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.
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.