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).
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.
… 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:
Edit: And to avoid a slipping of local norms here. I am only leaving this comment here now after I have seriously entertained the hypothesis that I might be wrong, that maybe there do exist good arguments for moral weights that seem crazy to from where I was originally, but no, after looking into the arguments for quite a while, they still seem crazy to me, and so now I feel comfortable moving on and trying to think about what psychological or social process produces posts like this. And still, I am hesitant about it, because many readers have probably not gone through the same journey, and I don’t want a culture of dismissing things just because they are big and would imply drastic actions.
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”.)
Is this the sort of thing that you have in mind, when you talk about burden of proof?
Yes-ish, though I doubt we have a shared understanding of what “that sort of thing” is.
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”.)
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
in any meaningful sense, undertake to unilaterally decide anything w.r.t. correctness of views and positions.
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.
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.)
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.)