get that you disagree with Ray even about this.
Your comment under Ray’s post wrote:
This made me think you were also no longer very focused on the authors-as-unilateral-moderators model and was thinking more about subreddit-like models that Ray mentioned in his post.
BTW I’ve been thinking for a while that LW needs a better search, as I’ve also often been in the position being unable to find some comment I’ve written in the past.
Instead of one-on-one chats (or in addition to them), I think you should collect/organize your thoughts in a post or sequence, for a number of reasons including that you seem visibly frustrated that after having written 50k+ words on the topic, people like me still don’t know your reasons for preferring your solution.
Huh, ironically I now consider the AI Alignment Forum a pretty big mistake in how it’s structured (for reasons mostly orthogonal but not unrelated to this).
Agree.
I think I have elaborated non-trivially on my reasons in this thread, so I don’t really think it’s an issue of people not finding it.
I do still agree it would be good to do more sequences-like writing on it, though like, we are already speaking in the context of Ray having done that a bunch (referencing things like the Archipelago vision), and writing top-level content takes a lot of time and effort.
It’s largely an issue of lack of organization and conciseness (50k+ words is a minus, not a plus in my view), but also clearly an issue of “not finding it”, given that you couldn’t find an important comment of your own, one that (judging from your description of it) contains a core argument needed to understand your current insistence on authors-as-unilateral-moderators.
I’m having a hard time seeing how this reply is hooking up to what I wrote. I didn’t say critics, I spoke much more generally. If someone wants to keep their distance from you because you have bad body odor, or because they think your job is unethical, and you either don’t know this or disagree, it’s pretty bad social form to go around loudly complaining every time they keep their distance from you. It makes it more socially costly for them to act in accordance with their preferences and makes a bunch of unnecessary social conflict. I’m pretty sure this is obvious and this doesn’t change if you’ve suddenly developed a ‘criticism’ of them.
I mean, I think it pretty plausible that LW would be doing even better than it is with more people doing more gardening and making more moderated spaces within it, archipelago-style.
I read you questioning my honesty and motivations a bunch (e.g. you have a few times mentioning that I probably only care about this because of status reasons I cannot mention or to attract certain authors and that my behavior is not consistent with believing in users moderating their own posts being a good idea) which are of course fine hypotheses for you to consider. After spending probably over 40 hours writing this month explaining why I think authors moderating their posts is a good idea and making some defense of myself and my reasoning, I think I’ve done my duty in showing up to engage with this semi-prosecution for the time being, and will let ppl come to their own conclusions. (Perhaps I will write up a summary of the discussion at some point.)
Great, so all you need to do is make a rule specifying what speech constitutes “retribution” or “counterpunishment” that you want to censor on those grounds.
Maybe the rule could be something like, “No complaining about being banned by a specific user (but commenting on your own shortform strictly about the substance of a post that you’ve been banned from does not itself constitute complaining about the ban)” or “No arguing against the existence on the user ban feature except in designated moderation threads (which get algorithmically deprioritized in the new Feed).”
It’s your website! You have all the hard power! You can use the hard power to make the rules you want, and then the users of the website have a clear choice to either obey the rules or be banned from the site. Fine.
What I find hard to understand is why the mod team seems to think it’s good for them to try to shape culture by means other than clear and explicit rules that could be neutrally enforced. Telling people to “stop optimizing in a fairly deep way” is not a rule because of how vague and potentially all-encompassing it is. Telling people to avoid “mak[ing] people feel judged or not” is not a rule because I don’t have control over how other people feel.
“Don’t tell people ‘I’m judging you about X’” is a rule. I can do that.
What I can’t do is convincingly pretend to be a person with a completely different personality such that people who are smart about subtext can’t even guess from subtle details of my writing style that I might privately be judging them.
I mean, maybe I could if I tried very hard? But I have too much self-respect to try. If the mod team wants to force temperamentally judgemental people to convincingly pretend to be non-judgemental, that seems really crazy.
I know, the mods didn’t say “We want temperamentally judgemental people to convincingly pretend to have a completely different personality” in those words; rather, Habryka said he wanted to “avoid a passive aggressive culture tak[ing] hold”. I just don’t see what the difference is supposed to be in practice.
Mm, I think sometimes I’d rather judge on the standard of whether the outcome is good, rather than exclusively on the rules of behavior.
A key question is: Are authors comfortable using the mod tools the site gives them to garden their posts?
You can write lots of judgmental comments criticizing an author’s posts, and then they can ban you from their comments because they find engaging with you to be exhausting, and then you can make a shortform where you and your friends call them a coward, and then they stop using the mod tools (and other authors do too) out of a fear that using the mod tools will result in a group of people getting together to bully and call them names in front of the author’s peers. That’s a situation where authors become uncomfortable using their mod tools. But I don’t know precisely what comment was wrong and what was wrong with it such that had it not happened the outcome would counterfactually not have obtained i.e. that you wouldn’t have found some other way to make the author uncomfortable using his mod tools (though we could probably all agree on some schelling lines).
Also I am hesitant to fully outlaw behavior that might sometimes be appropriate. Perhaps there are some situations where it’s appropriate to criticize someone on your shortform after they banned you. Or perhaps sometimes you should call someone a coward for not engaging with your criticism.
Overall I believe sometimes I will have to look at the outcome and see whether the gain in this situation was worth the cost, and directly give positive/negative feedback based on that.
Related to other things you wrote, FWIW I think you have a personality that many people would find uncomfortable interacting with a lot. In-person I regularly read you as being deeply pained and barely able to contain strongly emotional and hostile outbursts. I think just trying to ‘follow the rules’ might not succeed at making everyone feel comfortable interacting with you, even via text, if they feel a deep hostility from you to them that is struggling to contain itself with rules like “no explicit insults”, and sometimes the right choice for them will just be to not engage with you directly. So I think it is a hypothesis worth engaging with that you should work to change your personality somewhat.
To be clear I think (as Said has said) that it is worth people learning to be able to make space to engage with people like you who they find uncomfortable, because you raise many good ideas and points (and engaging with you is something I relatively happily do, and this is a way I have grown stronger relative to myself of 10 years ago), and I hope you find more success as I respect many of your contributions, but I think a great many people who have good points to contribute don’t have as much capacity as me to do this, and you will sometimes have to take some responsibility for navigating this.
A key reason to favor behavioral rules over trying to directly optimize outcomes (even granting that enforcement can’t be completely mechanized and there will always be some nonzero element of human judgement) is that act consequentialism doesn’t interact well with game theory, particularly when one of the consequences involved is people’s feelings.
If the popular kids in the cool kids’ club don’t like Goldstein and your only goal is to make sure that the popular kids feel comfortable, then clearly your optimal policy is to kick Goldstein out of the club. But if you have some other goal that you’re trying to pursue with the club that the popular kids and Goldstein both have a stake in, then I think you do have to try to evaluate whether Goldstein “did anything wrong”, rather than just checking that everyone feels comfortable. Just ensuring that everyone feels comfortable at all costs, without regard to the reasons why people feel uncomfortable or any notion that some reasons aren’t legitimate grounds for intervention, amounts to relinquishing all control to anyone who feels uncomfortable when someone else doesn’t behave exactly how they want.
Something I appreciate about the existing user ban functionality is that it is a rule-based mechanism. I have been persuaded by Achmiz and Dai’s arguments that it’s bad for our collective understanding that user bans prevent criticism, but at least it’s a procedurally “fair” kind of badness that I can tolerate, not completely arbitrary tyranny. The impartiality really helps. Do you really want to throw away that scrap of legitimacy in the name of optimizing outcomes even harder? Why?
But I’m not trying to make everyone feel comfortable interacting with me. I’m trying to achieve shared maps that reflect the territory.
A big part of the reason some of my recent comments in this thread appeal to an inability or justified disinclination to convincingly pretend to not be judgmental is because your boss seems to disregard with prejudice Achmiz’s denials that his comments are “intended to make people feel judged”. In response to that, I’m “biting the bullet”: saying, okay, let’s grant that a commenter is judging someone; to what lengths must they go to conceal that, in order to prevent others from predictably feeling judged, given that people aren’t idiots and can read subtext?
I think there’s something much more fundamental at stake here, which is that an intellectual forum that’s being held hostage to people’s feelings is intrinsically hampered and can’t be at the forefront of advancing the art of human rationality. If my post claims X, and a commenter says, “No, that’s wrong, actually not-X because Y”, it would be a non-sequitur for me to reply, “I’d prefer you engage with what I wrote with more curiosity and kindness.” Curiosity and kindness are just not logically relevant to the claim! (If I think the commenter has misconstrued what I wrote, I could just say that.) It needs to be possible to discuss ideas without getting tone-policed to death. Once you start playing this game of litigating feelings and feelings about other people’s feelings, there’s no end to it. The only stable Schelling point that doesn’t immediately dissolve into endless total war is to have rules and for everyone to take responsibility for their own feelings within the rules.
I don’t think this is an unrealistic superhumanly high standard. As you’ve noticed, I am myself a pretty emotional person and tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. There are definitely times as recently as, um, yesterday, when I procrastinate checking this website because I’m scared that someone will have said something that will make me upset. In that sense, I think I do have some empathy for people who say that bad comments make them less likely to use the website. It’s just that, ultimately, I think that my sensitivity and vulnerability is my problem. Censoring voices that other people are interested in hearing would be making it everyone else’s problem.
An intellectual forum that is not being “held hostage” to people’s feelings will instead be overrun by hostile actors who either are in it just to hurt people’s feelings, or who want to win through hurting people’s feelings.
Some sensitivity is your problem. Some sensitivity is the “problem” of being human and not reacting like Spock. It is unreasonable to treat all sensitivity as being the problem of the sensitive person.
This made my blood go cold, despite thinking it would be good if Said left LessWrong.
My first thoughts when I read “judge on the standard of whether the outcome is good” is that this lets you cherrypick your favorite outcomes without justifying them. My second is that it knowing if something is good can be very complicated even after the fact, so predicting it ahead of time is challenging even if you are perfectly neutral.
I think it’s good LessWrong(’s admins) allows authors to moderate their own posts (and I’ve used that to ban Said from my own posts). I think it’s good LessWrong mostly doesn’t allow explicit insults (and wish this was applied more strongly). I think it’s good LessWrong evaluates commenting patterns, not just individual comments. But “nothing that makes authors feel bad about bans” is way too far.
It’s extremely common for all judicial systems to rely on outcome assessments instead of process assessments! In many domains this is obviously the right standard! It is very common to create environments where someone can sue for damages and not just have the judgement be dependent on negligence (and both thresholds are indeed commonly relevant for almost any civil case).
Like sure, it comes with various issues, but it seems obviously wrong to me to request that no part of the LessWrong moderation process relies on outcome assessments.
Okay. But I nonetheless believe it’s necessary that we have to judge communication sometimes by outcomes rather than by process.
Like, as a lower stakes examples, sometimes you try to teasingly make a joke at your friend’s expense, but they just find it mean, and you take responsibility for that and apologize. Just because you thought you were behaving right and communicating well doesn’t mean you were, and sometimes you accept feedback from others that says you misjudged a situation. I don’t have all the rules written down such that if you follow them your friend will read your comments as intended, sometimes I just have to check.
Similarly sometimes you try to criticize an author, but they take it as implying you’ll push back whenever they enforce boundaries on LessWrong, and then you apologize and clarify that you do respect them enforcing boundaries in general but stand by the local criticism. (Or you don’t and then site-mods step in.) I don’t have all the rules written down such that if you follow them the author will read your comments as intended, sometimes I just have to check.
Obviously mod powers can be abused, and having to determine on a case by case basis is a power that can be abused. Obviously it involves judgment calls. I did not disclaim this, I’m happy for anyone to point it out, perhaps nobody has mentioned it so far in this thread so it’s worth making sure the consideration is mentioned. And yeah, if you’re asking, I don’t endorse “nothing that makes authors feel bad about bans”, and there are definitely situations where I think it would be appropriate for us to reverse someone’s bans (e.g. if someone banned all of the top 20 authors in the LW review, I would probably think this is just not workable on LW and reverse that).
Sure, but “is my friend upset” is very different than “is the sum total of all the positive and negative effects of this, from first order until infinite order, positive”
I don’t really know what we’re talking about right now.
Said, you reacted to this:
with “Disagree”.
I have no idea how you could remotely know whether this is true, as I think you have never interacted with either Ben or Zack in person!
Also, it’s really extremely obviously true. Indeed, Zack frequently has the corresponding emotional and hostile outbursts, so it’s really extremely evident they are barely contained during a lot of it (since sometimes they do not end up contained, and then Zack apologizes for containing them and explains that this is difficult for him).
Here’s what confuses me about this stance: do an author’s posts on Less Wrong (especially non-frontpage posts) constitute “the author’s private space”, or do they constitute “public space”?
If the former, then the idea that things that Alice writes about Bob on her shortform (or in non-frontpage posts) can constitute “bullying”, or are taking place “in front of” third parties (who aren’t making the deliberate choice to go to Alice’s private space), is nonsense.
If the latter, then the idea that authors should have the right to moderate discussions that are happening in a public space is clearly inappropriate.
I understood the LW mods’ position to be the former—that an author’s posts are their own private space, within the LW ecosystem (which is why it makes sense to let them set their own separate moderation policy there). But then I can’t make any sense of this notion of “bullying”, as applied to comments written on an author’s shortform (or non-frontpage posts).
It seems to me that these two ideas are incompatible.
No judicial system in the world has ever arrived at the ability to have “neutrally enforced rules”, at least the way I interpret you to mean this. Case law is the standard in almost every legal tradition, and the US legal system relies heavily on things like “jury of your peers” type stuff to make judgements.
Intent frequently matters in legal decision. Cognitive state of mind matters for legal decisions. Judges go through years of training and are part of a long lineage of people who have built up various heuristics and principles about how to judge cases. Individual courts have their own culture and track record.
And that is for the US legal system, which is absolutely not capable of operating remotely to the kind of standard that allows people to curate social spaces or deal with tricky kinds of social rulings. No company could make cultural or hiring or business decisions based on the standard of the US legal system. Neither could any internet forum.
There is absolutely no chance we will ever be able to encodify LessWrong rules of conduct into a set of specific rules that can be neutrally judged by a third party. Zero chance. Give up. If that is something you need here, leave now. Feel free to try to build it for yourself.
It’s not just confusing sometimes, it’s confusing basically all the time. It’s confusing even for me, even though I’ve spent all these years on Less Wrong, and have been involved in all of these discussions, and have worked on GreaterWrong, and have spent time thinking about moderation policies, etc., etc. For someone who is even a bit less “very on LW”[1]—it’s basically incomprehensible.
I mean, consider: whenever I comment on anything anywhere, on this website, I have to not only keep in mind the rules of LW (which I don’t actually know, because I can’t remember in what obscure, linked-from-nowhere-easily-findable, long, hard-to-parse post those rules are contained), and the norms of LW (which I understand only very vaguely, because they remain somewhere between “poorly explained” and “totally unexplained”), but also, in addition to those things, I have to keep in mind whose post I am commenting under, and somehow figure out from that not only what their stated “moderation policy” is (scare quotes because usually it’s not really a specification of a policy, it’s just sort of a vague allusion at a broad class of approaches to moderation policy), but also what their actual preferences are, and how they enforce those things.
(I mean, take this recent post. The “moderation policy” a.k.a. “commenting guidelines” are: “Reign of Terror—I delete anything I judge to be counterproductive”. What is that? That’s not anything. What is Nate going to judge to be “counterproductive”? I have no idea. How will this “policy” be applied? I have no idea. Does anyone besides Nate himself know how he’s going to moderate the comments on his posts? Probably not. Does Nate himself even know? Well, maybe he does, I don’t know the guy; but a priori, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t know. The only way to proceed here is to just assume that he’s going to be reasonable… but it is incredibly demoralizing to invest effort into writing some comments, only for them to be summarily deleted, on the basis of arbitrary rules you weren’t told of beforehand, or “norms” that are totally up to arbitrary interpretation, etc. The result of an environment like that is that people will treat commenting here as strictly a low-effort activity. Why bother to put time and thought into your comments, if “whoops, someone’s opaque whim dictates that your comments are now gone” is a strong possibility?)
The whole thing sort of works most of the time because most people on LW don’t take this “set your own moderation policy” stuff too seriously, and basically (both when posting and when commenting) treat the site as if the rules were something like what you’d find on a lightly moderated “nerdy” mailing list or classic-style discussion forum.
But that just results in the same sorts of “selective enforcement” situations as you get in any real-world legal regime that criminalizes almost everything and enforces almost nothing.
By analogy with “very online”
Yes, of course. I both remember and agree wholeheartedly. (And @habryka’s reply in a sibling comment seems to me to be almost completely non-responsive to this point.)
I think there is something to this, though I think you should not model status in this context as purely one dimensional.
Like a culture of mutual dignity where you maintain some basic level of mutual respect about whether other people deserve to live, or deserve to suffer, seems achievable and my guess is strongly correlated with more reasonable criticism being made.
I think parsing this through the lens of status is reasonably fruitful, and within that lens, as I discussed in other sub threads, the problem is that many bad comments try to make some things low status that I am trying to cultivate on the site, while also trying to avoid accountability and clarity over whether those implications are actually meaningfully shared by the site and its administrators (and no, voting does not magically solve this problem).
The status lens doesn’t super shine light on the passive vs. active aggression distinction we discussed. And again as I said it’s too one dimensional in that people don’t view ideas on LessWrong as having a strict linear status hierarchy. Indeed ideas have lots of gears and criticism does not primarily consist of lowering something’s status, that seems like it gets rid of basically all the real things about criticism.
What are these things? Do you have a post about them?
I’m not sure what things you’re trying to cultivate in particular, but in general, I’m curious whether you’ve given any thought to the idea that the use of moderator power to shape culture is less robust to errors in judgement than trying to shape culture by means of just arguing for your views, for the reasons that Scott Alexander describes in “Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons”. That is, in Alexander’s terminology, mod power is a “symmetric weapon” that works just as well whether the mods are right or wrong, whereas public arguments are an “asymmetric weapon” that’s more effective when the arguer is correct on the merits.
When I think rationalist culture is getting things wrong (whether that be an object-level belief, or which things are considered high or low status), I write posts arguing for my current views. While I do sometimes worry about whether my current views are mistaken, I don’t worry much about having a large negative impact if it turns out that my views are mistaken, because I think that the means by which I hope to alter the culture has some amount of built-in error correction: if my beliefs or status-assignment-preferences are erroneous in some way that’s not currently clear to me, others who can see the error will argue against my views in the comments, contributing to the result that the culture won’t accept my (ex hypothesi erroneous) proposed changes.
(In case this wasn’t already clear, this is not an argument against moderators ever doing anything. It’s a reason to be extra conservative about controversial and uncertain “culture-shaping” mod actions that would be very costly to get wrong, as contrasted to removing spam or uncontroversially low-value content.)
I have argued a lot for my views! My sense is they are broadly (though not universally) accepted among what I consider the relevant set of core stakeholders for LessWrong.
But beyond that, the core set of stakeholders is also pretty united behind the meta-view that in order for a place like LessWrong to work, you need the culture to be driven by someone with taste, who trusts their own judgements on matters of culture, and you should not expect that you will get consensus on most things.
My sense is there is broad buy-in that under-moderation is a much bigger issue than over-moderation. And also ‘convincing people in the comments’ doesn’t actually like… do anything. You would have to be able to convince every single person who is causing harm to the site, which of course is untenable and unrealistic. At some point, after you explained your reasons, you have to actually enforce the things that you argued for.
See of course the standard Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism:
I have very extensively argued for my moderation principles, and also LessWrong has very extensively argued about the basic premise of Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. Of course, not everyone agrees, but both of these seem to me to I think create a pretty good asymmetric-weapons case for the things that I am de-facto doing as a head moderator.
The post also ends with a call for people to downvote more, which I also mostly agree with, but also it just seems quite clear that de-facto a voting system is not sufficient to avoid these dynamics.
Sorry, I don’t understand how this is consistent with the Public Archipelago doctrine, which I thought was motivated by different people wanting to have different kinds of discussions? I don’t think healthy cultures are driven by a dictator; I think cultures emerge from the interaction of their diverse members. We don’t all have to have exactly the same taste in order to share a website.
I maintain hope that your taste is compatible with me and my friends and collaborators continuing to be able to use the website under the same rules as everyone else, as we have been doing for fifteen years. I have dedicated much of my adult life to the project of human rationality. (I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup in February 2008.) If Less Wrong is publicly understood as the single conversational locus for people interested in the project of rationality, but its culture weren’t compatible with me and my friends and collaborators doing the intellectual work we’ve spent our lives doing here, that would be huge problem for my life’s work. I’ve made a lot of life decisions and investments of effort on the assumption that this is my well-kept garden, too; that I am not a “weed.” I trust you understand the seriousness of my position.
Well, it depends on what cultural problem you’re trying to solve, right? If the problem you’re worried about is “Authors have to deal with unwanted comments, and the existing site functionality of user-level bans isn’t quite solving that problem yet, either because people don’t know about the feature or are uncomfortable using it”, you could publicize the feature more and encourage people to use it.
That wouldn’t involve any changes to site policy; it would just be a matter of someone using speech to tell people about already-existing site functionality and thus to organically change the local culture.
It wouldn’t even need to be a moderator: I thought about unilaterally making my own “PSA: You Can Ban Users From Commenting on Your Posts” post, but decided against it, because the post I could honestly write in my own voice wouldn’t be optimal for addressing the problems that I think you perceive.
That is, speaking for myself in my own voice, I have been persuaded by Wei Dai’s arguments that user bans aren’t good because they censor criticism, which results in less accurate shared maps; I think people who use the feature (especially liberally) could be said to be making a rationality mistake. But crucially, that’s just my opinion, my own belief. I’m capable of sharing a website with other people who don’t believe the same things as me. I hope those people feel the same way about me.
My understanding is that you don’t think that popularizing existing site functionality solves the cultural problems you perceive, because you’re worried about users “heap[ing] [...] scorn and snark and social punishment” on e.g. their own shortform. I maintain hope that this class of concern can be addressed somehow, perhaps by appropriately chosen clear rules about what sorts of speech are allowed on the topics of particular user bans or the user ban feature itself.
I think clear rules are important in an Archipelago-type approach for defining how the different islands in the archipelago interact. Attitudes towards things like snark is one of the key dimensions along which I’d expect the islands in an archipelago to vary.
I fear you might find this frustrating, but I’m afraid I still don’t have a good grasp of your conceptualization of what constitutes social punishment. I get the impression that in many cases, what me and my friends and collaborators would consider “sharing one’s honest opinion when it happens to be contextually relevant (including negative opinions, including opinions about people)”, you would consider social punishment. To be clear, it’s not that I’m pretending to be so socially retarded that I literally don’t understand the concept that sharing negative opinions is often intended as a social attack. (I think for many extreme cases, the two of us would agree on characterizing some speech as unambiguously an attack.)
Rather, the concern is that a policy of forbidding speech that could be construed as social punishment would have a chilling effect on speech that is legitimate and necessary towards the site’s mission (particularly if it’s not clear to users how moderators are drawing the category boundary of “social punishment”). I think you can see why this is a serious concern: for example, it would be bad if you were required to pretend that people’s praise of the Trump administration’s AI Action plan was in good faith if you don’t actually think that (because bad faith accusations can be construed as social punishment).
I just want to preserve the status quo where me and my friends and collaborators can keep using the same website we’ve been using for fifteen years under the same terms as everyone else. I think the status quo is fine. You want to get back to work. (Your real work, not whatever this is.) I want to get back to work. I think we can choose to get back to work.
Please don’t strawman me. I said no such thing, or anything that implies such things. Of course not everyone needs to have exactly the same taste to share a website. What I said is that the site needs taste to be properly moderated, which of course does not imply everyone on it needs to share that exact taste. You occupy spaces moderated by people with different tastes from you and the other people within it all the time.
Yep, moderation sucks, competing access needs are real, and not everyone can share the same space, even within a broader archipelago (especially if one is determined to tear down that very archipelago). I do think you probably won’t get what you desire. I am genuinely sorry for this. I wish you good luck.[1]
Look, various commenters on LW including Said have caused much much stronger chilling effects than any moderation policy we have ever created, or will ever create. It is not hard to drive people out of a social space. You just have to be persistent and obnoxious and rules-lawyer every attempt at policing you. It really works with almost perfect reliability.
And of course, nobody at any point was arguing (and indeed I was careful to repeatedly clarify) that all speech that could be construed as social punishment is to be forbidden. Many people will try to socially punish other people. The thing that one needs to reign in to create any kind of functional culture is social punishments of the virtues and values that are good and should be supported and are the lifeblood of the site by my lights.
The absence of moderation does not create some special magical place in which speech can flow freely and truth can be seen clearly. You are welcome to go and share your opinions on 4chan or Facebook or Twitter or any other unmoderated place on the internet if you think that is how this works. You could even start posting on DataSecretLox if you are looking for something with more similar demographics as this place, and a moderation philosophy more akin to your own. The internet is full of places with no censorship, with nothing that should stand in the way of the truth by your lights, and you are free to contribute there.
My models of online platforms say that if you want a place with good discussion the first priority is to optimize its signal-to-noise ratio, and make it be a place that sets the right social incentives. It is not anywhere close to the top priority to worry about every perspective you might be excluding when you are moderating. You are always excluding 99% of all positions. The question is whether you are making any kind of functional discussion space happen at all. The key to doing that is not absence of moderation, it’s presence of functional norms that produce a functional culture, which requires both leading by example and selection and pruning.
I also more broadly have little interest in continuing this thread, so don’t expect further comments from me. Good luck. I expect I’ll write more some other time.
Like, as in, I will probably ban Said.
Well, I agree with all of that except the last three words. Except that it seems to me that the things that you’d need to reign in is the social (and administrative) punishment that you are doing, not anything else.
I’ve been reviewing older discussions lately. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most disruptive effects by far, among all discussions that I’ve been involved with, were created directly and exclusively by the LW moderators, and that if the mods had simply done absolutely nothing at all, most of those disruptions just wouldn’t have happened.
I mean, take this discussion. I asked a simple question about the post. The author of the post (himself an LW mod!), when he got around to answering the question, had absolutely no trouble giving a perfectly coherent and reasonable answer. Neither did he show any signs of perceiving the question to be problematic in any way. And the testimony of multiple other commenters (including from longtime members who had contributed many useful comments over the years) affirmed that my question made sense and was highly relevant to the core point of the post.
The only reason—the only reason!—why a simple question ended up leading to a three-digit-comment-count “meta” discussion about “moderation norms” and so on, was because you started that discussion. You, personally. If you had just done literally nothing at all, it would have been completely fine. A simple question would’ve been asked and then answered. Some productive follow-up discussion would’ve taken place. And that’s all.
Many such cases.
It’s a good thing, then, that nobody in this discussion has called for the “absence of moderation”…
I certainly agree with this.
Thanks Said. As you know, I have little interest in this discussion with you, as we have litigated it many times.
Please don’t respond further to my comments. I am still thinking about this, but I will likely issue you a proper ban in the next few days. You will probably have an opportunity to say some final words if you desire.
Look, this just feels like a kind of crazy catch-22. I weak-downvoted a comment, and answered a question you asked about why someone would downvote your comment. I was not responsible for anything but a small fraction of the relevant votes, nor do I consider any blame to have fallen upon me when honestly explaining my case for a weak-downvote. I did not start anything. You asked a question, I answered it, trying to be helpful in understanding where the votes came from.
It really is extremely predictable that if you ask a question about why a thing was downvoted, that you will get a meta conversation about what is appropriate on the site and what is not.
But again, please, let this rest. Find some other place to be. I am very likely the only moderator for this site that you are going to get, and as you seem to think my moderation is cause for much of your bad experiences, there is little hope in that changing for you. You are not going to change my mind in the 701st hour of comment thread engagement, if you didn’t succeed in the first 700.
Alright—apologies for the long delay, but this response meant I had to reread the Scaling Hypothesis post, and I had some motivation/willpower issues in the last week. But I reread it now.
I agree that the post is deliberately offensive at parts. E.g.:
or (emphasis added)
and probably the most offensive is the ending (wont quote to not clutter the reply, but it’s in Critiquing the Critics, especially from “What should we think about the experts?” onward). You’re essentially accusing all the skeptics of falling victim to a bundle of biases/signaling incentives, rather than disagreeing with you for rational reasons. So you were right, this is deliberately offensive.
But I think the answer to the question—well actually let’s clarify what we’re debating, that might avoid miscommunication. You said this in your initial reply:
So in a nutshell, I think we’re debating something like “will what I advocate mean you’ll be less effective as a writer” or more narrowly “will what I’m advocating for mean you couldn’t have written really valuable past pieces like the Scaling Hypothesis”. To me it still seems like the answer to both is a clear no.
The main thing is, you’re treating my position as if it’s just “always be nice”, which isn’t correct. I’m very utilitarian (about commenting and in general) (one of my main insights from the conversation with Zack is that this is a genuine difference). I’ve argued repeatedly that Said’s comment is ineffective, basically because of what Scott said in How Not to Lose an Argument. It was obviously ineffective at persuading Gordon. Now Said argued that persuading the author isn’t the point, which I can sort of grant, but I think it will be similarly ineffective for anyone sympathetic to religion for the same reasons. So it’s not that I terminally value being nice,[1] it’s that being nice is generally instrumentally useful, and would have been useful in Said’s case. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily always useful.
I want to call attention my rephrasing of Said’s post. I still claim that this post would have been much more effective in criticizing Gordon’s post. Gordon would have reacted in more constructive way, and again, I think everyone else who sympathizes with religion is essentially in the same position. This seems to me like a really important point.
So to clarify, I would not have objected to the Scaling Hypothesis post despite some rudeness. The rudeness has a purpose (the bolded sentence is the one that I remembered most from reading it all the way back, which is evidence for your claim that “those were some of the most effective parts”). And the context is also importantly different; you’re not directly replying to a skeptic; the post was likely to be read by lots of people who are undecided. And the fact that it was a super high effort post also matters because ‘how much effort does the other person put into this conversation’ is always one of the important parameters for vibes.
I also wanna point out that your response was contradictory in an important way. (This isn’t meant as a gotcha, I think it capture the difference between “always be nice” and “maximize vibes for impact under the constraint of being honest and not misleading”.) Because you said that you wouldn’t have been successful if you worried about vibes, but also that you made the Scaling Hypothesis post deliberately offensive, which means you did care about vibes, you just didn’t optimize them to be nice in this case.
Idk if this is worth adding, but two days ago I remembered something you wrote that I had mentally tagged as “very rude”, and where following my principles would mean you’re “not allowed” to write that. (So if you think that was important to write in this way, then we have a genuine disagreement.) That was your response to now-anonymous on your Clippy post, here. Here, my take (though I didn’t reread, this is mostly from memory) is something like
the critique didn’t make a lot of sense because it boiled down to “you’re asserting that people would do xyz, but xyz is stupid”, which is a nonseqitor (“people do xyz” and “xyz is stupid” can both be true)
your response was needlessly aggressive and you “lost” the argument in the sense that you failed the persuade the person who complained
it was absolutely possible to write a better reply here; you could have just made the above point (i.e., “it being stupid doesn’t mean it’s unrealistic”) in a friendly tone and the result would probably been that the commenter realizes their mistake; the same is achieved with fewer words and it arguably makes you look better. I don’t see the downside.
Strictly speaking I do terminally value being nice a little bit because I terminally value people feeling good/bad, but I think the ‘improve everyone’s models about the world’ consideration dominates the calculation.
There’s no way this is true.
Not really, no. As you say, you’ve made your position clear. I’m not sure what I could say to convince you otherwise, and that’s not really my goal, anyhow. As far as I’m concerned, what I’m saying is extremely obvious. For example, you write:
And this is obviously, empirically false. The most intellectually productive environments/organizations in the history of the world have been those where you can say stuff like the example comment without concern for censure, and where it’s assumed that nobody will be bothered by it. (Again, see the Philip Greenspun MIT anecdote I cited for one example; but there are many others.)
I think that you are typical-minding very strongly. It seems as if you’re not capable of imagining that someone can fail to perceive the sort of thing we’re discussing as being some sort of social attack. This is causing you to both totally misunderstand my own perspective, and to have a mistaken belief about how “almost everyone on LessWrong” thinks. (I don’t know if you just haven’t spent much time around people of a certain mental make-up, or what.)
I appreciate it! I think this is actually an excellent example of how “vibe protection” is bad, because it prevents us from discussing this sort of thing—which is obviously bad, because it’s central to the disagreement!
I think I’m capable of imagining that someone can fail to perceive this sort of thing. I know this because I did imagine this—when you told me you don’t care, and every comment I had read from you was in the same style, I (perhaps naively) just assumed that you’re telling the truth.
But then you wrote this reply to me, which was significantly friendlier than any other post you’ve written to me. This came directly after I said this
And then also your latest comment (the one I’m replying to) is the least friendly, except for the final paragraph, which is friendly again. So, I when I said did something unusually nice,[1] you were being nice in response. When I was the most rude, in my previous comment, you were the most rude back. Your other comments in this thread that stand out as more nice are those in response to Ben Pace rather than habryka.
… so in summary, you’re obviously just navigating social vibes like a normal person. I was willing to take your words that you’re immune, but not if you’re demonstrating otherwise! (A fun heuristic is just to look at {number of !}/{post length}. There are exceptions, but most of the time, !s soften the vibe.)
clarifying that this was not an intended trap; I just genuinely don’t get why the particular comment asking me to define vibes should get downvoted. (Although I did deliberately not explain why I said I don’t believe you; I wanted to see if you’d ask or just jump to a conlucusion.)
Frankly, I think that you’re mistaking noise for signal here. There’s no “niceness” or “rudeness” going on in these comments, there are just various straightforwardly appropriate responses to various statements / claims / comments / etc.
This is related to what I meant when I wrote:
There’s just no need for this sort of “higher simulacrum level” stuff. Is my comment “nice”? Is it “rude”? No, it’s just saying what I think is true and relevant. If you stop trying to detect “niceness” and “rudeness” in my comments, it’ll be simpler for everyone involved. That’s the benefit of abjuring “vibes”: we can get down to the important stuff.
… on the other hand, maybe everything I just said in the above paragraph is totally wrong, and you should instead try much harder to detect “vibes”:
Do you mean this literally? Because that’s intensely ironic, if so! You see, it’s extremely obvious to me why that comment got downvoted. If I get it, and you don’t, then… what does that say about our respective ability to understand “vibes”, to “navigate social situations”, and generally to understand what’s going on in discussions like this? (No, really—what does it say about those things? That’s not a rhetorical question, and I absolutely cannot predict what your response is going to be.)
I didn’t say I don’t get why it happened; I said, I don’t get why it should happen, meaning I don’t see a reason I agree with, I think the comment is fine. (And if it matters, I never thought about what I think would have happened or why with this comment, so I neither made a true nor a false prediction.)
I see… well, fair enough, I guess. (I find the original wording confusing, FYI, but your explanation does clear things up.)
Separate response because this doesn’t matter for the moderation question (my argument here applies to personal style only) and also because I suspect this will be a much more unpopular take than the other one, so people may disagree-vote in a more targeted way.
The question of, should you optimize personal writing for persuasion-via-vibes is one I’ve thought about a lot, and I think the correct answer is “yes”. Here’s four reasons for why.
One, you can adhere to very high epistemic standard while doing this. You can still only argue for something if you believe it to be true and know why you believe it, and always give the actual reasons for why you believe it. (The State Science Institute article from your post responding to Eliezer’s meta-honesty notably fails this standard.) I’m phrasing this in a careful/weird way because I guess you are in some sense including ‘components’ into your writing that will be persuasive for reasons-that-are-not-the-reasons-why-you-believe-the-thing-you’re-arguing-for, so you’re not only giving those reasons, but you can still always include those reasons. I mean the truth is that when I write, I don’t spend much time explicitly checking whether I obey any specific rules, I just think I have a good intuitive sense of how epistemically pure I’m being. When I said in my comment 4 days ago that optimizing vibes doesn’t require you to lie “at all”, this feeling was the thing upstream of that phrasing. Like, I can write a post such that I have a good feeling about both the post’s vibes and its epistemic purity.
In practice, I just suspect that the result won’t look anything you’d actually take issue with. E.g., my timelines post was like this.. (And fwiw no one has ever accused me of being manipulative in a high-effort post, iirc.)
Two, I don’t think there is a bright line between persuasive vibes and not having anti-persuasive vibes. Say you start off having a writing style that’s actively off-putting and hence anti-persuasive. I think you’re “allowed” to clean that up? But then when do you have to stop?
Three, it’s not practically feasible no not optimize vibes. It is feasible to not deliberately optimize vibes, but if you care about your writing, you’re going to improve it, and that will make the vibes better. Scott Alexander is obviously persuasive in part because he’s a good writer. (I think that’s obvious, anyway.) I think your writing specifically actually has a very distinct vibe, and I think that significantly affects your persuasiveness, and you could certainly do a lot worse as far as the net effect goes, so… yeah, I think it is in fact true to say that you have optimized your vibes to be more persuasive, just not intentionally.
And four, well, if there’s a correlation between having good ideas and having self-imposed norms on how to communicate, which I think there is, then refusing to optimize vibes is shooting yourself/your own team/the propagation of good ideas in the foot. You could easily come up with a toy model where where there are two teams, one optimizes vibes and one doesn’t, and the one who does gradually wins out.
I think right now the situation is basically that ~no one has a good model of how vibes work so people just develop their own vibes and some of them happen to be good for persuasion and some don’t. I’d probably estimate the net effect of this much higher than most people; as I indicated in my comment 4 days ago, I think the idea that most people on LW are not influenced by vibes is just not true at all. (Though it is higher outside LW, which, I mean, that also matters.) Which is kind of a shitty situation.
Like I said, I think this doesn’t have a bearing on the moderation question, but I do think it’s actually a really important point that many people will have to grapple with at some point. Ironically I think the idea of optimizing vibes for persuasion has very ugly vibes (like a yuck factor to it), which I definitely get.
I upvoted this comment but strongly disagree-voted. (This is unusual enough that I mention it.) The following are some scattered notes, not to be taken as a comprehensive reply.
Firstly, I think that your thinking about this subject could stand to be informed a lot more by the “selective” vs. “corrective” vs. “structural” trichotomy.[1] In particular, you essentially ignore selective approaches; but I think that they are of critical importance, and render a large swath of what you say here largely moot.
Second… I must’ve linked to this comment thread by Vladimir_M several dozen times by now, but I think it still hasn’t really “reached conceptual fixation”, so I’m linking it again. I highly recommend reading it in detail (Vladimir_M was one of LW’s most capable and insightful commenters, in the entirety of the site’s history), but the gist is that while a person could claim to be experiencing some negative emotional effect of some other person’s words or actions, could even actually, genuinely be experiencing that negative emotional effect, nevertheless the actual cause of that emotional effect is an unconscious strategic calculation that is based entirely on status dynamics. Change the status dynamics, and—like magic!—the experienced emotional effects will change, or even vanish entirely. This means that taking the emotional effects (which, I repeat, may be entirely “real”, in the sense that they are not consciously falsified) as “brute facts” is a huge mistake, both descriptively and strategically: it simply gets the causation totally wrong, and creates hideously bad incentives.
And that, in turn, means that all of the reasons you give for “coddling”, for attending to “vibes”, etc., are based on a radically mistaken model of interpersonal dynamics; and that rather than improving anything, doing what you suggest is precisely the worst thing that we could be doing. To the extent that we’re doing it already, it’s the source of most of our problems; to the extent that we could be doing it even more, it’s going to cause even worse problems than we already see.
This, for example, seems like a clear case of perception of status dynamics.
Already discussed many times. (I especially note this comment.) What you say here is basically just entirely wrong, in every particular:
It’s not possible to “articulate identical points in a different style”.
If it were possible and if I did it, it would have exactly the same effect.
The trade-off is huge for both the commenter and (even more importantly!) for readers.
Writing more words to express the same idea is bad.
Again, this has all been discussed ad nauseam, and all of the points you cite have been quite thoroughly rebutted, over and over and over. (I don’t mean this as a rebuff to you—there’s no reason you should be expected to have followed these discussions or even to know about them. I am only saying that none of these points are new, and there is absolutely nothing in what you say here that I—and, I expect, Zack as well—haven’t already considered at length.)
And to summarize my response: not only is “caring about vibes” instrumentally very bad, but also, the idea that “caring about vibes” makes people feel better, while “not caring about vibes” makes people feel worse, is just mistaken.
The important things in interacting on a public forum for intellectual discussion are honesty, integrity, and respect for one’s interlocutor as someone who is assumed to be capable of taking responsibility for their own mind and their own behavior. (In other words, a person-interface approach.)
(As usual, none of this is to be taken as an endorsement of vulgarity, insults, name-calling, etc.; the normal standards of basic decency toward other people, as seen in ordinary intellectual society, still apply. The MIT professor from Philip Greenspun’s story probably wasn’t going around calling his students idiots or assholes, and we shouldn’t do such things either.)
I apologize for the self-serving nature of that objection; but then, I did write that post because I find this conceptual distinction to be very often useful, and also very neglected.
(I had not encountered any of the resources you linked, but mostly (I skipped e.g. some child threads in the Vladimir_M thread) read them now, before replying.)
To make sure I understand. Are you saying, “my style of commenting will cause some users to leave the site, and those will primarily be users that are a net negative for the site, so that’s a good thing?”
Assuming that is the argument, I don’t agree that this is an important factor in your favor. Insofar as the unusual property about your commenting style is vibes, it does a worse job at the selection than a nice comment with identical content would do.
(If you’re just arguing about net impact of your comments vs. the counterfactual of you not writing them at all—rather than whether they could be written differently—then I still disagree because I think the ‘driving people away’ effect will be primarily vibe-based on your case, and probably net harmful.)
I read the comment thread before your summary, and this is definitely not what I would have said the gist of the comment thread was that. I’d have said the main point was that, if you have a culture that terminally values psychological harm minimization, this allows for game-theoretical exploits where people either pretend to be hurt or modify themselves to be actually hurt.
Response to your summary: I haven’t asserted any causation. Even if your description is true, it’s unclear how this contradicts my position. (Is it true? Most complicated question we’ve touched so far, imo, big rabbit hole, probably not worth going into. But my model agrees that status dynamics play a gigantic role.)
Response to what I thought the gist was: I agree that exploitation is a big problem. I disagree that this is enough of a reason not to optimize for vibes. I think in practice it’s less of a problem than Vladimir makes it sound, for the particular interventions I suggest (like optimizing vibes for your commenting style and considering it as a factor for moderating decisions) because (a) some people are quite good at seeing whether someone is sincere and are hard to trick, and I think this ability is crucial to be a good mod, and (b) I don’t think it sets particularly bad incentives for self-modification because you don’t actually a get a lot of power from having your feelings hurt, under the culture I’m advocating for.
But, even if it were a bigger problem—even a much bigger problem—I would still not consider it a fatal rebuttal. I view this sort of like saying that having a karma system is bad because it can be exploited. In fact it is exploited all the time, but it’s still a net positive. You don’t just give up on modeling one of the most important factors of how brains work because your system of doing so will be exploited. You optimize anyway and then try to intelligently deal with exploitation as best as you can.
The people in the comment threads you linked didn’t seem to be convinced, so I think a more accurate summary is, “I’ve discussed this several times before, and I think I’m right.”
If you think that this is not worth discussing again and therefore it’s not worth continuing this particular conversation, then I’m fine with that, I don’t think you have any obligation to respond to this part of the comment, or the entire comment. (I wanna point out that I wrote my initial comment to Zack, not to you—though I understand that I mentioned you, which I thought was kind of unavoidable, but I concede that it can be viewed as starting a conversation with you.)
You can probably guess this, but I’m not convinced by your arguments, and I think the first two bullet points are completely false, and the second is mostly false. (I agree with the last one, but changing vibes doesn’t make comments that much longer; my initial comment here was long for specific reasons that don’t generalize.) I used to have a commenting style much closer to yours, and now I don’t, so I know you can in fact dramatically change vibes without changing content or length all that much. It’s difficult to convince me that X isn’t possible when I’ve done X.
(When you say “I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be ‘less social-attack-y’” then I believe you, but so what? (I can see immediately why the alternative version is less social-attack-y.) If the argument were “what you’re advocating for is unfair toward people who aren’t as good at understanding vibes”, then I’d take this very seriously, but I won’t reply to that until you’re actually making that argument.)
No.
I am saying that if we have a forum where the attitude and approach that I recommend, then those people will be attracted to the forum who are suited to a forum like that, and those people who are not suited to it, will mostly stay away. This is a much more effective way of building a desirable forum culture than trying to have existing members alter their behavior to “optimize for vibes”.
(Of course this works in reverse, too. The current administration of LW have built the currently active forum culture not by getting people to change their behavior, but by driving away people who find their current approach to be bad, and attracting people who find their current approach to be good.)
This is a moot point given that the assumption doesn’t hold, but I just want to note that there is no such thing as “a nice comment with identical content” (as some purportedly “not-nice” comment). If you say something differently, then you’ve said something different. Presentation cannot be separated from content.
Yeah, you’ve definitely missed the point.
As you say, this is rather a large rabbit hole, but I’ll just note a couple of things:
This is a total, fundamental misunderstanding of the claim. The people who are experiencing the negative emotions in the sorts of cases that Vladimir_M is talking about are sincere! They sincerely, genuinely, un-feignedly feel bad!
It’s just that if the incentives and the status dynamics were different, those people would feel differently.
There is usually nothing conscious about it, and no “tricking” involved.
You get all the power from that, under the culture you’re advocating for. The purported facts about who gets their feelings hurt by what is the motivating principle of the culture you’re advocating for! By your own description, this is a culture of “optimizing for vibes”!
See above. Total misunderstanding of the causation. Your model simply gets things backwards.
Sure they weren’t convinced. What, did you expect replies along the lines of “yeah you’re totally right, after reading what you just wrote there, I hereby totally reverse my view on the matter”? As I’ve written before, that would be a bad idea! It is proper that no such replies were forthcoming, even conditional on my arguments having been completely correct.
But my interlocutors in those discussions also didn’t provide anything remotely resembling coherent or credible counter-arguments, weighty contrary evidence, etc.
(In any case, why rely on others? Suppose they had been convinced—so what? I claim that the points you cite have been thoroughly rebutted. If I am wrong about that, and a hundred people agree with me, then I am still wrong. I didn’t link those comment threads because I thought that everyone agreed with me, I linked them because I consider my arguments there to have been correct. If you disagree, fine and well; but that’s whose opinion matters here, not some other people’s.)
Well, having traded high-level overviews, nothing remains for us at this point but to examine specific examples. If you have such, I’m interested to see them. (That’s as far as the first bullet point goes, i.e. “it’s not possible to ‘articulate identical points in a different style’”.)
As to the second bullet point (“if it were possible and if I did it, it would have exactly the same effect”), I am quite certain about this because I’ve experienced it many times.
Here’s the thing: when someone (who has some stake in the situation) tells you that “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”, that is, with almost no exceptions ever, a deliberate attempt to get you to not say that thing at all, in any way. It is a deliberate attempt to impose costs on your ability to say that thing—and if you change the “how”, then they will simply find another thing to criticize in “how”, all the while denying that the problem is with the “what”.
(See this recent discussion for a perfect example. I say critical things directly—I get moderated for it. I don’t say such things directly, I get told that I’m being “passive-aggressive”, that what I wrote is “the same thing even though you successfully avoided saying the literal words”, that it’s “obvious” that I meant the same thing, we have a moderator outright admitting that he reads negative connotations into my comments, etc., etc. We even see a moderator claiming, absurdly, that it would be better if I were to outright call people stupid and evil! How’s that for “vibes optimization”, eh? And what’s the likelihood that “you are stupid and evil” would actually not draw moderator action?)
I’ve seen this play out many, many, many times, and not only with myself as the target. As I’ve mentioned, I do now have some experience running my own discussion forum, with many users, various moderators, various moderation approaches, etc. I have seen this happening to other people, quite often.
When someone whose interests are opposed to yours tells you that “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”, the appropriate assumption to make is that they’re lying. The only real question is whether they’re also lying to themselves, or only to you. (Both variants happen often enough that one should not have strong priors either way.)
I’m afraid that you are responding to a strawman of my point.
You quote the first sentence of the linked comment, but of course it was only the first sentence; in the rest of that comment, I go on to say that I do not, in fact, think that the proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”, and furthermore that I think that neither version of my comment is, or would be, “social-attack-y” at all; but that nevertheless, either version would be equally perceived as being a social attack, by those who expect to benefit from so perceiving it. As I said then:
So this is not a matter of me “not understanding vibes”. It is a matter of you being mistaken about the role that “vibes” play in situations like this.
Note that the person that I’m talking to, in that comment thread—the one who gave the proposed alternate formulation of my comment—then writes, in response (and in partial agreement with) my above-quoted comment:
(This is also what it looks like when a person perceives status dynamics without recognizing this fact.)
Read everything you wrote; I think it’s very unlikely that continuing this would be fruitful, so I won’t.
This doesn’t seem compatible with reality as I understand it. I am not familiar with any example of the latter, and I have seen dozens of instances of the former. I’d appreciate examples[1] illustrating why I’m wrong.
I recognize the irony here
Have you met a user called “aranjaegers” in lesswrong adjacent discord servers? (lesswrong name; @Bernd Clemens Huber ) Infamously banned from 50+ rationalist adjacent servers—either for being rude, spamming wall of text of his arguments(which he improved on eventually), being too pompous in his areas of interests etc . I think his content and focus area are mostly fine, he can be rude here and there, and the walls of texts — which he restricts to other channels if asked for. He’s barely a crackpot who’s plausible deniably not a crackpot but operating from inside view and a bit straightforward in calling what he thinks are stupid or clownish things(Although I personally think he’s rationalising). After other servers banned him the main unofficial lw-cord maintained with extremely light moderation by a single volunteer—who thought aran jaeger was good at scaring away certain types of people—got captured by aran jaegers, the discord got infamous for being a containment chamber for this person, eventually the moderator muted him for a day after an year, because he was being rude to @Kabir Kumar , so he left. (I tracked this situation for multiple months)
Can confirm, was making the server worse—banned him myself, for spam.
Thanks for the example. It’s honestly entertaining and at times hilarious to go through his comment history. It does seem to qualify as spam, though.
That was from before, I convinced him to condense his entire wall of text into 4 premises[1]—I used the analogy of it being a test for finding interested people so that he can expand later with his wall of texts— but that took around 3 hours of back and forth in lw-cord because otherwise it goes in circle. Besides I find him funny too. He still managed to get banned from multiple servers afterwards, so I think it’s just his personality and social skills. It’s possible to nudge him in certain directions, but it takes a lot of effort, his bottom line is kind of set on his cause.
I would summarise it as “evolutionary s-risk due to exponentially increasing contamination by panspermia caused by space exploration” . (He thinks the current organisations monitoring this are dysfunctional)
Other trivia includes, I told him to go attend an EA meetup in munich. He was convinced he will make an impact, but was disappointed that only few people attended, although his impression was mostly positive. (If you know about more meetups or events in munich regarding this particular cause let me know I will forward it to him)
On the lw-cord thing, Kabir kumar, posted an advert for an event he was hosting, with some slogan calling in who’s qualified. Aran basically went on to paraphrase “but I am the most important person and he banned me from his server, so he’s a liar”, the lw-cord mod got mildly annoyed at his rude behavior and muted him.
But he didn’t actually leave because he got muted—he has been muted several times from hundreds of servers—he cited the reason that some other user in discord was obnoxious to him from time to time, this same user was called “clown” by aran when they had an ethical disagreement and renamed his server alias to “The Clown King” to mock aran. He also had a change in heart with that approach, given not many people took his cause as seriously as him on discord. Nowadays he’s in his moral ambition phase, he even enrolled in a mars innovation competition for children and got graded 33⁄45, because his project didn’t innovate anything, he just posted about his ethical cause.
He has been oneshotted by inside view enough times, that he thinks he has access to infohazards which have potential to stop elon musk from launching things into space. For example, his latest public one is that under UN weapons of mass destruction treaty all interplanetary space travel are prohibited and people should be prosecuted for that. [2]
He has a masters in maths,his now deleted reddit account is u/eterniseddragon, he has sent emails regarding his cause to 100k people and organisations(easily searchable on lw-cord)[3], he even has a text file with all the mail ids etc.
I think those are the main highlights anyways.
I have touched grass with long term commitment a month ago and left discord,twitter,reddit in general except for dms and real life work, so I cannot link this here, but you may recognise me, if you have been on there on few of those discords—namely bayesianconspiracy,lesswrong discord—by my multiple usernames and accounts: dogmaticrationalist, militantrationalist, curiousinquirer, averagepcuser, averagediscorduser, RatAnon.
I even trolled a bunch of discord servers by creating a huge list of link in a discord thread on lw-cord, such that aran finds it easier to find servers(although I wasn’t that explicit with my non altruistic motives) but it was funny to watch him go and get banned. Optimised dating server banned him very quickly from what I have heard. In hindsight I apologize for any inconvenience.
I see, thanks.
Am I to take this as a statement of a moderation decision, or merely your personal opinion?
If the former—then, of course, I hear and obey. (However, for the remainder of this comment I’ll assume that it’s the latter.)
No, I don’t think that I’m strawmanning anything. You keep saying this, and then your supposed corrections just restate what I’ve said, except with different valence. For instance:
This seems to be just another way to describe what I wrote in the grandparent, except that your description has the connotation of something fine and reasonable and unproblematic, whereas mine obviously does not.
Of course people have such preferences! Indeed, it’s not shocking at all! People prefer not to have their bad ideas challenged, they prefer not to have obvious gaps in their reasoning pointed out, they prefer that people treat all of their utterances as deserving of nothing less than “curious”, “kind”, “collaborative” replies (rather than pointed questions, direct and un-veiled criticism, and a general “trial by fire”, “explore it by trying to break it” approach)?! Well… yeah. Duh. Humans are human. No one is shocked.
(And people will, if asked, couch these preferences in claims about “bad discourse in plausibly deniable ways”, etc.? Again: duh.)
And I must point out that for all your complaints about strawmanning, you don’t seem to hesitate in doing that very thing to me. In your reply, you write as if I hadn’t included the parenthetical, where I clarify that of course I can understand the mindset in question, if I allow certain unflattering hypotheses into the space of possibilities. You might perhaps imagine reasons why I would be initially reluctant to do this. But that’s only initially. To put it another way, I have a prior against such hypotheses, but it’s not an insuperable one.
So, yes, I understand just fine; I am quite capable of “modeling the preferences” of such people as you mention. No doubt you will reply: “no, actually you don’t, and you aren’t”. But let’s flesh out this argument, proactively. Here’s how it would go, as far as I can tell:
“You are ascribing, to individuals who are clearly honest people of high integrity and strength of character, preferences and motivations which are indicative of the opposite of those traits. Therefore, your characterization cannot be accurate.”
“One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. The behavior of the people in question points unambiguously at their possessing the ascribed preferences and motivations (which are hardly improbable a priori, and must be actively fought against even by the best of us, not simply assumed not to be operative). Therefore, perhaps they are not quite so honest, their integrity not so high, and their strength of character not so great.”
I don’t know what exactly you’d then say in response to this—presumably you won’t be convinced, especially since you included yourself in the given set of people. And, to be clear, I don’t think that disagreeing with this argument is evidence of anything; I am certainly not saying anything like “aha, and if you reject this argument that says that you are bad, then that just proves that you are bad!”.
I outline this reasoning only to provide a countervailing model, in response your own argument that I am simply clueless, that I have some sort of inability to understand why people do things and what they want, etc. No, I certainly do have a model of what’s going on here, and it predicts precisely what we in fact observe. You can argue that my model is wrong and yours is right, but that’s what you’ll have to argue—“you lack a model that describes and predicts reality” is an argument that’s available to you in this case.
One of these days, I will probably need to write an essay, which will be titled “‘Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism’ Considered Harmful”. That day will not be today, but here’s a small down payment on that future essay:
When I read that essay, I found it pretty convincing. I didn’t see the problems, the mistakes—because I’d never been a moderator myself, and I’d never run a website.
That has changed now. And now that I have had my own experience of running an online forum (for five years now)—having decisions to make about moderation, having to deal with spam and egregious trolls and subtle trolls and just bad posters and crazy people and all sorts of things—now that I’ve actually had to face, and solve, the problems that Eliezer describes…
… now I can see how dreadfully, terribly wrong that essay is.
(Maybe the problem is that “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism” was written before Eliezer really started thinking about incentives? Maybe his own frustration with low-quality commenters on Overcoming Bias led him to drastically over-correct when trying to establish principles and norms for the then-new Less Wrong? Maybe he forgot to apply his own advice to his thinking about forum moderation? I don’t know, and a longer and deeper exploration of these musings will have to wait until I write the full version of this post.)
Stiil, I don’t want to give the impression that the essay is completely wrong. Eliezer writes:
Downvoting. He’s talking about downvoting. Not banning! That was a mistake this essay could have included, but didn’t. (Perhaps because Eliezer hadn’t thought of it yet? But I do generally default to thinking well of people whose writings I esteem highly, so that is not my first hypothesis.)
And while the karma system has its own problems (of which I have spoken, a few times), nevertheless it’s a heck of a lot better than letting authors ban whoever they want from their posts.
The fact that it’s nevertheless (apparently) not enough—that the combination of downvotes for the bad-but-not-overtly-bannable, and bans for the overly-bannable, is not enough for some authors—this is not some immutable fact of life. It simply speaks poorly of those authors.
Anyhow:
Of course they do. That’s exactly how they tend to die. It’s precisely the obviously norm-violating content that is the problem, because if you accept that, then your members learn that your moderators either have an egregious inability to tell the good stuff from the bad, or that your moderators simply don’t care. That is deadly. That is when people simply stop trying to be good themselves—and your garden dies.
And there’s also another way in which well-kept gardens tend to die: when the moderators work to prevent the members from maintaining the garden; when “grass-roots” maintenance efforts—done, most commonly, simply with words—are punished, while the offenders are not punished. That is when those members who contribute the most to the garden’s sanctity—those who put in effort to rebut bad arguments, for instance, or otherwise to enforce norms and practices of good discussion and good thinking—will become disgusted with what they perceive as the moderators betraying the garden to its enemies.
This seems to me to be the crux of the issue.
There’s a thing that happens in sports and related disciplines wherein the club separates into two different sections, where there is a competition team and there’s everybody else trying to do the sport and have a good time. There are very sharp differences in mindset between the teams.
In the competition team every little weakness or mistake is brutally hammered out of you, and the people on the team like this. It’s making them stronger and better, they signed up for it. But if a beginner tried to join them, the beginner would just get crushed. They wouldn’t get better, and they would probably leave and say their competitive-minded teammates are being jerks.
Without any beginners though, there is no competition team. The competitors all used to be beginners, and would have gotten crushed in the hyperbaric training chamber of their current team culture.
I think you are trying to push for a competition team, and Habryka is not.
Competition teams are cool! I really like them in their time and place. I think the AI Alignment forum is a little bit like this with their invite-only setup (which is a notable feature of many competition teams).
You need the beginner space though. A place where little babbling half-formed sprouting ideas can grow without being immediately stomped down for being insufficiently rigorous.
Another angle on the same phenomenon: If you notice someone has a faulty foundation in their house of understanding they are building, there are two fundamentally different approaches one could take. You could either:
Be a Fellow Builder, where you point out the mistake in a friendly way (trying not to offend, because you want more houses of understanding built)
Be a Rival Builder, where you crush the house, thereby demonstrating the faulty foundation decisively. (where you only want the best possible houses to even be built at all, so whether that other builder comes back is irrelevant)
I think Habryka is building LessWrong for Fellows, not Rivals.
From the New User’s Guide:
My impression is that you want LessWrong to be a place of competitive truth-seeking, and Habryka is guiding LessWrong towards collaborative truth-seeking.
I think it’s fine to want a space with competitive dynamics. That’s just not what LessWrong is trying to be.
(I do appreciate the attempt at trying to bridge the epistemic gap, but just to be clear, this does not capture the relevant dimensions in my mind. The culture I want on LessWrong is highly competitive in many ways.
I care a lot about having standards and striving in intense ways for the site. I just don’t think the way Said does it really produces that, and instead think it mostly produces lots of people getting angry at each other while exacerbating tribal dynamics.
The situation seems more similar to having a competitive team where anyone gets screamed at for basically any motion, with a coach who doesn’t themselves perform the sport, but just complaints in long tirades any time anyone does anything, making references to methods of practice and training long-outdated, with a constant air of superiority. This is indeed a common error mode for competitive sports teams, but the right response to that is not to not have standards, it’s to have good standards and to most importantly have some functional way of updating the standards.)
So you want a culture of competing with each other while pushing each other up, instead of competing with each other while pushing each other down. Is that a fair (high-level, abstract) summary?
I think there is something in the space, but I wouldn’t speak in absolutes this way. I think many bad things deserve to be pushed down. I just don’t think Said has a great track record of pushing down the right things, and the resulting discussions seem to me to reliably produce misunderstandings and confusions.
I think a major thing that I do not like is “sneering”. Going into the cultural context of sneering and why it happens and how it propagates itself is a bit much for this comment thread, but a lot of what I experience from Said is that kind of sneering culture, which interfaces with having standards, but not in a super clear directional way.
No. This idea was already discussed in the past, and quite definitively rejected. (I don’t have the links to the previous discussions handy, though I’ll try to dig them up when I have some time. But I am definitely not doing anything of the sort.)
What you describe is a reasonable guess at the shape of the disagreement, but I’m afraid that it’s totally wrong.
EDIT: Frankly, I think that the “mystery” has already been solved. All subsequent comments in this vein are, in essence, a smokescreen.
I see the disagreement react, so now I’m thinking maybe LessWrong is trying to be a place where both competitive and collaborative dynamics can coexist, and giving authors the ability to ban users from commenting is part of what makes the collaborators space possible?
Commenting to register my interest: I would like to read this essay. As it stands, “Well-Kept Gardens” seems widely accepted. I can say I have internalized it. It may not have been challenged at any length since the original comment thread. (Please correct me with examples.)
I think the main factor you seem to me to be leaving out is emotional tone? Just as changes in tone of voice like yelling or mocking can come across unpleasantly in vocal conversation, in most or all cultures subtle patterns of phrasing and emphasis can also communicate information about the speaker’s emotional state. Many/most people learn to associate some such patterns (sorry, this is vague, which ones depends on both context and individual; uh in many parts of the internet all-caps is seen as similar to yelling?) with emotions such as anger, contempt, etc. and develop a similar negative response to them as to in-person signs of such emotions. Uh, I think for most people this sort of stuff exists on a gradient with stuff like vulgarity and insults?
This is generally true but doesn’t seem applicable to Said-in-particular. Said’s tone doesn’t usually seem emotional to me, and the patterns you’re mentioning (such as all-caps or vulgarity) don’t seem obviously applicable to his commenting style either, at least not in general.
Nonetheless, I think the issue isn’t too complex to identify. Authors want comments, even critical comments, to come from users with the following mindset: “I believe the author has something worthwhile to say, something I can learn from regardless of my previous beliefs. While I think he is wrong/unclear on something specific in his post, it could be I’m missing something important. So I’ll write my comment in a way that invites collaboration (in the Sabien sense) and signal that engaging with me will be personally and emotionally beneficial to the author.”
And indeed, most critical comments by users on this site indeed flow from this mindset. I suspect this is not just because they think this consequentially leads to better discourse outcomes, but also in large part because most LW users are fundamentally and dispositionally pro-social and conflict-averse (illustrative example).
“Conflict-averse”… is not a description I’ve ever seen Said Achmiz receive. His mindset seems to me more like: “The vast majority of what is written online, including what is written on LW by high-karma users, is abject nonsense filled with selective evidence, failure to comprehend the basics of the Sequences, and applause lights masquerading as actual insight. Their failure to illustrate why this isn’t so, in an environment where they nonetheless have 100% control over what words they get to use, is their own problem and illustrates they are fundamentally wrong/confused about foundational matters. It shows they probably have nothing useful to contribute to my understanding that I don’t know already. Sabien-style collaboration is not how LW is meant to function; instead, my job is to write the quiet part out loud and say The Emperor Has No Clothes, lest the comment section collapse into a happy death spiral over how insightful the post is.”
From the perspective of authors, Said’s comment style signals that he thinks the post is worthless and that he considers his job to illustrate this as opposed to working collaboratively, in a nice, soothing and pro-social tone (think of the fake positivity in every EA Forum comment where almost every disagreement starts with “Thank you so much for writing this insightful post! I have just a few quibbles with it [inserts fundamental disagreements tearing apart the entirety of OP’s worldview]”). And authors correctly (IMO) conclude this is unlikely to change over the course of a few back-and-forth comments, because Said is challenging them for the sake of the audience as opposed to engaging with them 1-on-1 like they were friends.
Perhaps I’ve presented this matter in a way that gives off the impression Said is behaving anti-socially. So let me be clear: I believe Said is factually right about LW’s epistemic standards, as revealed by the behavior of high-status users, being way too low, I believe he is right in the vast majority of major disagreements he has had in comment sections with authors, and I believe his commenting style is excellent for LW (even though I prefer writing more long-winded comments myself).
If most other commentators all accept seeing each other’s input… then why should a small minority’s opinion or preferences matter enough to change what the overwhelming majority can see or comment on, anywhere on this site?
I can’t think of any successful forum whatsoever where that is the case, other than those where the small minority is literally paying the majority somehow.
If it was a whitelist system where everyone is forbidden from commenting by default there might be a sensible argument here… but in the current norm it can only cause more issues down the road.
Over the long time frame there will definitely be some who exploit it to play tricks… and once that takes hold I’m pretty sure LW will go down the tubes as even for the very virtuous and respectable… nobody is 100% confident that their decisions are free from any sort politiking or status games whatsoever. And obviously for Duncan I doubt anyone is even 95% confident.
Because the post author is the person who gets the majority of the credit for the conversation existing in the first place. Something that makes them not-post-at-all is very costly for everyone.
This logic also applies to commenters whose top-level comments start discussions.
True! What’s relevant about the current setup is that banned users can post anywhere else on the site equally well after they’re banned from a particular author (e.g. quick takes, posts, open thread) whereas previously there was nowhere for the author to post in a way that would reliably not have the unpleasant-to-them-user able to post in reply.
That doesn’t seem true in my experience. For example I recently wanted to post a comment asking a question about the new book that’s been heavily promoted and I found, only after writing it out, that So8res inexplicably banned me from commenting.
And I can’t see any other place where I could post a specific question about that book “equally well”.
I think a shortform would work fine?
Comment threads are conversations! If you have one person in a conversation who can’t see other participants, everything gets confusing and weird. Points brought up in an adjacent thread suddenly have to be relitigated or repeated. The conversation has trouble moving forward, its hard to build any kind of common knowledge of assumptions, and people get annoyed at each other for not knowing the same things, because they aren’t reading the same content.
I would hate comment sections on LW where I had no idea which other comments my interlocutors have read. I don’t always assume that every person I am responding to has read all other comments in a thread, but I do generally assume they have read most of them, and that this is informing whatever conversation we are having in this subthread.
Comment threads are a useful mechanism for structuring local interactions, but whole comment sections proceed as a highly interconnected conversation, not as individual comment threads, and splintering the knowledge and participation graph of that seems much more costly than alternatives to me.
(Contrast LW with Twitter where indeed the conversations generally proceed much more just based on a single thread, or quote-threads, and my experience there is that whenever I respond to someone, I just end up having the same conversation 10 times, as opposed to on LW, where I generally feel that when I respond to someone, I won’t have 10 more people comment or ask with the same confusion)
The additional confusion seems pretty minimal, if the muted comments are clearly marked so others are aware that the author can’t see them. (Compare to the baseline confusion where I’m already pretty unsure who has read which other comments.)
I just don’t get how this is worse than making it so that certain perspectives are completely missing from the comments.
So like, do you distrust writers using substack? Because substack writers can just ban people from commenting. Or more concretely, do you distrust Scott to garden his own space on ACX?
Giving authors the ability to ban people they don’t want commenting is so common that it feels like a Chesterton’s Fence to me.
It’s normally out of my mind, but whenever I’m reminded of it, I’m like “damn, I wonder how many mistaken articles I read and didn’t realize it because the author banned or discouraged their best (would be) critiques.” (Substack has other problems though like lack of karma that makes it hard to find good comments anyway, which I would want to fix first.)
It could also just be a race to the bottom to appeal to unhealthy motivation, kind of like YouTube creating Shorts to compete with TikTok.
Substack seems like it has the usual rigors of the rest of the Internet — namely, one isn’t going to see strong objections to articles posted there in the comments section. This isn’t very rigorous.
LW’s rigors are higher if authors aren’t banning, or can’t ban, people from commenting on their posts because if someone tries to advance an attractive but underbaked/wrongheaded/etc. idea, he/she will be rebutted right there in the comments. This makes things posted to LW, in general, better than most of the rest of the Internet.
I want LW to be better than the most of the rest of the Internet.
Agreed on wanting LW to be better than the rest of the Internet.
My model is something like: The site dies without writers → writers only write if they enjoy writing on the platform → writers don’t enjoy writing without the ability to ban commenters that they find personally aversive → Give authors the ability to ban commenters on their posts.
I’m cognizant of the failure where good critiques get banned. Empirically, however, I don’t think that’s a problem here on LW. Long, well-written critiques are some of the most upvoted posts on the site. I think it’s fine if the critique lives in the larger LW archipelago, and not in the island of one author. The rigor lives in the broader site, not just in an individual posts comment section.
If the critique “lives in the larger LW archipelago”, then:
It won’t be highly upvoted, because…
Almost nobody will read it; and therefore…
It won’t be posted in the first place.
You don’t get to have both (a) well-written criticism being commonplace, and (b) writers never having to read comments that they find “personally aversive”. Pick one.
Doesn’t the existence proof of long, well-written and highly upvoted critiques disprove your point?
There’s plenty of comments that are critiques, and the author of the post doesn’t ban them because the critique wasn’t cruel. Even if an author starts constantly banning anyone who disagrees with them, they’ll get a reputation pretty fast.
It feels to me like you are vigorously defending against a failure mode that is already handled by existing reputational effects like karma, and people being free to write their own post in response.
… no?
Why in the world would it? How can the existence of things in the current regime disprove my point about what would happen in a different regime?
Both regimes share the property wherein someone can disagree and write a lengthy critique as a top-level post. This empirically does happen, and they are sometimes highly upvoted and widely read. Hence existence proof. The regimes are not different in this regard.
“Lengthy critique”≠ “good critique.”
Really, this has been covered before. Not every[1] good, useful, or even necessary critical comment can be turned into a post in a way that makes sense. See the example in the linked comment:
I’d even go further and say “not even a large portion of”
I think you failed to establish that the long, well-written and highly-upvoted critiques lived in the larger LW archipelago, so there’s a hole in your existence proof. On that basis, I would surmise that on priors Said assumed you were referring to comments or on-site posts.
There are so many critical posts just here on LessWrong that I feel like we are living in different worlds. The second most upvoted post on the entire site is a critique, and there’s dozens more about everything from AI alignment to discussion norms.
I thought commenters on Substack posts were exclusively people paying money to the post’s author until a week or two ago.
I figured I’d been wrong all along when I saw this one post getting negative comments from commenters scolding the author for not abiding by their thede’s taboos which they consider universal.
I absolutely didn’t trust Scott to garden his own space on SSC (and correctly so, in retrospect, as his pattern of bans was quite obviously jam-packed with political bias). I don’t read ACX comments much, but I don’t expect that anything’s changed since the SSC days, in this regard. (And this is despite the fact that I both respect Scott as a writer and thinker, and like him as a person.)
I don’t even trust myself to moderate a forum that I run (where, despite being the sole administrator of the site, I am not only formally excluded from having moderation privileges, but I don’t even pick the moderators).[1]
It’s not a Chesterton’s fence at all, because (a) it’s very new (it wasn’t like this before the blog era!), and (b) we know perfectly well why it came about (hint: the answer is “politics”).
Now, why do you think I set things up like that? Specifically, what do I personally gain from this setup (i.e., setting aside answers like “I have a principled belief that this is the correct way to run a forum”)?
What’s the “and-flag” part for?
So the mute gets recorded in https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation?
Each muted comment/thread is marked/flagged by an icon, color, or text, to indicate to readers that the OP author can’t see it, and if you reply to it, your reply will also be hidden from the author.
In contrast with my fellow mod, I do feel worried about the suppression of criticism as a result of banning. I think that sort of thing is hard to admit to because we generally have pretty hard lines around that sort of thing around here, and it is plausible to me not worth putting any pressure on in this case.
Something on my mind is that sometimes there are people that are extremely unpleasant to deal with? For instance, I know one occasional commenter in this site who I believe stole a bunch of money from another occasional commenter, though they never took it to court. I think that’d be v unpleasant if the former ended up replying to a lot of the latter’s posts.
I would also say that sometimes people can be extremely unpleasant online. I know one person who (I believe) goes around the internet spreading falsehoods attempting to damage the reputation of another person, often directly, and in ways that seem to me a bit delusional, and I think that just based on that behavior it would be reasonable to ban someone.
Perhaps you will say that these are decisions for the mods to make. Perhaps that is so. My guess is that having to send a message to one of the mods making your case, is a much much bigger trivial inconvenience than banning the person, and this is more likely to suppress the person’s contributions. I think this is a strong reason to let users decide themselves, and I would like to give them agency in that. Indeed, on social media sites like Twitter the only way to survive is via massive amounts of blocking, one could not conceivably report all cases to mods and get adjudication.
The counterpoint is that banning can be abused, and conversation in spite of unpleasantness and conflict is critical to LessWrong. If a user banned a lot of good contributors to the site, I would probably desire to disable their ability to be able to do that. So I think it a good default to not allow it. But I think at the very least it should not be thought of as a policy with no downsides, that doesn’t cause a lot of people to feel uncomfortable here because people who have behaved in unpleasant ways that would be unacceptable elsewhere can comment freely here, even though overall it is fantastic.
Babble of alternative ideas.
You should be able to ban users and give a reason, and mods can override your reason.
Banned users can still comment on a post but it goes to a section below the comment section that is collapsed by-default.
Users have a budget for banning, and it is more costly to ban users who have higher karma.
We should build a natural ontology for “response posts” so that a post you write critiquing another post is natively shown on the original post above the comments.
The last idea there is exciting to me. I can imagine in such a world, being much more comfortable with blocking-from-comments, if critique-via-post was proportionally elevated to more than make up for the change in pressure.
Isn’t this just… comments, but worse? (Because surely not all useful comments are written in direct response to a post; many times, they are responses to other people’s comments, or to the OP’s comments which are written in response to other people’s comments, etc.)
Do you really think that an author who banned a commenter from commenting on their posts would be more happy if the commenter could instead write “response posts” which would be displayed under that author’s posts (and above the comments, no less!)??
This sounds like “the blogosphere, but more self-contained” (not unlike Substack).
Yes. I currently guess that I would prefer that people I find very unpleasant be able to critique my post but I not have to read it in order to read and engage with the comments of ppl I don’t find v unpleasant. I don’t mind that it happens, I mind that I have to read it when reading through all my other comments.
(In case this is the crux: I am imagining the response post to be shown with the same UI as a post on the frontpage, a horizontal box that is much shorter vertically than almost all comments.)
I see. Yeah, that’s not what I thought you were saying.
However, I remain skeptical, simply because a response post titled “Ben Pace’s Recent Post About Foo Bar Is Dumb And He Should Feel Bad About Writing It” (with the post itself being like a paragraph long, so it fits in the popup when someone hovers over it in post listings) does not seem like an improvement over a critical comment—and the feature you suggest would encourage such things.
What is really unclear to me is why this whole alleged problem wouldn’t be solved much more simply by an ignore system? GreaterWrong has one, in fact (you can go to a user’s page and click the “Ignore user” button at the top). When a user is ignored, their comments render like this:
This seems to me like it would completely solve the problem of preventing you from having to read comments from someone you don’t like, while not depriving any readers of the ability to read critical comments without restriction, not depriving commenters of the ability to discuss the post in a straightforward and simple way, etc. (You could even make it so that comments by ignored users don’t generate notifications.)
As far as I can tell, this is simply a vastly superior solution compared to banning, with basically none of the downside and all of the upside.
Nice idea, but that feels like being in a group conversation and one person ignoring all the contributions of a single other member of the conversation, but everyone else not behaving that way. I don’t think it really works. I’m proposing having two separate group conversations, one without the unpleasant-to-the-author user, and one with.
(To be clear I suspect that the author will sometimes choose to engage on the post by the other user, it’s just something they can prepare themselves for, rather than it being the default.)
I’m in a Discord guild where one guy’s posts are nothing more than spam to me.
I just don’t respond to any of those posts, while others do.
After a few weeks of this I decided to try a built-in muting function (I’m not sure I’m using the exact terminology; there are two “shut this user up” options available to non-moderators) and got Discord to collapse those messages. I still see a “1 ignored message” occasionally, but the signal:noise ratio is improved somewhat.
It’s a bit weird for me having a bunch of notifications of posts instead of actual posts, and I know who it is by process of elimination, but it’s not like me not interacting with this guy is super noticeable.
As far as I can tell, it really works.
This would be a reasonable concern with a flat commenting system, but LW has a threaded system, so this objection seems very odd to me. If Alice dislikes Bob, she can ignore all comment threads and subthreads started by Bob. (Or, if she wants, she can “prepare herself”, and then un-collapse a particular comment thread that Bob started, to see if there’s anything interesting being said there.)
In other words, in a threaded comment system, we already have multiple “separate group conversations”, and you can already just ignore any of those conversations—indeed, any individual branches of those conversations!—that involve someone you don’t like.
As far as I can tell, this solution satisfies all of your stated desiderata.
That doesn’t sound like my universal experience of threads. I feel like it often goes 1-2-1-3-1-2-1-2 where a third person interjects and the second person replies to them and then the author replies again. I suspect I wouldn’t want the convo to route through such a person at all.
Again, I’m not confident that this generalizes, I’m coming around to your proposal a bit, but it still feels like everyone else would be confused about an author not engaging on pertinent threads, and eventually over time infer that it was because they find a person unpleasant rather than because they can’t find a good response/rebuttal.
From the author perspective, I think I’d rather ask them to move to a different conversation thread. But I expect a second, lower down, “unpleasant” comment thread would be quite an unpleasant experience for the folks relegated there, to be blatantly a second-class citizen. Instead, having their own post for a response if they want it seems nicer for them, which doesn’t necessarily imply that they had to do so, and also in that post they would be treated as any other commenter.
Yes, of course, but the same thing happens on a “response post”, too; an author might want to respond to a third party’s comment on a “response post”, etc. (But then they’d have to expose themselves to the critical post!)
You could even have the ignore feature collapse only the ignored person’s comments, and not any subthreads originating therefrom (perhaps this could even be a toggleable option; I am not sure which setting should be the default, but that is surely something you could iterate on).
(Also, worrying about this seems rather inconsistent with the notion that banning a commenter is a good idea in the first place. Like, if you’re Alice, you’re ok with banning Bob from your posts and thereby unrecoverably losing all the conversations that Bob’s comments would’ve started, all comments by all commenters that would’ve been posted in those comment threads… but you’re not ok with not reading such comments/threads when they’re collapsed? Doesn’t really make much sense. If you don’t think that Bob’s ability to comment on your posts is contributing anything that you don’t care to lose, then ignoring all comments downthread of Bob’s is clearly unproblematic!)
Yes, of course people would be confused. This is good! People should wonder why an author isn’t responding to critical comments (if those comments aren’t obviously dumb or nonsensical, aren’t getting answered satisfactorily by other people, etc.). If an author wishes to avoid this, he can write some sort of note, like “FYI: I have the following users on ignore”. (Perhaps you could allow authors to optionally display this info automatically under their posts.)
Well… that’s one conclusion that readers might reach, certainly. In any case, the point here, I think, is to make all the relevant information available; and then all readers/commenters/etc. could reach whatever conclusions they saw fit to reach.
As an aside, I get the sense you keep insisting the only reason the person doesn’t want to engage with the comments is because it’s criticism. But often I think ppl don’t want to engage with relatively un-critical content because the author is unpleasant in how they conduct themselves. That’s a more central case motivating this.
I… don’t understand what part of my comment you’re replying to with this. And I also don’t understand the scenario that you’re describing, or how it connects to what we’re talking about. I am, on the whole, baffled by how to relate your comment to this discussion.
Would you perhaps care to elaborate…?
No!
I would believe this iff banned users were nonetheless allowed (by moderator fiat) to type up a comment saying “I have written a response to this post at [insert link],” which actually shows up in the comment section of the original post.
Otherwise, I’d suspect a large part of the readers of the post will not even know there is such a response disagreeing with the original (because they just stumbled upon the post, or they clicked on a link to it from elsewhere on LW, or were just browsing some tag or the “recent activity” tab, etc).
(Not to mention that posts don’t even have a sticker at the bottom saying “the author has banned the following users from commenting on their posts: [...]”, which should absolutely appear if the point of allowing authors to ban commenters was actually to improve the record and discourse.
You have to know to click on a whole different link (which basically gets advertised precisely nowhere on the front page) to gather that info, and unironically I don’t even currently remember what that link is… and I think I’m pretty well-acquainted with this site!)
Trivial inconveniences in theory are often nontrivial inconveniences in practice. Also, “just make a post” is definitely a nontrivial inconvenience even in theory; many disagreeing comments would be too short or informal or otherwise not meet the current site-wide standards for a full post, while still being perfectly fine comments.
“You keep using the word [X] in your post; I counted you used it 10 times. But it seems to just be a mere substance-free applause light, and indeed we have covered this matter extensively back in the Sequences [insert link to sequences post]. If you think I’m wrong, give some examples to illustrate what I’m missing.”
What I wrote above seems like an excellent disagreeing comment to me (if appropriate in context), but would make basically no sense as a stand-alone post...
Oh, also just for the record, we have a pingback section at the bottom of every post, above the comment section, which basically achieves exactly this. If you write a popular response to a post, it will show up right below the post for anyone to see!
I find that feature extremely helpful a lot of old sequence posts are outdated or have detailed expansions which often ping the original post, that alongside with precise tagging makes lesswrong easier. I don’t know how feasible this is, and how much usage it will garner but a pingback, tagging or bookmark feature for shortforms— since people are resorting to expanding various ideas in this format— would be useful, whereas in early era of lesswrong there were extremely short posts, which makes searching for them much easier.
(Or alternatively make shortforms more like twitter and add a low character limit)
Advanced search operators would also be welcome! Thanks.
I think some UI thing in the space wouldn’t be crazy. If banning was going to be used more frequently, it’s something I would consider building (I would put it at the bottom of the comment section, but that’s still a reasonable place to find it).
We have something kind of close. At the bottom of every comment section you see a link to the moderation log, which allows you to see who is banned from whose posts. If banning was a thing that happened reasonably frequently, changing it to say “Moderation Log (3 users banned from this post, 2 comments deleted)” or something like that, would be reasonable to me. But it happens so rarely that I currently don’t think it’s worth the development effort (but if people really care, I would accept a PR that adds something like that).
With respect, this is not close at all.
The UI element should explicitly list which users have been banned, without making anyone click on anything.
(And the list of deleted comments should explicitly list the authors of those comments, and link to the text of those comments in the moderation log.)
I agree with @sunwillrise: the current design is absolutely not what the feature would look like if it were actually designed to serve readers and improve discussions.
The feature was not designed for this purpose, it was mostly designed so that people who are interested in LW can generally see what kind of moderation actions are happening. I agree that if banning was more frequent I would add a more specific list (which is what I said, and you seem to have just ignored).
I don’t think a full list makes sense, just because of clutter, but a number seems pretty reasonable (and ideally some way of highlighting the UI element if indeed there is some kind of relevant thing happening).
… of course banning has this effect, but this is obviously a massively misleading appearance in that case, so why would we want this? You seem to be describing a major downside of allowing authors to ban critics!
Like, suppose that I read a post, see that the author responds to all critical comments, and think: “Cool, this dude doesn’t ignore critics; on the contrary, he replies coherently and effectively to all critical comments; well done! This makes me quite confident that this post in particular doesn’t have any glaring flaws (since someone would point them out, and the author would have no good answer); and, more generally, it makes me think that this author is honest and unafraid to face criticism, and has thought about his ideas, and so is unlikely to be spouting nonsense.”
And then later I find out that actually, this author has banned one or more users from his posts after those users posted seriously critical comments for which the author had no good responses; and I think “… oh.”
Because that initial impression was clearly wrong, wasn’t it? It was based on a completely mistaken premise. I was misled! And deliberately misled, too. I based my initial conclusion on the lack of a certain sort of evidence (which I, conditional on the contrary hypothesis, would’ve expected to see); but it turns out that said evidence was in fact deliberately suppressed.
This not only cancels out that initial conclusion, but makes me update past the neutral state, in the opposite direction.
Yeah, I agree this would be bad if it happened. I don’t currently think it’s happening, but see my response to sunwillrise on what I would do if it turned out to be an issue.
I also am really not interested in this discussion with you in-particular. You alone are like 30% of the reason why a ban system on this site is necessary. I think this site might have literally died if we had you and not a ban system, so it appears to me that you in-particular seem to particularly fail to understand the purpose of a ban system. I could not in good faith encourage someone to post on LW if they did not have the option of banning you and an extremely small number of other users from their post.
I… don’t understand what this could mean. I didn’t describe some totally different phenomenon; I just described the thing you already said was the purpose of the ban system! How could it not be happening??
No, I understand quite well what you claim is the purpose of a ban system (as you have taken the time to explain your thinking on this, numerous times, and at some length). That is not the source of our disagreement at all.
You think that there are (some? many?) authors whose contributions are valuable (such that it would be better to have those authors’ posts on LW than not to have them), but who experience such severe mental discomfort from being criticized (or even having their ideas challenged or questioned) in a sufficiently direct way that if they expect this to happen in response to posts they write on LW, then they will prefer not to write posts on LW.
You believe that this is a loss for the forum, for the “rationalist community”, maybe for humanity as a whole, etc. Therefore, by letting those authors ban anyone they want from commenting on their posts, you enable those authors to post on LW as they please, without fear of the aforementioned mental discomfort; and this, according to you, is a gain for all relevant parties/groups, and advances the goals of Less Wrong. The counterfactual loss of the comments that will not be posted as a result of such bans is insignificant by comparison (although regrettable ceteris paribus).
There’s nothing confusing or difficult to understand about this view. The only trouble is that it’s thoroughly and egregiously mistaken.
If you don’t want to discuss this with me, well, that’s your right, of course. But I hope you can see why this unwillingness is quite predictable, conditional on the assumption that I’m simply correct about this.
No you have strawmaned my position while asserting facts about my mental state with great confidence. As I have said in another thread, I have uniquely little interest in discussing this with you, so I won’t respond further.
Given that the current comment tree is very large and unwieldy to read through, I would suggest that specific preferences on a system are agreed-or-disagreed-upon at my dedicated post—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z3zCGmqPC7geBHf5N/actionable-moderation-proposals-from-comments-tree.
Dividing the site to smaller sub-tiefs where individual users have ultimate moderation power seems to have been a big part of why Reddit (and to some extent, Facebook) got so successful, so I’m having big hopes for this model.
I love the idea of having private comments on posts. Sometimes I want to point out nitpicky things like grammatical errors or how something could have been phrased differently. But I don’t want to “take up space” with an inconsequential comment like that, and don’t want to appear nitpicky. Private comments would solve those sorts of problems. Another alternative feature might be different comment sections for a given post. Like, a “nitpicks” section, a “stupid questions” section, a “thanks” section.
I have an impression that, as Said Achmitz already noted, if it were required that if you delete a comment, you must explain why, people would feel much less aversion to this policy. I feel like there’s something particularly frustrating about having a comment of yours just deleted out of thin air without any explanation as to why. Feels very Big Brother-y.
One thing that I like about this is that regardless of whether or not it works, it’s an experiment. You can’t improve without trying new things. I generally applaud efforts to experiment. It makes me feel excited about the future of Less Wrong. “What cool features will we end up stumbling upon over the next 12 months?”
I personally don’t see that there is much of a need for this comment moderation. On the rest of the internet, there’s tons of trolls and idiots. But here I feel like very, very few comments are so bad that someone would want to delete them. And in the few cases where they are that bad, they get downvoted heavily and appear minimized so as to be unintrusive. I think you guys do a great job with product development and are all really smart so I fear that I’m being too uncharitable in asking this, but how much user research has been done before spending time developing this feature? One exercise that I think would be useful is to go through some sample of comments and judge how many of them are delete-worthy. If that percentage is under some number (eg. 1%), perhaps the feature isn’t needed, or at least be worth deprioritizing. Very few comments seem to be downvoted to less than, say, −3, which makes me think that the result of the experiment would show that very few comments are delete-worthy.
I don’t have an opinion on the moderation policy, but I did want to say thanks for all the hard work in bringing the new site to life.
LessWrong 1.0 was basically dead, and 2.0 is very much alive. Huge respect and well-wishes.
Thank you! :)
Just want to say this moderation design addresses pretty much my only remaining aversion to posting on LW and I will be playing around with Reign of Terror if I hit the karma. Also really prefer not to leave public traces.
If you don’t want to leave public traces, others must assume that we wouldn’t like what we saw if the traces were public.
No, others could be a bit more charitable than that. Looking back at the very few comments I would have considered deleting, I would use it exclusively to remove low-effort comments that could reasonably be interpreted as efforts to derail the conversation into demon threads.
Consider the possible reasons why you, as the OP, would not want a comment to appear in the comments section of your post. These fall, I think, into two broad categories:
Category 1: Comments that are undesirable because having other people respond to them is undesirable.
Category 2: Comments that are undesirable because having people read them is undesirable (regardless of whether anyone responds to them).
Category 1 (henceforth, C1) includes things like what you just described. Trolling (comments designed to make people angry or upset and thus provoke responses), off-topic comments (which divert attention and effort to threads that have nothing to do with what you want to discuss), low-effort or malicious or intentionally controversial or etc. comments that are likely to spawn “demon threads”, pedantry, nitpicking, nerdsniping, and similar things, all fall into this category as well.
Category 2 (henceforth, C2) is quite different. There, the problem is not the fact that the comment provokes responses (although it certainly might); the problem is that the actual content of the comment is something which you prefer people not to see. This can include everything from doxxing to descriptions of graphic violence to the most banal sorts of spam (CHEAP SOCKS VERY GOOD PRICE) to things which are outright illegal (links to distribution of protected IP, explicit incitement to violence, etc.).
And, importantly, C2 also includes things like criticism of your ideas (or of you!), comments which mention things about you that paint you in a bad light (such as information about conflicts of interest), and any number of similar things.
It should be clear from this description that Category 2 cleaves neatly into two subtypes (let’s call them C2a and C2b), the key distinction between which is this: for comments in C2a, you (the OP) do not want people to read them, and readers themselves also do not want to read them; your interests and those of your readers are aligned. But for comments in C2b, you—even more so than for C2a!—don’t want people to read them… but readers may (indeed, almost certainly do) feel very differently; your interests and those of your readers are at odds.
It seems clear to me that these three types of comments require three different approaches to handling them.
For comments in C1 (those which are undesirable because it’s undesirable for people to respond to them), it does not seem necessary to delete them at all! In fact, they need not even be hidden; simply disable responses to the comment (placing an appropriate flag or moderator note on it; and, ideally, an explanation). I believe LW2 already includes this capability.
Comments in C2a (those which are undesirable because you do not want people to read them, and readers also have no desire to read them) clearly need to be hidden, at the least; by construction, anything less fails to solve the problem. Should they be entirely deleted, however? Well, read on.
Comments in C2b (those which are undesirable to you because you prefer that people not see them, but which may be quite desirable indeed to your readers)… well, this is the crux of the matter. It’s a very dubious proposition, to say that such comments are a problem in the first place. Indeed, I’d claim the opposite is true. Of course, you (the OP) might very much like to delete them without a trace—if you are dishonest, and lacking in integrity! But your readers don’t want you to be able to delete them tracelessly; and it seems obvious to me that the admins of any forum which aims to foster honest seeking after truth, should be on the readers’ side in such cases.
Now let’s go back to comments of type C2a. Should they be entirely deleted, without a trace? No, and here’s why: if you delete a comment, then that is evidence for that comment having been in C2b; certainly it casts a shadow of suspicion on whoever deleted it. Is that really what you want? Is an atmosphere of mistrust, of uncertainty, really what we want to foster? It seems a wholly undesirable side effect of merely wanting to protect your readers from things that they themselves don’t wish to see! Much better simply to hide the comments (in some suitably unobtrusive way—I won’t enumerate possible implementations here, but they are legion). That way, anyone who wishes to assure themselves of your integrity can easily do so, while at the same time, saving readers from having to view spam and other junk text.
My primary desire to remove the trace is that there are characters so undesirable on the internet that I don’t want to be reminded of their existence every time I scroll through my comments section, and I certainly don’t want their names to be associated with my content. Thankfully, I have yet to receive any comments anything close to this level on LW, but give a quick browse through the bans section of SlateStarCodex and you’ll see they exist.
I am in favor of a trace if it were on a moderation log that does not show up on the comment thread itself.
Wouldn’t someone just make a client or mirror like greaterwrong that uses the moderation log to unhide the moderation?
This is a valid concern, one I would definitely like to respond to. I obviously can’t speak for anyone else who might develop another third-party client for LW2, but as far as GreaterWrong goes—saturn and I have discussed this issue. We don’t feel that it would be our place to do what you describe, as it would violate the LW2 team’s prerogative to make decisions on how to set up and run the community. We’re not trying to undermine them; we’re providing something that (hopefully) helps them, and everyone who uses LW2, by giving members of the community more options for how to interact with it. So you shouldn’t expect to see GW add features like what you describe (i.e. those that would effectively undo the moderation actions of the LW2 team, for any users of GW).
They might. But that would unhide it only for them. For most undesirable comments, the point of deleting them is to keep them out of everyone’s face, and that’s perfectly compatible with there being other ways of viewing the content on LW that reinstate the comments.
What fraction of users who want the ability to delete comments without trace would be satisfied with that, I don’t know.
(A moderation log wouldn’t necessarily contain the full text of deleted comments, anyway, so restoring them might not be possible.)
Yeah, I wasn’t thinking of showing the full text of deleted comments, but just a log of its deletion. This is also how lobste.rs does it.
You’re right about lobste.rs, but in this case I would strongly suggest that you do show the full text of deleted comments in the moderation log. Hide them behind a disclosure widget if you like. But it is tremendously valuable, for transparency purposes, to have the data be available. It is a technically insignificant change, and it serves all the same purposes (the offending comment need not appear in the thread; it needs not even appear by default in the log—hence the disclosure widget); but what you gain, is very nearly absolute immunity to accusations of malfeasance, to suspicion-mongering, and to all the related sorts of things that can be so corrosive to an internet community.
Hmm, so the big thing I am worried about is the Streisand effect, with deleted content ending up getting more attention than normal content (which I expect is the primary reason why Lobse.rs does not show the original content).
Sometimes you also delete things because they reveal information that should not be public (such as doxing and similar things) and in those situations we obviously still want the option of deleting it without showing the original content.
This might be solvable by making the content of the deleted comments only available to people who have an account, or above a certain level of karma, or to make it hard to link to individual entries in the moderation log (though that seems like it destroys a bunch of the purpose of the moderation log).
Currently, I would feel uncomfortable having the content of the old comments be easily available, simply because I expect that people will inevitably start paying more attention to the deleted content section than the average comment with 0 karma, completely defeating the purpose of reducing the amount of attention and influence bad content has.
The world where everyone can see the moderation log, but only people above a certain karma threshold can see the content seems most reasonable to me, though I still need to think about it. If the karma threshold is something like 100, then this would drastically increase the number of people who could provide information about the type of content that was deleted, while avoiding the problem of deleted contents getting tons of attention.
This view seems to imply some deeply worrying things about what comments you expect to see deleted—and that you endorse being deleted! Consider again my taxonomy of comments that someone might want gone. What you say applies, it seems to me, either to comments of type C1 (comments whose chief vice is that they provoke responses, but have little or no intrinsic value), or to comments of type C2b (criticism of the OP, disagreement, relevant but embarrassing-to-the-author observations, etc.).
The former sort of comment is unlikely to provoke a response if they are in the moderation log and not in the thread. No one will go and dig a piece of pedantry or nitpickery out of the mod-log just to response to it. Clearly, such comments will not be problematic.
But the latter sort of comment… the latter sort of comment is exactly the type of comment which it should be shameful to delete; the deletion of which reflects poorly on an author; and to whose deletion, attention absolutely should be paid! It is right and proper that such comments, if removed, should attract even more attention than if they remain unmolested. Indeed, if the Streisand effect occurs in such a case, then the moderation log is doing precisely that which it is meant to do.
This category of comment ought not meaningfully inform your overall design of the moderation log feature, as there is a simple way to deal with such cases that doesn’t affect anything else:
Treat it like any other deleted comment, but instead of showing the text of the comment in the mod-log, instead display a message (styled and labeled so as to clearly indicate its nature—perhaps in bold red, etc.) to the effect of “The text of this comment has been removed, as it contained non-public information / doxxing / etc.”. (If you were inclined to go above and beyond in your dedication to transparency, you might even censor only part of the offending comment—after all, this approach is good enough for our government’s intelligence organizations… surely it’s good enough for a public discussion forum? ;)
This is certainly not the worst solution in the world. If this is the price to be paid for having the text of comments be visible, then I endorse this approach (though of course it is still an unfortunate barrier, for the reasons I outline above).
Whoever provides a mirror would only need the cooperation of some user with 100 karma to circumvent that restriction. Unless you log which users viewed which deleted posts, and track which deleted posts have been published. Then the mirror might become a trading hub where you provide content from deleted posts in exchange for finding out content from other deleted posts. And at some point money might enter into it, incentivizing karma farms.
Others could, if they are unwise. But they should not. There is no shame in deleting low-effort comments and so no reason to hide the traces of doing so. There is shame in deleting comments for less prosocial reasons, and therefore a reason to hide the traces.
The fact that you desire to hide the traces is evidence that the traces being hidden are of the type it is shameful to create.
I agree that desiring to hide traces is evidence of such a desire, but it’s simply not my motivation:
The primary reason I want comments at all are (a) to get valuable corrective feedback and discussion, and (b) as motivation and positive reinforcement to continue writing frequently. There are comments that provide negligible-to-negative amounts of (a) and even leaving a trace of which stands a serious chance of fucking with (b) when I scroll past in the future. These I would like to delete without trace.
Now I would like to have a discussion about whether a negative reaction to seeing even traces of the comments of trolls is a rational aversion to have, but I know I currently have it and would guess that most other writers do as well.
Can’t you just use AdBlock to hide such comments from your browser?
I think you are seriously missing the point of the concerns that PDV is (and that I am) raising, if you respond by saying “but I don’t plan to use traceless deletion for the bad reason you fear!”.
Do I really need to enumerate the reasons why this is so? I mean, I will if asked, but every time I see this sort of really very frustrating naïveté, I get a bit more pessimistic…
This seems to be missing the point of Alkjash’s comment, though. I don’t think Alkjash is missing the concerns you and PDV have.
PDV said “others can only assume that we wouldn’t like what we saw if the traces were public.” This sounded to me like PDV could only imagine one reason why someone might delete a comment with no trace. Alkjash provided another possible reason. (FYI, I can list more).
(if PDV was saying ’it’s strategically adviseable to assume the worst reason, that’s… plausible, and would lead me to respond differently.)
FYI I agree with most of your suggestion solutions, but think you’re only look at one set of costs and ignoring others.
Making it easier to get away with bad behavior is bad in itself, because it reduces trust and increases the bad behavior’s payoff, even if no bad behavior was occurring before. It’s also corrosive to any norm that exists against the bad behavior, because “everyone’s getting away with this except me” becomes a plausible hypothesis whether or not anyone actually is.
I interpret PDV’s comments as an attempt to implicitly call attention to these problems, but I think explicitly spelling them out would be more more likely to be well-received on this particular forum.
It is strategically necessary to assume that social incentives are the true reason, because social incentives disguise themselves as any acceptable reason, and the corrosive effect of social incentives is the Hamming Problem for group epistemics. (I went into more detail here.)
Then his comments are simply non-responsive to what I and PDV have said, and make little to no sense as replies to either of our comments. I assumed (as I usually do) compliance with the maxim of relation.
Indeed I am, and for good reason: the cost I speak of is one which utterly dwarfs all others.
I think here I’m going to say “plausible deniability” and “appearance of impropriety” and hope that those keywords get my point across. If not, then I’m afraid I’ll have to bow out of this for now.
This is a claim that requires justification, not bald assertion—especially in this kind of thread, where you are essentially implying that anyone who disagrees with you must be either stupid or malicious. Needless to say, this implication is not likely to make the conversation go anywhere positive. (In fact, this is a prime example of a comment that I might delete were it to show up on my personal blog—not because of its content, but because of the way in which that content is presented.)
Issues with tone aside, the quoted statement strongly suggests to me that you have not made a genuine effort to consider the other side of the argument. Not to sound rude, but I suspect that if you were to attempt an Ideological Turing Test of alkjash’s position, you would not in fact succeed at producing a response indistinguishable from the genuine article. In all charitability, this is likely due to differences of internal experience; I’m given to understand that some people are extremely sensitive to status-y language, while others seem blind to it entirely, and it seems likely to me (based on what I’ve seen of your posts) that you fall into the latter category. In no way does this obviate the existence or the needs of the former category, however, and I find your claim that said needs are “dwarfed” by the concerns most salient to you extremely irritating.
Footnote: Since feeling irritation is obviously not a good sign, I debated with myself for a while about whether to post this comment. I decided ultimately to do so, but I probably won’t be engaging further in this thread, so as to minimize the likelihood of it devolving into a demon thread. (It’s possible that it’s already too late, however.)
I agree that desiring to hide traces is evidence of such a desire, but it’s simply not my motivation
Irrelevant. Stated motivation is cheap talk, not reliable introspectively, let alone coming from someone else.
Or, in more detail:
1) Unchecked, this capability being misused will create echo chambers.
2) There is a social incentive to misuse it; lack of dissent increases perceived legitimacy and thus status.
3) Where social incentives to do a thing for personal benefit exist, basic social instincts push people to do that thing for personal benefit.
4) These instincts operate at a level below and before conscious verbalization.
5) The mind’s justifier will, if feasible, throw up more palatable reasons why you are taking the action.
6) So even if you believe yourself to be using an action for good reasons, if there is a social incentive to be misusing it, you are very likely misusing it a significant fraction of the time.
7) Even doing this a fraction of the time will create an echo chamber.
8) For good group epistemics, preventing the descent into echo chambers is of utmost importance.
9) Therefore no given reason can be an acceptable reason.
10) Therefore this capability should not exist.
I quite dislike the idea of people being able to moderate their content in this fashion—that just isn’t what a public discussion is in my view—but thanks for being transparent about this change.
Yeah, I agree that there is an important distinction between a public discussion that you know isn’t censored in any way, and one that is intentionally being limiting in what can be said.
I would be worried about a world where the majority of frontpage posts was non-public in the sense you said, but do think that the marginal non-fully-public conversation doesn’t really cause much damage, as long as it’s easy to create a public conversation in another thread that isn’t limited in the same way.
I do think it’s very important for users to see whether a post is moderated in any specific way, which is why I tried to make the moderation guidelines at the top of the comment thread pretty noticeable.
Here’s a hypothesis for the crux of the disagreement in this comments section:
There’s a minor identity crisis about whether LW is/should primarily be a community blog or a public forum.
If it is to be a community blog, then the focus is in the posts section, and the purpose of moderation should be to attract all the rationality bloggers to post their content in one place.
If it is to be a public forum/reddit (I was surprised at people referring to it like so), then the focus is in the comments section, and the main purpose of moderation should be to protect all viewpoints and keep a bare minimum of civility in a neutral and open discussion.
No, I don’t think that’s the crux. In fact, I’ll go further and say that believing these two things are somehow distinct is precisely what I disagree with.
Ever read the sequences? Probably you have. Now go back through those posts, and count how many times Eliezer is responding to something a commenter said, arguing with a commenter, using a commenter’s argument as an example, riffing on a commenter’s objection… and then go back and read the comments themselves, and see how many of them are full of critical insight. (Robin Hanson’s comments alone are a gold mine! And he’s only the first of many.)
Attracting “rationality bloggers” is not just useless, but actively detrimental, if the result is that people come here to post “rationality content” which is of increasingly questionable value and quality—because it goes unchallenged, unexamined, undiscussed. “Rationality content” which cannot stand up to (civil, but incisive) scrutiny is not worthy of the name!
LW should be a community blog and a public forum, and if our purpose is the advancement of “rationality” in any meaningful sense whatsoever, then these two identities are not only not in conflict—they are inseparable.
While it seems clearly correct to me that all content should have a space to be publicly discussed at some point, it is not at all clear to me that all of that needs to happen simultaneously.
If you create an environment where people feel uncomfortable posting their bad ideas and initial guesses on topics, for fear of being torn to shreds by critical commenters, then you simply won’t see that content on this site. And often this means those people will not post hat content anywhere, or post it privately on Facebook, and then a critical step in the idea pipeline will be missing from this community.
Most importantly, the person you are using as the central example here, namely Eliezer, has always deleted comments and banned people, and was only comfortable posting his content in a place where he had control over the discussion. The amazing comment sections you are referring to are not the result of a policy of open discussion, but of a highly moderated space in which unproductive contributions got moderated and deleted.
… good?
I… am very confused, here. Why do you think this is bad? Do you want to incentivize people to post bad ideas? Why do you want to see that content here?
What makes this “step in the idea pipeline”—the one that consists of discussing bad ideas without criticism—a “critical” one? Maybe we’re operating under some very different assumptions here, so I would love it if you could elaborate on this.
This is only true under a very, very different (i.e., much more lax) standard of what qualifies as “unproductive discussion”—so different as to constitute an entirely other sort of regime. Calling Sequence-era OB/LW “highly moderated” seems to me like a serious misuse of the term. I invite you to go back to many of the posts of 2007-2009 and look for yourself.
Weren’t you objecting to the poster tracelessly moderating at all, rather than the standard they intended to enforce? Surely present-you would object to a reinstatement of OB as it was?
People being able to explore ideas strikes me as a key part of making intellectual progress. This involves discussing bad arguments and ideas, and involves discussing people’s initial hunches about various things that might or might not turn out to be based in reality, or point to good arguments.
I might continue this discussion at some later point in time, but am tapping out for at least today, since I need to deal with a bunch of deadlines. I also notice that I am pretty irritated, which is not a good starting point for a productive discussion.
Fair enough. And thanks for the elaboration—I have further thoughts, of course, but we can certainly table this for now.
What was the logic behind having a karma threshold for moderation? What were you afraid would happen if low karma people could moderate, especially on their personal blog?
The karma threshold for personal blogs is mostly just to avoid bad first interactions for posters and commenters. If you create a post that is super incendiary, and then you go on and delete all comments that disagree with you on it, then we would probably revoke your moderation privileges, or have to ban you or something like that, or delete the posts, which seems like a shitty experience for everyone. And similarly as a commenter, it’s a pretty shitty experience to have your comment deleted. And if you have someone who doesn’t have any experience with the community and who just randomly showed up from the internet, then either of these seems pretty likely to happen, and it seemed better to me to avoid them from the start by requiring a basic level of trust before we got out the moderation tools.
That makes sense. Why such a high threshold for front page posts?
Allowing someone to moderate their own frontpage posts is similar to them being a side-wide moderator. They can now moderate a bunch of public discussion that is addressed to the whole community. That requires a large amount of trust, and so a high karma threshold seemed appropriate.
Does allowing users to moderate mean the moderation team of the website will not also be moderating those posts? If so, that seems to have two implications: one, this eases the workload of the moderation team; two, this puts a lot more responsibility on the shoulders of those contributors.
Ah, sorry, looks like I forgot to mention that in the post above. There is a checkbox you can check on your profile that says “I’m happy for LW site moderators to help enforce my policy”, which then makes it so that the sitewide moderators will try to help with your moderation.
We will also continue enforcing the frontpage guidelines on all frontpage posts, in addition to whatever guidelines the author has set up.
No worries, thank you for the clarification.
I would like to state plainly that I am in favor of measures taken to mitigate the workload of the moderation team: I would greatly prefer shouldering some of the burden myself and dealing with known-to-be-different moderation policies from some contributors in exchange for consistent, quality moderation of the rest of the website.
I’m still somewhat uncomfortable with authors being able to moderate front-page comments, but I suppose it could be an interesting experiment to see if they use this power responsibly or if it gets abused.
I think that there should also be an option to collapse comments (as per Reddit), instead of actually deleting them. I would suggest that very few comments are actually so bad that they need to be deleted, most of the time it’s simply a matter of reducing the incentive to incite controversy in order to get more people replying to your comment.
Anyway, I’m really hoping that it encourages some of the old guard to post more of their content on Less Wrong.
I don’t think it’s an interesting experiment. The outcome is obvious: it will be abused to silence competing points of view.
I think this is extremely bad. Letting anyone, no matter how prominent, costlessly remove/silence others is toxic to the principle of open debate.
At minimum, there should be a substantial penalty for banning and deleting comments. And not a subtraction, a multiplication. My first instinct would be to use the fraction of users you have taken action against as a proportional penalty to your karma, for all purposes. Or, slightly more complex, take the total “raw score” of karma of all users you’ve taken action against, divide by the total “raw score” of everyone on the site, double it, and use that as the penalty factor. If Eliezer actually only bans unhelpful newbies, then this will be a small penalty. If he starts taking repeated action against many people otherwise regarded as serious contributors, then it will be a large penalty.
The intended use case of this may be positive, but let’s be real: even among rationalists, status incentives always win out. Put on your David Monroe/ialdabaoth hats and remember that for a group rationality project, priorities 1, 2, and 3 must be defanging social incentives to corrupt group epistemics.
Nobody is silenced here in the sense that their ability to express themselves gets completely removed.
If someone has a serious objection to a given post they are free to write a rebuttal to the post on their personal page.
This policy rewards people for writing posts instead of writing comments and that’s a good choice. The core goal is to get more high quality posts and comments are a lesser concern.
People absolutely are silenced by this, and the core goal is to get high quality discussion, for which comments are at least as important as posts.
Writing a rebuttal on your personal page, if you are low-status, is still being silenced. To be able to speak, you need not just a technical ability to say things, but an ability to say them to the audience that cares.
Under this moderation scheme, if I have an novel, unpopular dissenting view against a belief that is important to the continuing power of the popular, they can costlessly prevent me from getting any traction.
No, you can still get traction, if your argument is good enough. It just requires that your rebuttal itself, on the basis of its own content and quality, attracts enough attention to be read, instead of you automatically getting almost as much attention as the original author got just because you are the first voice in the room.
If you give exposure to whoever first enters a conversation opened by someone with a lot of trust, then you will have a lot of people competing to just be the first ones dominating that discussion, because it gives their ideas a free platform. Bandwith is limited, and you need to allocate bandwidth by some measure of expected quality, and authors should feel free to not have their own trust and readership given to bad arguments, or to people furthering an agenda that is not aligned with what they want.
There should be some mechanisms by which the best critiques of popular content get more attention than they would otherwise, to avoid filter bubble effects, but critiques should not be able to just get attention by being aggressive in the comment section of a popular post, or by being the first comment, etc. If we want to generally incentivize critiques, then we can do that via our curation policies, and by getting people to upvote critiques more, or maybe by other technical solutions, but the current situation does not strike me as remotely the best at giving positive incentives towards the best critiques.
If a nobody disagrees with, being less wrong than, Yudkowsky, they’ll be silenced for all practical purposes. And I do think there was a time when people signalled by going against him, which was the proof of non-phyggishness. Phygs are bad.
You could try red-letter warnings atop posts saying, “there’s a rebuttal by a poster banned from this topic: [link]”, but I don’t expect you will, because the particular writer obviously won’t want that.
Comments on the personal page show up for people who browse Popular Posts/Community and also for people who look at the Daily list of posts.
Giving people with a history of providing value contributions (=high status) a better ability to have an audience is desirable.
Definitely put on the Ialdabaoth hat. You do not in any circumstances have to consciously devise any advantage to hand to high-status people, because they already get all conceivable advantages for free.
High-status people get advantages for free because it’s beneficial for agents to give them advantages. For a high status person it’s easy to stay away and publish their content on their own blog and have an audience on their own blog. This makes it more important to incentive them to contribute.
Companies have bonus system to reward the people who already have the most success in the company because it’s very important to keep high performers happy.
I think this only works if your standards for posts are in sync with those of the outside world. Otherwise, you’re operating under incompatible status models and cannot sustain your community standards against outside pressure; you will always be outcompeted by the outside world (who can pretty much always offer more status than you can simply by volume) unless you can maintain the worth of your respect, and you cannot do that by copying outside appraisal.
My intuition is that it would be better to allow users to see posts of their own that were deleted in a grayed out way instead of going through the way of sending an PM.
If there’s a troll, sending a troll a PM that one of their post got deleted creates a stronger invitation to respond. That especially goes for deletions without giving reasons.
In addition I would advocate that posts that are deleted in this way stay visible to the Sunshine regiment in a grayed out way. For the Sunshine regiment it’s important to understand what get’s deleted.
We considered the grayed-out way, but it was both somewhat technically annoying, and I did also feel like it is justified to notify people if one of their comments was deleted, without them having to manually check the relevant section of the comment area.
The PM comes from a dummy account, and I think makes it clear that there is no use in responding. But unsure whether that was what you were pointing to with “stronger invitation to respond”.
And yep, all deleted comments are visible to sunshines.
If you have a person who writes a trolling post out of anger, the event of them getting a PM that their post was deleted triggers the anger again. This can lead to more engagement.
On the other hand, just greying out the post doesn’t produce engagement with the topic in the same strength.
Given that we don’t have that many angry trolls at the moment, I however don’t think this is an important issue.
Will there be a policy on banned topics, such as e.g. politics, or will that be left to author discretion as part of moderation? Perhaps topics that are banned from promotion / front page (regardless of upvotes and comments) but are fine otherwise?
If certain things are banned, can they please be listed and defined more explicitly? This came up recently in another thread and I wasn’t answered there.
We have the frontpage post and commenting guidelines here, which are relatively explicit:
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/tKTcrnKn2YSdxkxKG/frontpage-posting-and-commenting-guidelines