but it just seems absurd to suggest that paragraphs like this is not equivalent to calling people “stupid” or “evil”:
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.
And the additional words and superlatives do exactly one thing, they communicate that derision.
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:
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…
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).
If someone wanted to just communicate that people have a complicated and often sensitive relationship to criticism
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.”
I can read the subtext, and I really have very little patience for people trying to claim it isn’t there.
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.)
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...
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.”
“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:
you obviously call people stupid and evil [...] but it just seems absurd to suggest that paragraphs like this is not equivalent to calling people “stupid” or “evil”
Which I responded to by saying:
It’s… obviously not equivalent to saying people are dumb or evil?
It is equivalent to saying people have soft egos.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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)
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.
…
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.
And Zack wrote:
comments from our team captain [i.e., Said] often feature judgemental and derisive subtext
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?
If all of the above is true, then what exactly is the point of litigating the subtle tonal nuances of my comments?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
FYI, I had accidentally banned you and two other users in my personal posts only some time ago, but realized when you commented that I hadn’t banned you in all my posts as I’d intended.
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”.
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.
I am confident you can figure out how the second sentence relates to the first.
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?
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.
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.