Yes, shockingly, people have preferences about how people interact with them that go beyond obvious unambigious norm violations, what a shocker!
This seems to be just another way to describe what I wrote in the grandparent, except that your description has the connotation of something fine and reasonable and unproblematic, whereas mine obviously does not.
This seems to me to be the crux of the issue.
There’s a thing that happens in sports and related disciplines wherein the club separates into two different sections, where there is a competition team and there’s everybody else trying to do the sport and have a good time. There are very sharp differences in mindset between the teams.
In the competition team every little weakness or mistake is brutally hammered out of you, and the people on the team like this. It’s making them stronger and better, they signed up for it. But if a beginner tried to join them, the beginner would just get crushed. They wouldn’t get better, and they would probably leave and say their competitive-minded teammates are being jerks.
Without any beginners though, there is no competition team. The competitors all used to be beginners, and would have gotten crushed in the hyperbaric training chamber of their current team culture.
I think you are trying to push for a competition team, and Habryka is not.
Competition teams are cool! I really like them in their time and place. I think the AI Alignment forum is a little bit like this with their invite-only setup (which is a notable feature of many competition teams).
You need the beginner space though. A place where little babblinghalf-formed sprouting ideas can grow without being immediately stomped down for being insufficiently rigorous.
Another angle on the same phenomenon: If you notice someone has a faulty foundation in their house of understanding they are building, there are two fundamentally different approaches one could take. You could either:
Be a Fellow Builder, where you point out the mistake in a friendly way (trying not to offend, because you want more houses of understanding built)
Be a Rival Builder, where you crush the house, thereby demonstrating the faulty foundation decisively. (where you only want the best possible houses to even be built at all, so whether that other builder comes back is irrelevant)
I think Habryka is building LessWrong for Fellows, not Rivals.
wants to work collaboratively with others to figure out what’s true
My impression is that you want LessWrong to be a place of competitive truth-seeking, and Habryka is guiding LessWrong towards collaborative truth-seeking.
I think it’s fine to want a space with competitive dynamics. That’s just not what LessWrong is trying to be.
(I do appreciate the attempt at trying to bridge the epistemic gap, but just to be clear, this does not capture the relevant dimensions in my mind. The culture I want on LessWrong is highly competitive in many ways.
I care a lot about having standards and striving in intense ways for the site. I just don’t think the way Said does it really produces that, and instead think it mostly produces lots of people getting angry at each other while exacerbating tribal dynamics.
The situation seems more similar to having a competitive team where anyone gets screamed at for basically any motion, with a coach who doesn’t themselves perform the sport, but just complaints in long tirades any time anyone does anything, making references to methods of practice and training long-outdated, with a constant air of superiority. This is indeed a common error mode for competitive sports teams, but the right response to that is not to not have standards, it’s to have good standards and to most importantly have some functional way of updating the standards.)
So you want a culture of competing with each other while pushing each other up, instead of competing with each other while pushing each other down. Is that a fair (high-level, abstract) summary?
I think there is something in the space, but I wouldn’t speak in absolutes this way. I think many bad things deserve to be pushed down. I just don’t think Said has a great track record of pushing down the right things, and the resulting discussions seem to me to reliably produce misunderstandings and confusions.
I think a major thing that I do not like is “sneering”. Going into the cultural context of sneering and why it happens and how it propagates itself is a bit much for this comment thread, but a lot of what I experience from Said is that kind of sneering culture, which interfaces with having standards, but not in a super clear directional way.
I think you are trying to push for a competition team, and Habryka is not.
No. This idea was already discussed in the past, and quite definitively rejected. (I don’t have the links to the previous discussions handy, though I’ll try to dig them up when I have some time. But I am definitely not doing anything of the sort.)
What you describe is a reasonable guess at the shape of the disagreement, but I’m afraid that it’s totally wrong.
EDIT: Frankly, I think that the “mystery” has already been solved. All subsequent comments in this vein are, in essence, a smokescreen.
I see the disagreement react, so now I’m thinking maybe LessWrong is trying to be a place where both competitive and collaborative dynamics can coexist, and giving authors the ability to ban users from commenting is part of what makes the collaborators space possible?
This seems to me to be the crux of the issue.
There’s a thing that happens in sports and related disciplines wherein the club separates into two different sections, where there is a competition team and there’s everybody else trying to do the sport and have a good time. There are very sharp differences in mindset between the teams.
In the competition team every little weakness or mistake is brutally hammered out of you, and the people on the team like this. It’s making them stronger and better, they signed up for it. But if a beginner tried to join them, the beginner would just get crushed. They wouldn’t get better, and they would probably leave and say their competitive-minded teammates are being jerks.
Without any beginners though, there is no competition team. The competitors all used to be beginners, and would have gotten crushed in the hyperbaric training chamber of their current team culture.
I think you are trying to push for a competition team, and Habryka is not.
Competition teams are cool! I really like them in their time and place. I think the AI Alignment forum is a little bit like this with their invite-only setup (which is a notable feature of many competition teams).
You need the beginner space though. A place where little babbling half-formed sprouting ideas can grow without being immediately stomped down for being insufficiently rigorous.
Another angle on the same phenomenon: If you notice someone has a faulty foundation in their house of understanding they are building, there are two fundamentally different approaches one could take. You could either:
Be a Fellow Builder, where you point out the mistake in a friendly way (trying not to offend, because you want more houses of understanding built)
Be a Rival Builder, where you crush the house, thereby demonstrating the faulty foundation decisively. (where you only want the best possible houses to even be built at all, so whether that other builder comes back is irrelevant)
I think Habryka is building LessWrong for Fellows, not Rivals.
From the New User’s Guide:
My impression is that you want LessWrong to be a place of competitive truth-seeking, and Habryka is guiding LessWrong towards collaborative truth-seeking.
I think it’s fine to want a space with competitive dynamics. That’s just not what LessWrong is trying to be.
(I do appreciate the attempt at trying to bridge the epistemic gap, but just to be clear, this does not capture the relevant dimensions in my mind. The culture I want on LessWrong is highly competitive in many ways.
I care a lot about having standards and striving in intense ways for the site. I just don’t think the way Said does it really produces that, and instead think it mostly produces lots of people getting angry at each other while exacerbating tribal dynamics.
The situation seems more similar to having a competitive team where anyone gets screamed at for basically any motion, with a coach who doesn’t themselves perform the sport, but just complaints in long tirades any time anyone does anything, making references to methods of practice and training long-outdated, with a constant air of superiority. This is indeed a common error mode for competitive sports teams, but the right response to that is not to not have standards, it’s to have good standards and to most importantly have some functional way of updating the standards.)
So you want a culture of competing with each other while pushing each other up, instead of competing with each other while pushing each other down. Is that a fair (high-level, abstract) summary?
I think there is something in the space, but I wouldn’t speak in absolutes this way. I think many bad things deserve to be pushed down. I just don’t think Said has a great track record of pushing down the right things, and the resulting discussions seem to me to reliably produce misunderstandings and confusions.
I think a major thing that I do not like is “sneering”. Going into the cultural context of sneering and why it happens and how it propagates itself is a bit much for this comment thread, but a lot of what I experience from Said is that kind of sneering culture, which interfaces with having standards, but not in a super clear directional way.
No. This idea was already discussed in the past, and quite definitively rejected. (I don’t have the links to the previous discussions handy, though I’ll try to dig them up when I have some time. But I am definitely not doing anything of the sort.)
What you describe is a reasonable guess at the shape of the disagreement, but I’m afraid that it’s totally wrong.
EDIT: Frankly, I think that the “mystery” has already been solved. All subsequent comments in this vein are, in essence, a smokescreen.
I see the disagreement react, so now I’m thinking maybe LessWrong is trying to be a place where both competitive and collaborative dynamics can coexist, and giving authors the ability to ban users from commenting is part of what makes the collaborators space possible?