My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.
I reached out to Scott Alexander via Discord on 11 July 2025 to ask if he had “any specific feelings about Said Achmiz and whether he should be allowed to post on Less Wrong”. Alexander issued this statement:
I have no direct opinion on him. I have heard his name as someone who’s very confrontational, and I agree that this can make a website less pleasant, but I can’t remember having any personal experience.
Separately, as I mentioned to you in our meeting of 26 June 2025, in a public comment of 9 October 2018, Jacob Falkovich wrote (bolding added):
Said, I have seen a lot of your comments on LW, on my posts and the posts of others. They are, by my standards, high on criticism and low on niceness. I personally formed an impression of you as disagreeable. Even though I have argued myself that LW should optimize for honesty over niceness, still the impression of you disagreeableness was colored negatively in my mind.
But now that you’ve stated that you’re disagreeable on purpose, the negative effect flipped entirely to become positive. Instead of you being disagreeable by accident, it’s intentional. I like diversity, and I support people who are on a mission to bring a new flavor to the community. Knowing this also makes it easier to take criticism from you—it’s not that you hate me or what I write, it’s just that you don’t care if someone thinks you hate them and their writing. The Bayesian update in the two cases is very different!
Thanks for the follow-up! I talked with Scott about LW moderation a long time ago (my guess is around 2019) and Said’s name came up then. My guess is he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention, but we were talking about what makes LW comment sections good or bad, and he was a commenter we discussed in that conversation in 2019 or so.
I think you can clearly see how the Jacob Falkovich one is complicated. He basically says “I used to be frustrated by you, but this thing made that a lot better”. I don’t remember the exact time I talked to Jacob about it, but it had come up sometime some context where we discussed LW comment sections. It’s plausible to me it was before he made this comment, though it would be a bit surprising to me, since that’s pretty early into LW’s history.
You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements, as I exhibit below.
I reached out to Scott Alexander via Discord on 11 July 2025 to ask if he had “any specific feelings about Said Achmiz and whether he should be allowed to post on Less Wrong”. Alexander issued this statement:
Separately, as I mentioned to you in our meeting of 26 June 2025, in a public comment of 9 October 2018, Jacob Falkovich wrote (bolding added):
Thanks for the follow-up! I talked with Scott about LW moderation a long time ago (my guess is around 2019) and Said’s name came up then. My guess is he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention, but we were talking about what makes LW comment sections good or bad, and he was a commenter we discussed in that conversation in 2019 or so.
I think you can clearly see how the Jacob Falkovich one is complicated. He basically says “I used to be frustrated by you, but this thing made that a lot better”. I don’t remember the exact time I talked to Jacob about it, but it had come up sometime some context where we discussed LW comment sections. It’s plausible to me it was before he made this comment, though it would be a bit surprising to me, since that’s pretty early into LW’s history.