For the record, I had not read that instance of banning, and it is only just at this late point (e.g. after basically the whole thread has wrapped [edit: the whole thread, it turned out, had not wrapped]) did I read that thread and realize that this whole thread was downstream of that. All my comments and points so far were not written with that instance in mind but on general principle.
(And if you’re thinking “Surely you would’ve spoken to Habryka at work about this thread?” my response is “I was not at work! I am currently on vacation.” Yes, I have chosen to — and enjoyed! — spending my vacation arguing the basic principles of moderation, criticism, and gardening.)
Initial impressions re: that thread:
For the record I had read Said’s comment in “Top Comments” and not the original post (I’d read the opening 2-3 paragraphs), and had hit weak-agree-vote on Said’s comment. I was disappointed to see a post endorsing religions and was grateful for a comment that made a good point (I especially agree with the opening sentence) that I could agree with and express my continued anti-religion stance.
I don’t think Said’s comment was otherwise good at engaging with the post (note that I agree-upvoted but didn’t karma-upvote), and I think it was fine for Gordon to ban him for being a repeatedly obtuse yet snide commenter.
This is not the sort of comment that nobody but Said can make! I was even forming an intention to write my own until I saw that there was one already there.
I think Gordon is someone who is quite willing to engage with critics (e.g. he links to other examples of doing so with Said). I suspect that Said has such confidence in his comments that the only hypothesis he will consider is that this is someone unwilling to engage with an excellent critic, but I do not believe this hypothesis.
(Apologies in advance for extreme slowness of replies; I am currently rate-limited such that I can only post one comment per day, on the whole site.)
For the record I had read Said’s comment in “Top Comments” and not the original post (I’d read the opening 2-3 paragraphs), and had hit weak-agree-vote on Said’s comment. I was disappointed to see a post endorsing religions and was grateful for a comment that made a good point (I especially agree with the opening sentence) that I could agree with and express my continued anti-religion stance.
Well… I hate to criticize when someone’s saying good things about me, but… frankly, I think that you shouldn’t’ve done that (vote on a comment without reading what it’s responding to, that is). I certainly disapprove of it.
Indeed, I think that this highlights a serious mistake in the design of the “Top Comments” feature. For comparison, GreaterWrong’s Recent Comments view does not allow you to vote on the comments (the vote buttons are not displayed at all, although the current karma and agreement totals are); you must click through to the comment (either in context, or as a permalink) in order to vote on it.
(This is no accident; @clone of saturn and I discussed this particular design choice, and we agreed not to display vote buttons in Recent Comments—nor in search results listings, nor when viewing comments from a user’s page, etc.—because we did not want to encourage users to vote on comments without having seen them in their conversational context. It seemed to us that allowing users to vote from such auxiliary views, where comments were displayed shorn of their context, would create unfortunate dynamics, contribute to the development of echo chambers, etc.)
This is not the sort of comment that nobody but Said can make! I was even forming an intention to write my own until I saw that there was one already there.
If you would have written the same comment, then why is it bad when I write it? And if it wouldn’t’ve been as bad, because you’d’ve written it differently… then what makes you sure that it would’ve been as good?
(EDIT: In other words: if you say something differently, then you’ve said something different. This isn’t an ironclad rule—there are such things as logically equivalent statements with no difference in connotation or valence; and there are also such things as ideas that, in order to be communicated effectively, must be described from multiple angles. But it is a strong heuristic. This is also why I am so intensely skeptical of “interpretive labor” as a tool of communication.)
Anyhow, I just don’t believe this claim of “in Said’s absence, all requisite criticisms will be written by other people”. I routinely read terrible posts or comments on Less Wrong, think to myself “I should reply… hm, no, I’ll let other people take up the slack, surely there are plenty of other people here who see the problems with this, and aren’t afraid to say something”, wait, and then… nothing. And I keep waiting, and… nothing. And I never comment, and… nobody else does, either.
(Another thing that often happens—not as often as “nobody bothers to make any serious criticisms”, but often—is that other people post critical comments, but none of them get to the heart of the matter, none of them make the important points, etc.)
As far as I can tell, this “there are plenty of substitutes available” view is just straightforwardly false. (I very much wish it were true! But it’s not. Indeed, this is a big part of why I find the LW of today to be so frustrating—there’s a dire lack of good criticism. Things aren’t as bad as the EA Forum… yet… but they’re surely heading in that direction.)
I think Gordon is someone who is quite willing to engage with critics (e.g. he links to other examples of doing so with Said). I suspect that Said has such confidence in his comments that the only hypothesis he will consider is that this is someone unwilling to engage with an excellent critic, but I do not believe this hypothesis.
But of course you’re wrong about this. Of course I consider other hypotheses. It’s just that the other hypotheses are so very, very easy to falsify.
The problem, basically, is that you are treating “willing to engage with critics” as basically a binary property (or, at best, a single dimension of variation). But it’s nothing of the sort.
Plenty of authors are “willing to engage” with “critics”—as long as the “critics” are the sort that take as an axiom that the author’s work is valuable, important, and interesting, and that the author himself is intelligent, well-intentioned, well-informed, and sane; and as long as their “criticism” is of the sort that says “how very fascinating your ideas are; I would love to learn more about your thinking, but I have not yet grasped your thesis in its fullness, and am confused; might you deign to enlighten me?” (in other words, “here’s a prompt for you to tell us more about your amazing ideas”). (You might call this “intellectual discussion as improv session”—where, as in any improv, the only allowed replies are “yes, and…”.)
But of course those are terrible axioms to adopt, for the simple reason that they are very often false.
You say that Gordon links to examples of him engaging with my criticism. Did you follow those links? Did you read those comment threads? Perhaps you did, but for the benefit of other readers, let’s take a look: Gordon links to this comment, where he claims that he is using technical language; I reply briefly to ask a very simple question—which of his terms does he claim are “technical language”? could he link to definitions of them?—and he… well, I think @sunwillrise put it well: Gordon ran away. Just a flat refusal to answer the most trivial of questions (made in response to a straightforward claim which seemed like it outright invited such a question!).
And this is what you call “quite willing to engage with critics”?
Plenty of authors are “willing to engage” with “critics”—as long as the “critics” are the sort that take as an axiom that the author’s work is valuable, important, and interesting, and that the author himself is intelligent, well-intentioned, well-informed, and sane; and as long as their “criticism” is of the sort that says “how very fascinating your ideas are; I would love to learn more about your thinking, but I have not yet grasped your thesis in its fullness, and am confused; might you deign to enlighten me?” (in other words, “here’s a prompt for you to tell us more about your amazing ideas”). (You might call this “intellectual discussion as improv session”—where, as in any improv, the only allowed replies are “yes, and…”.)
It is challenging and unpleasant to be in an interaction with someone who is exuding disgust and contempt for you, and it’s not a major weakness in people that they disprefer conversations like that.
A good thing to do in such situations is to do post-level responses rather than comment-level replies. I’ve seen many post-level back-and-forths where people disrespect the other person’s opinions (e.g. Scott Alexander / Robin Hanson on healthcare, Scott Alexander / Current Affairs on whether republicans are literal monsters, Scott Alexander / Tyler Cowen on multiple topics, etc). This gives people more space for slower replies and to take time to put in the effort to consider the points the other person is making with more space to get over immediate emotional responses and digging-in-one’s-heels.
It also makes sense to save your limited energies for those critics only if they meet a slightly higher bar of worthiness of engaging with. Not all critics are born equal. Just because someone has shown up to criticize you doesn’t make their criticism good or worth engaging with.
I want to push back on any notion that all people should be able to engage with all critics with ease regardless of time/energy and as though disgust/contempt was magically not a factor. I think it’s important to be able to engage with quality critics, but 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).
(To clarify, I am not defending the position you gave in the quote above, about everyone having interesting things to say and conversations requiring “yes-and”. I think that is probably a position that, were you to move in the direction of, would push against the contempt/disgust that I suspect many users feel from you, but I am just defending that the contempt/disgust is unpleasant to interface with, not that one is supposed to respect other people’s opinions. I regularly have little respect for people’s opinions on this site, and say so!)
It is challenging and unpleasant to be in an interaction with someone who is exuding disgust and contempt for you, and it’s not a major weakness in people that they disprefer conversations like this.
There are two mistakes here, I’d say.
First: no, it absolutely is a “major weakness in people” that they prefer to avoid engaging with relevant criticism merely on the basis of the “tone”, “valence”, etc., of the critics’ words. It is, in fact, a huge weakness. Overcoming this particular bias is one of the single biggest personal advances in epistemic rationality that one can make.
(Actually, I recently read a couple of tweets by @Holly_Elmore, with whom I certainly haven’t always agreed, but who describes this sort of thing very aptly.)
Second: you imply a false dichotomy between the “improv session” sort of faux-criticism I describe, and “exuding disgust and contempt”. Those are not the only options! It is entirely possible to criticize someone’s ideas, very harshly, while exhibiting (and experiencing) no significant emotionally-valenced judgment of the person themselves.
One of the best things that I’ve read recently was “ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up” by Philip Greenspun, which is a sort of postmortem of Ars Digita (a company that played a major role in the rise of the web, the dot-com bubble, etc.). I recommend the essay in its entirety; it’s quite entertaining, despite the seemingly dry subject matter (the background to an ongoing corporate lawsuit). A particularly relevant section, however, is this one, where Greenspun describes a period when the executives and board members at ArsDigita were ignoring all of his advice:
At this point you might ask “Hey, weren’t you still on the Board?” Sure. But for most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen didn’t want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn’t have to listen to me: I’d hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I’m not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as “a no-praise zone”. My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said “You’re having trouble with this problem because you don’t know anything and you’re not working very hard.”
Now, do you think that this professor “exuded disgust and contempt” for young Philip?
A good thing to do in such situations is to do post-level responses rather than comment-level replies. I’ve seen many post-level back-and-forths where people disrespect the other person’s opinions (e.g. Scott Alexander / Robin Hanson on healthcare, Scott Alexander / Current Affairs on whether republicans are literal monsters, Scott Alexander / Tyler Cowen on multiple topics, etc).
No, this is not a good thing at all. The disadvantages are legion:
It’s much harder to get into details. A back-and-forth of posts is necessarily serial; I post, you post in response, I post in response. This throws away all of the advantages of a threaded comment system, which is that we can discuss two, or three, or fifteen, different aspects of your post in parallel, in the comments. If I have to write a whole post, should I discuss every separate thing I have to say about your post? In your response, should you do the same for my post? How readable is this going to be? (Not at all.)
It’s much less discoverable for readers, and much less convenient to follow the discussion. I read your post; now I need to go and read… how many? five? twelve? more? other posts, by how many other people, to get a sense of the conversation? Who’s replying to whom? What points are being made in response to what?
As a corollary to the above, it’s much harder for someone to join the conversation. I have something to say that doesn’t deserve a whole post—now what? Do I just not write it? If I do write it, where should it go? Discussions in comments have much lower activation energy, which means that people who have something relevant to say but would never write a whole post will definitely make a comment. Heck, you must know this! Look at how many excellent contributions to this site were written as comments, and then think about whether the author of the comment would have bothered to write a whole post—“My Thoughts On A Post That Someone Else Recently Wrote”. Almost none!
It discourages brevity. This is extremely bad. (We’ve had this discussion in the past, multiple times—do I need to dredge it up? I will if I have to, but I expect that you remember.)
It works against clarity, and encourages strawmanning. In a comment back-and-forth, if someone mischaracterizes your ideas, or says something clearly mistaken, they can be corrected immediately. (And not just by you! This is another of the great values of using comments instead of posts: it doesn’t privilege one participant in a discussion. So if I write something wrong in a comment on your post, someone other than you can correct me just as easily as you can.) With posts, if I strawman you, well, sure you can write a post calling me out for it, but is everyone who reads my post going to read your counter-post? Not even close—especially because the delay between me posting my error and you posting the correction will be much greater than if we were commenting back and forth.
Using comments for discussions means that things are posted when they are fresh in the commenter’s mind; this is tremendously important both to maintain depth (with time, ideas lose specificity unless written down, and transform into vaguer, lower-resolution versions of themselves) and motivation to reply (after some time passes, one often says: “eh, is it even worth it to engage? meh”). (This last is especially a problem if you are also, simultaneously, increasing the effort required to write the reply, by forcing it to be a post instead of a comment.)
A conversation carried on via dueling posts is just inherently lower-resolution, more lacking in details, poorer by virtue of making it harder for people to contribute, more wordy but less contentful, harder to follow, and worse along dimensions of clarity, accuracy, depth, and even existence.
(Frankly, if you wanted to discourage criticism, while also ensuring that any criticism that does get posted probably won’t make much of an impact, you could hardly do worse than the idea of “make critics write top-level posts”. This suggests an obvious hypothesis w.r.t. your motivations. Obviously, this hypothesis is quite an uncharitable one, and also I don’t really believe it of you in particular—so how about a less obvious alternative: that despite your genuinely well-meaning motivations, your suggested remedy makes you the natural ally of those who do want to discourage criticism, and to blunt its effects.)
This gives people more space for slower replies and to take time to put in the effort to consider the points the other person is making with more space to get over immediate emotional responses and digging-in-one’s-heels.
See above: “slower replies” is more bad than good. As for getting over immediate emotional responses… look, there’s not really a “nice” way to say this, but… participants in intellectual discussion should be expected to have a certain degree of emotional continence and self-control. If a person cannot manage this, then they should simply not participate in such discussions, until and unless they learn to manage their emotions.
(I hear that various techniques exist to aid one in this task—like, say, meditation. Perhaps it might benefit folks here to try such things.)
It also makes sense to save your limited energies for those critics only if they meet a slightly higher bar of worthiness of engaging with. Not all critics are born equal. Just because someone has shown up to criticize you doesn’t make their criticism good or worth engaging with.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Note, however, that this consideration does not at all suggest that unworthy critics should be banned from commenting on your posts. (Perhaps you did not intend to suggest otherwise? But it’s very important to keep explicit track of which arguments do and do not serve to support which claims.)
I want to push back on the hypothesis that all people should be able to engage with all critics with ease as though the disgust/contempt was magically not there.
With ease? Perhaps not. For that matter—engage? Also perhaps not. (Although see above re: the importance of overcoming this particular bias.)
But remember: we are discussing whether it’s acceptable to allow authors, not only to not engage with certain critics, but to ban them from commenting on their posts (thus preventing everyone else from engaging with those critics, too!). The claim is that the discomfort of even seeing a person’s comments under your posts, just having their comments exist on the same page as your post and the discussions that you’re having, is too much to be asked to tolerate.
And I think that all people who expect to engage in any kind of even remotely serious intellectual discussion absolutely should be able to tolerate this. They should be able to tolerate it with ease, even.
I think it’s important to be able to engage with quality critics, but 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.
Those preferences are fine, I think there do indeed exist many stupid and evil people, but it just seems absurd to suggest that paragraphs like this is not equivalent to calling people “stupid” or “evil”:
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.
This is in direct reference to the preferences of the other people in the conversation! This is not some kind of far-mode depiction of humanity. This is you representing the preferences of your fellow commenters and posters.
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.
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.
First: no, it absolutely is a “major weakness in people” that they prefer to avoid engaging with relevant criticism merely on the basis of the “tone”, “valence”, etc., of the critics’ words. It is, in fact, a huge weakness. Overcoming this particular bias is one of the single biggest personal advances in epistemic rationality that one can make.
Or put another way, “Your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes more Charisma to persuade you of false things, and less Charisma to persuade you of true things”
I do think many people could be served by trying to find the truth in harsh criticisms, to wonder if part of the sting is the recognition the critic was right. You’re example of ArsDigita was quite helpful in getting a concrete demonstration of the value of that kind of critique.
The thing is, Greenspun failed.
People are not empty-machines of perfect reasoning. There’s an elephant in our brains. If the critique is to land, if it is to change someone’s mind or behavior, it has to get through to the elephant.
Second: you imply a false dichotomy between the “improv session” sort of faux-criticism I describe, and “exuding disgust and contempt”. Those are not the only options! It is entirely possible to criticize someone’s ideas, very harshly, while exhibiting (and experiencing) no significant emotionally-valenced judgment of the person themselves.
Indeed. It is also possible (I claim) to give pointed criticism while remaining friendly. The elephant doesn’t like it when words look like they come from an enemy. If you fail to factor in the elephant, and your critique doesn’t land, that is your own mistake. Just as they have failed to see the value of the critique, you have failed to see the weight of the elephant.
The executives and other board members of ArsDigita failed, but if Greenspun could have kept their ear by being friendlier, and thereby increased the chances of changing their minds or behavior, Greenspun also failed at rationality.
If it is rational to seek the truth of criticism even when it hurts, then it is also rational to deliver your criticism in a friendly way that will actually land. Or put another way, your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes less Wisdom to notice your plans will fail.
FWIW, I mostly don’t buy this framing. I think people being passively-aggressively hostile towards you in the way some LW commenters seem to valorize is I think reasonably well-correlated with indeed just not understanding your core points, not being valuable to engage with, and usually causing social dynamics in a space to go worse.
To be clear, this is a very small minority of people! But I think mostly when people get extremely frustrated at this extremely small minority of people, they pick up on it indeed being very rarely worth engaging with them deeper, and I don’t think the audience ends up particularly enlightened either (the associated comments threads are ones I glance over most reliably, and definitely far far underperform the marginal top-level posts in terms of value provided to the reader, which they usually trade off against).
I think people definitely have some unhealthy defensiveness, but the whole framing of “oh, you just need to placate the dumb elephant in people’s brains” strikes me as a very bad way to approach resolving that defensiveness successfully. It matters whether you surround yourself with sneering people, it really has a very large effect on you and your cognition and social environment and opportunities to trade.
(I had drafted a long reply to this which still needed more work, but I’ve rather gone over the limit of how much time to spend arguing about moderation on LessWrong this month, so I decided not to finish it. Nonetheless, FWIW, I thought this was a good comment and made some good counterpoints and I upvoted it. I think you’re right that it is often a weakness to be strongly affected by it, and that post-replies have many weakness compared to arguing in the comments, but I would want to defend that there are many worthy environments for public writing about how the world works where it makes sense for people with that weakness to optimize at-all for comfort over criticism, and also that it’s not a weakness in many contexts to use contempt/disgust to track real threats and people who aren’t worth talking to, it’s just accurate.)
Well… I hate to criticize when someone’s saying good things about me, but… frankly, I think that you shouldn’t’ve done that (vote on a comment without reading what it’s responding to, that is). I certainly disapprove of it.
Just noting briefly that I’ve gone back and read the whole post; I stand by the agree-react on your comment, and think I was correct in my assumption that his post did not provide a strong counterargument to the point you made at the top of your comment.
For the record, I had not read that instance of banning, and it is only just at this late point (e.g. after basically the whole thread has wrapped [edit: the whole thread, it turned out, had not wrapped]) did I read that thread and realize that this whole thread was downstream of that. All my comments and points so far were not written with that instance in mind but on general principle.
(And if you’re thinking “Surely you would’ve spoken to Habryka at work about this thread?” my response is “I was not at work! I am currently on vacation.” Yes, I have chosen to — and enjoyed! — spending my vacation arguing the basic principles of moderation, criticism, and gardening.)
Initial impressions re: that thread:
For the record I had read Said’s comment in “Top Comments” and not the original post (I’d read the opening 2-3 paragraphs), and had hit weak-agree-vote on Said’s comment. I was disappointed to see a post endorsing religions and was grateful for a comment that made a good point (I especially agree with the opening sentence) that I could agree with and express my continued anti-religion stance.
I don’t think Said’s comment was otherwise good at engaging with the post (note that I agree-upvoted but didn’t karma-upvote), and I think it was fine for Gordon to ban him for being a repeatedly obtuse yet snide commenter.
This is not the sort of comment that nobody but Said can make! I was even forming an intention to write my own until I saw that there was one already there.
I think Gordon is someone who is quite willing to engage with critics (e.g. he links to other examples of doing so with Said). I suspect that Said has such confidence in his comments that the only hypothesis he will consider is that this is someone unwilling to engage with an excellent critic, but I do not believe this hypothesis.
(Apologies in advance for extreme slowness of replies; I am currently rate-limited such that I can only post one comment per day, on the whole site.)
Well… I hate to criticize when someone’s saying good things about me, but… frankly, I think that you shouldn’t’ve done that (vote on a comment without reading what it’s responding to, that is). I certainly disapprove of it.
Indeed, I think that this highlights a serious mistake in the design of the “Top Comments” feature. For comparison, GreaterWrong’s Recent Comments view does not allow you to vote on the comments (the vote buttons are not displayed at all, although the current karma and agreement totals are); you must click through to the comment (either in context, or as a permalink) in order to vote on it.
(This is no accident; @clone of saturn and I discussed this particular design choice, and we agreed not to display vote buttons in Recent Comments—nor in search results listings, nor when viewing comments from a user’s page, etc.—because we did not want to encourage users to vote on comments without having seen them in their conversational context. It seemed to us that allowing users to vote from such auxiliary views, where comments were displayed shorn of their context, would create unfortunate dynamics, contribute to the development of echo chambers, etc.)
If you would have written the same comment, then why is it bad when I write it? And if it wouldn’t’ve been as bad, because you’d’ve written it differently… then what makes you sure that it would’ve been as good?
(EDIT: In other words: if you say something differently, then you’ve said something different. This isn’t an ironclad rule—there are such things as logically equivalent statements with no difference in connotation or valence; and there are also such things as ideas that, in order to be communicated effectively, must be described from multiple angles. But it is a strong heuristic. This is also why I am so intensely skeptical of “interpretive labor” as a tool of communication.)
Anyhow, I just don’t believe this claim of “in Said’s absence, all requisite criticisms will be written by other people”. I routinely read terrible posts or comments on Less Wrong, think to myself “I should reply… hm, no, I’ll let other people take up the slack, surely there are plenty of other people here who see the problems with this, and aren’t afraid to say something”, wait, and then… nothing. And I keep waiting, and… nothing. And I never comment, and… nobody else does, either.
(Another thing that often happens—not as often as “nobody bothers to make any serious criticisms”, but often—is that other people post critical comments, but none of them get to the heart of the matter, none of them make the important points, etc.)
As far as I can tell, this “there are plenty of substitutes available” view is just straightforwardly false. (I very much wish it were true! But it’s not. Indeed, this is a big part of why I find the LW of today to be so frustrating—there’s a dire lack of good criticism. Things aren’t as bad as the EA Forum… yet… but they’re surely heading in that direction.)
But of course you’re wrong about this. Of course I consider other hypotheses. It’s just that the other hypotheses are so very, very easy to falsify.
The problem, basically, is that you are treating “willing to engage with critics” as basically a binary property (or, at best, a single dimension of variation). But it’s nothing of the sort.
Plenty of authors are “willing to engage” with “critics”—as long as the “critics” are the sort that take as an axiom that the author’s work is valuable, important, and interesting, and that the author himself is intelligent, well-intentioned, well-informed, and sane; and as long as their “criticism” is of the sort that says “how very fascinating your ideas are; I would love to learn more about your thinking, but I have not yet grasped your thesis in its fullness, and am confused; might you deign to enlighten me?” (in other words, “here’s a prompt for you to tell us more about your amazing ideas”). (You might call this “intellectual discussion as improv session”—where, as in any improv, the only allowed replies are “yes, and…”.)
But of course those are terrible axioms to adopt, for the simple reason that they are very often false.
You say that Gordon links to examples of him engaging with my criticism. Did you follow those links? Did you read those comment threads? Perhaps you did, but for the benefit of other readers, let’s take a look: Gordon links to this comment, where he claims that he is using technical language; I reply briefly to ask a very simple question—which of his terms does he claim are “technical language”? could he link to definitions of them?—and he… well, I think @sunwillrise put it well: Gordon ran away. Just a flat refusal to answer the most trivial of questions (made in response to a straightforward claim which seemed like it outright invited such a question!).
And this is what you call “quite willing to engage with critics”?
It is challenging and unpleasant to be in an interaction with someone who is exuding disgust and contempt for you, and it’s not a major weakness in people that they disprefer conversations like that.
A good thing to do in such situations is to do post-level responses rather than comment-level replies. I’ve seen many post-level back-and-forths where people disrespect the other person’s opinions (e.g. Scott Alexander / Robin Hanson on healthcare, Scott Alexander / Current Affairs on whether republicans are literal monsters, Scott Alexander / Tyler Cowen on multiple topics, etc). This gives people more space for slower replies and to take time to put in the effort to consider the points the other person is making with more space to get over immediate emotional responses and digging-in-one’s-heels.
It also makes sense to save your limited energies for those critics only if they meet a slightly higher bar of worthiness of engaging with. Not all critics are born equal. Just because someone has shown up to criticize you doesn’t make their criticism good or worth engaging with.
I want to push back on any notion that all people should be able to engage with all critics with ease regardless of time/energy and as though disgust/contempt was magically not a factor. I think it’s important to be able to engage with quality critics, but 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).
(To clarify, I am not defending the position you gave in the quote above, about everyone having interesting things to say and conversations requiring “yes-and”. I think that is probably a position that, were you to move in the direction of, would push against the contempt/disgust that I suspect many users feel from you, but I am just defending that the contempt/disgust is unpleasant to interface with, not that one is supposed to respect other people’s opinions. I regularly have little respect for people’s opinions on this site, and say so!)
There are two mistakes here, I’d say.
First: no, it absolutely is a “major weakness in people” that they prefer to avoid engaging with relevant criticism merely on the basis of the “tone”, “valence”, etc., of the critics’ words. It is, in fact, a huge weakness. Overcoming this particular bias is one of the single biggest personal advances in epistemic rationality that one can make.
(Actually, I recently read a couple of tweets by @Holly_Elmore, with whom I certainly haven’t always agreed, but who describes this sort of thing very aptly.)
Second: you imply a false dichotomy between the “improv session” sort of faux-criticism I describe, and “exuding disgust and contempt”. Those are not the only options! It is entirely possible to criticize someone’s ideas, very harshly, while exhibiting (and experiencing) no significant emotionally-valenced judgment of the person themselves.
One of the best things that I’ve read recently was “ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up” by Philip Greenspun, which is a sort of postmortem of Ars Digita (a company that played a major role in the rise of the web, the dot-com bubble, etc.). I recommend the essay in its entirety; it’s quite entertaining, despite the seemingly dry subject matter (the background to an ongoing corporate lawsuit). A particularly relevant section, however, is this one, where Greenspun describes a period when the executives and board members at ArsDigita were ignoring all of his advice:
Now, do you think that this professor “exuded disgust and contempt” for young Philip?
No, this is not a good thing at all. The disadvantages are legion:
It’s much harder to get into details. A back-and-forth of posts is necessarily serial; I post, you post in response, I post in response. This throws away all of the advantages of a threaded comment system, which is that we can discuss two, or three, or fifteen, different aspects of your post in parallel, in the comments. If I have to write a whole post, should I discuss every separate thing I have to say about your post? In your response, should you do the same for my post? How readable is this going to be? (Not at all.)
It’s much less discoverable for readers, and much less convenient to follow the discussion. I read your post; now I need to go and read… how many? five? twelve? more? other posts, by how many other people, to get a sense of the conversation? Who’s replying to whom? What points are being made in response to what?
As a corollary to the above, it’s much harder for someone to join the conversation. I have something to say that doesn’t deserve a whole post—now what? Do I just not write it? If I do write it, where should it go? Discussions in comments have much lower activation energy, which means that people who have something relevant to say but would never write a whole post will definitely make a comment. Heck, you must know this! Look at how many excellent contributions to this site were written as comments, and then think about whether the author of the comment would have bothered to write a whole post—“My Thoughts On A Post That Someone Else Recently Wrote”. Almost none!
It discourages brevity. This is extremely bad. (We’ve had this discussion in the past, multiple times—do I need to dredge it up? I will if I have to, but I expect that you remember.)
It works against clarity, and encourages strawmanning. In a comment back-and-forth, if someone mischaracterizes your ideas, or says something clearly mistaken, they can be corrected immediately. (And not just by you! This is another of the great values of using comments instead of posts: it doesn’t privilege one participant in a discussion. So if I write something wrong in a comment on your post, someone other than you can correct me just as easily as you can.) With posts, if I strawman you, well, sure you can write a post calling me out for it, but is everyone who reads my post going to read your counter-post? Not even close—especially because the delay between me posting my error and you posting the correction will be much greater than if we were commenting back and forth.
Using comments for discussions means that things are posted when they are fresh in the commenter’s mind; this is tremendously important both to maintain depth (with time, ideas lose specificity unless written down, and transform into vaguer, lower-resolution versions of themselves) and motivation to reply (after some time passes, one often says: “eh, is it even worth it to engage? meh”). (This last is especially a problem if you are also, simultaneously, increasing the effort required to write the reply, by forcing it to be a post instead of a comment.)
A conversation carried on via dueling posts is just inherently lower-resolution, more lacking in details, poorer by virtue of making it harder for people to contribute, more wordy but less contentful, harder to follow, and worse along dimensions of clarity, accuracy, depth, and even existence.
(Frankly, if you wanted to discourage criticism, while also ensuring that any criticism that does get posted probably won’t make much of an impact, you could hardly do worse than the idea of “make critics write top-level posts”. This suggests an obvious hypothesis w.r.t. your motivations. Obviously, this hypothesis is quite an uncharitable one, and also I don’t really believe it of you in particular—so how about a less obvious alternative: that despite your genuinely well-meaning motivations, your suggested remedy makes you the natural ally of those who do want to discourage criticism, and to blunt its effects.)
See above: “slower replies” is more bad than good. As for getting over immediate emotional responses… look, there’s not really a “nice” way to say this, but… participants in intellectual discussion should be expected to have a certain degree of emotional continence and self-control. If a person cannot manage this, then they should simply not participate in such discussions, until and unless they learn to manage their emotions.
(I hear that various techniques exist to aid one in this task—like, say, meditation. Perhaps it might benefit folks here to try such things.)
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Note, however, that this consideration does not at all suggest that unworthy critics should be banned from commenting on your posts. (Perhaps you did not intend to suggest otherwise? But it’s very important to keep explicit track of which arguments do and do not serve to support which claims.)
With ease? Perhaps not. For that matter—engage? Also perhaps not. (Although see above re: the importance of overcoming this particular bias.)
But remember: we are discussing whether it’s acceptable to allow authors, not only to not engage with certain critics, but to ban them from commenting on their posts (thus preventing everyone else from engaging with those critics, too!). The claim is that the discomfort of even seeing a person’s comments under your posts, just having their comments exist on the same page as your post and the discussions that you’re having, is too much to be asked to tolerate.
And I think that all people who expect to engage in any kind of even remotely serious intellectual discussion absolutely should be able to tolerate this. They should be able to tolerate it with ease, even.
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.
Those preferences are fine, I think there do indeed exist many stupid and evil people, but it just seems absurd to suggest that paragraphs like this is not equivalent to calling people “stupid” or “evil”:
This is in direct reference to the preferences of the other people in the conversation! This is not some kind of far-mode depiction of humanity. This is you representing the preferences of your fellow commenters and posters.
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.
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.
Or put another way, “Your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes more Charisma to persuade you of false things, and less Charisma to persuade you of true things”
I do think many people could be served by trying to find the truth in harsh criticisms, to wonder if part of the sting is the recognition the critic was right. You’re example of ArsDigita was quite helpful in getting a concrete demonstration of the value of that kind of critique.
The thing is, Greenspun failed.
People are not empty-machines of perfect reasoning. There’s an elephant in our brains. If the critique is to land, if it is to change someone’s mind or behavior, it has to get through to the elephant.
Indeed. It is also possible (I claim) to give pointed criticism while remaining friendly. The elephant doesn’t like it when words look like they come from an enemy. If you fail to factor in the elephant, and your critique doesn’t land, that is your own mistake. Just as they have failed to see the value of the critique, you have failed to see the weight of the elephant.
The executives and other board members of ArsDigita failed, but if Greenspun could have kept their ear by being friendlier, and thereby increased the chances of changing their minds or behavior, Greenspun also failed at rationality.
If it is rational to seek the truth of criticism even when it hurts, then it is also rational to deliver your criticism in a friendly way that will actually land. Or put another way, your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes less Wisdom to notice your plans will fail.
FWIW, I mostly don’t buy this framing. I think people being passively-aggressively hostile towards you in the way some LW commenters seem to valorize is I think reasonably well-correlated with indeed just not understanding your core points, not being valuable to engage with, and usually causing social dynamics in a space to go worse.
To be clear, this is a very small minority of people! But I think mostly when people get extremely frustrated at this extremely small minority of people, they pick up on it indeed being very rarely worth engaging with them deeper, and I don’t think the audience ends up particularly enlightened either (the associated comments threads are ones I glance over most reliably, and definitely far far underperform the marginal top-level posts in terms of value provided to the reader, which they usually trade off against).
I think people definitely have some unhealthy defensiveness, but the whole framing of “oh, you just need to placate the dumb elephant in people’s brains” strikes me as a very bad way to approach resolving that defensiveness successfully. It matters whether you surround yourself with sneering people, it really has a very large effect on you and your cognition and social environment and opportunities to trade.
Agreed. I was trying to point out how refusing to be friendly, even from a cynical point of view, is counterproductive.
(I had drafted a long reply to this which still needed more work, but I’ve rather gone over the limit of how much time to spend arguing about moderation on LessWrong this month, so I decided not to finish it. Nonetheless, FWIW, I thought this was a good comment and made some good counterpoints and I upvoted it. I think you’re right that it is often a weakness to be strongly affected by it, and that post-replies have many weakness compared to arguing in the comments, but I would want to defend that there are many worthy environments for public writing about how the world works where it makes sense for people with that weakness to optimize at-all for comfort over criticism, and also that it’s not a weakness in many contexts to use contempt/disgust to track real threats and people who aren’t worth talking to, it’s just accurate.)
We luckily have shortform for that!
No apology necessary! I am grateful for the slowdown in rate of replies, I am becoming busier again. But thanks for flagging.
Just noting briefly that I’ve gone back and read the whole post; I stand by the agree-react on your comment, and think I was correct in my assumption that his post did not provide a strong counterargument to the point you made at the top of your comment.