I found your comment surprising so I re-read blueiris’s comment and then realized that they actually had a reasonable point in their second paragraph. I think I basically only read the first paragraph, which read (and still reads) to me as an unwarranted ad hominem that has nothing to do with the content of the post, and then decided the second paragraph wasn’t worth reading and downvoted without bothering to read the whole thing.
I undid my downvote, but still feel like the first paragraph is bad enough that I don’t want to upvote either.
Oh, I think they identified him correctly and the things he says are optimized for manipulating the social hierarchy in his favor. But “talk her way out of any overton window” is a work of art and the purpose of the karma system should not be to let conflict theorists vote out the impostor.
(would have been better by saying "an" not "any", because then it's a nonchalant description of the novel's protagonist, not a demagogue's propaganda.)
they identified him correctly and the things he says are optimized for manipulating the social hierarchy in his favor
I mean, if you can accuse any negative comment as doing that and ban their account (and really I am the only negative commenter) then I don’t really understand how you can call this a rational forum. I would get more rational replies on reddit or even the street corner. My comments are legitimate and it sounds like you just find them convincing.
No status games, and again there’s a total double standard here, my account is literally anonymous zero-status and I am talking to a bunch of high-status people who are pulling their ~100K twitter followers into this thread.
I think you can go too far in enforcing civility on a forum. If users can brand-build on twitter (partly with a porn account), drive ~100K twitter followers to their post to upvote it, add an emotionally-salient personal narrative to their post, and influence ongoing moral issues in the community (with real consequences!), and dissenters get quietly blocked then I think you have probably gone too far.
And if Ad Hominems aren’t legitimate, then why is it legitimate to add a salient personal narrative? Isn’t that just an inverse ad hominem?
I banned your account. It would have been ideal to message/comment about it, but I didn’t have the time/attention to properly review or comment yesterday. Seeing an account at −168 karma with multiple severely negative comments, it seemed better to intervene before things got more out of hand, instead of doing nothing, even though I didn’t have the time to get all the context on the relevant thread.
I will hopefully get another chance in another couple of hours to review the thread and think about your comments. Please don’t comment in the meantime. If you want to contact me, use ruby@lesswrong.com, or the Intercom in the bottom right corner.
I mean what you’re writing has the right intellectual aesthetic but this is no different to just banning me for no reason. The stuff I’m saying really isn’t that bad and I am really the only seriously negative poster here. Aella knows how to get people to do things, anyone on the edge of the Bay Area community will know this, and the rationalists are really bad at ejecting manipulative people. It’s dangerous.
Just look at how she is controlling the narrative on her twitter account. She’s quoting stuff that nobody ever said in a way that makes people sympathetic to her ( https://mobile.twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1465397786107682817 ). She’s quote-tweeting dumb things from Nate Soares so he is more favorable to her while she is making this power play ( https://i.imgur.com/e0wxqsk.png ) … and I guess she just deleted it because it sounded too obvious.
This is all serious stuff. Other people don’t do it. You can’t mix this with an ongoing moral issue and to be honest it just shouldn’t be allowed in the community anyway.
Regarding where I banned you without reason: I have a certain amount of trust in LessWrong’s members that my prior is that severely downvoted comments are probably quite bad*, especially if a quick glance makes it seem likely. It’s not enough to reach a final verdict, but it’s enough for me to want to hit the brakes even before I get a chance to full judge for myself. In this case, I think the voters were correct in direct in direction although perhaps not in magnitude.
Fwiw, while I think at least part of the content of this last comment is wrong, it seems fine to raise concerns in that style.
Lastly, I apologize that it took me quite so long to conduct a review in this case. I’ve been hard-pressed for time.
*Granted that more caution is required in community threads where there can be more tribalism.
She’s quoting stuff that nobody ever said … ( https://mobile.twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1465397786107682817 )
To be precise: she puts the words “talking from abuse” in quotation marks. I don’t think it’s a secret that quotation marks are often used for things other than direct quotes, and I don’t think her use of them here is unusual. It’s ambiguous, certainly, but not in a way that I read as deliberate.
(For that matter, how do you know nobody ever said the exact words “talking from abuse” in relation to her post? They aren’t in this thread, but they might be elsewhere for all I know, and I’m guessing for all you know. I don’t particularly think it matters—but apparently you think it matters, so this bears mentioning.)
in a way that makes people sympathetic to her
Does it? The three tweets in question read
Some of the feedback on my frame control post centers around this being personal for me, or me “talking from abuse.” I centered on personal examples because the nature of the issue makes it really hard to use other people’s examples; it lies in the very tiny, nuanced details. 1/
A huge amount of my post came out of talking to and being around others who were doing frame control, or had escaped from frame control. My post would have had a very different vibe if I’d pulled mostly from my childhood. 2/
The post pulls from close encounters I had in or with people from 5 different heavy frame-control systems (not including my childhood), all of them different in small ways. 4 of those were ones I spent a long time listening to accounts from people impacted by them.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but this doesn’t make me feel particularly sympathetic to her? Nor the opposite, to be clear, it just… doesn’t generate strong emotions, and nor does it feel particularly engineered to? Reading these tweets, I think one learns approximately nothing about her own experiences or how she relates to them (e.g. she doesn’t describe them as abuse).
She’s quote-tweeting dumb things from Nate Soares … while she is making this power play ( https://i.imgur.com/e0wxqsk.png )
To be precise: three hours before she tweeted about the frame control thing, she tweeted a quote from Nate.
“power play” is not a neutral way to describe these tweets.
so he is more favorable to her
This is an inference and should be explicitly flagged as such. You do not have access to what is inside Aella’s mind.
This is also an inference. The previous “I guess” kind of flags it as such, except that that also applies to the “she just deleted it”, so I think it should be more explicitly flagged.
For someone supposedly concerned about manipulative people, you don’t seem to be trying very hard to not be manipulative yourself.
I also want to flag that Ruby explicitly said
I will hopefully get another chance in another couple of hours to review the thread and think about your comments. Please don’t comment in the meantime.
This seems like a clearly stated request. It’s the kind of request Ruby has explicit authority to make and enforce. It has two caveats making it less of an imposition than it might otherwise have been (it potentially expires after Ruby’s reviewed the thread, and Ruby gave you explicit permission to message him directly). And as far as I can tell you completely ignored it. I don’t think there are zero situations where it’s right to ignore such requests, but I do think that if you thought this was such a situation you should have explained why.
Apparently Ruby didn’t make a big deal out of this? So I feel kind of weird making a big deal of it myself, but… honestly, I’d be somewhat inclined to ban you just for this.
Whatever portions of your comment that are still viewable aren’t ban worthy in the least. Downvote amounts, especially on a post that has plenty of new commenters and was heavily advertised elsewhere, shouldn’t affect a moderator’s banning decision. I see from his comment that Ruby disagrees with this, but really don’t understand why. The types of content that beget downvotes isn’t the type of comment that begets deletion.
And the fact that Aella has every ability to just delete your comment if she would like to, without having to follow any rules, kinda cuts against the whole idea of moderator invention in a case like this at all.
I don’t agree with much of anything you’re saying in these comments though. There’s definitely other seriously negative comments besides yourself. The author tweeting someone else doesn’t have any relevance to this discussion at all. I think the post should be allowed just as your comments should be allowed.
Whatever portions of your comment that are still viewable aren’t ban worthy in the least.
Probably not super productive to get into, but I disagree with “aren’t ban worthy” and strongly disagree with “aren’t ban worthy in the least”.
Downvote amounts, especially on a post that has plenty of new commenters and was heavily advertised elsewhere, shouldn’t affect a moderator’s banning decision. I see from his comment that Ruby disagrees with this
It sounds from Ruby’s comment that downvote counts affected his decision to ban temporarily, until he’d had time to review and come to an actual decision. Do you think that’s bad? (And if so, is that a “there is a cost to this” or a “this is bad all things considered”? Like, it might be that ideally downvote counts wouldn’t affect this decision, but given the reality Ruby faces, it was right of him to let them do so.) Alternatively, do you think downvote counts affected Ruby’s final decision?
do you think downvote counts affected Ruby’s final decision?
Yes of course. There wouldn’t be any controversy over this comment if it wasn’t heavily downvoted. People have been saying stuff like this on lw for years and it’s not been ban worthy. Ruby is being swayed by entirely the wrong factors and frankly it’s a little annoying to continue using a forum where a moderator is banning users because they were on the wrong end of a coordinated downvote brigade like this. The reason that the comment sits at −63 over 38 votes — I don’t think I’ve ever seen another comment go that low before — is because this post attracted plenty of new/outside community members who have downvoted the comment because it’s negative about Aella. Otherwise I would see a similar comment sitting at 0 or slightly negative.
My main issue is that Ruby himself isn’t even explaining why the ban is not ok.
A very strong element of the badness in the first comment above (“Your whole career...”) is leveraging negative intuitions and associations about working in porn that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance. Similarly, while I feel that accusations that someone is exploiting morally-grey areas really needs to be backed up with examples and relevance to the post.
What does this even mean? People accuse others all the time of exploiting morally grey areas without giving good examples. Half the posts about Leverage and MIRI and whatever are people arguing that they’re exploiting moral gray areas or implicitly accusing them of being morally depraved while providing either flimsy evidence or weird diatribes about demons and spirits. This post is accusing Aella’s father and many other people of being morally depraved. Telling people to cut off their empathy for other people. If anything should be banned for leveraging negative intuitions or accusations it’s this post.
Ruby’s comment is saying that blueiris is exploiting moral gray areas and he cites just one specific example while he says such accusations “[need] to be backed up with examples.” Of course blueiris himself gave an example of Aella exploiting moral gray areas but I guess it wasn’t a good enough example or something. Also are we at the point where saying that there’s moral issues with porn isn’t allowable anymore? Because that’s what the first half of Ruby’s comment suggests. Apparently this is a forum where you’re not allowed to say that porn is bad and working in porn is bad because porn producers make it easy for children to access it and porn gives them a warped view of sex which negatively affects their future social behavior.
without justification or explanation of relevance
We’re allowed to assume things are bad. When we talk about unfriendly AI we implicitly assume that it’s bad without having to explain why or justify it. Iadalboath was banned because he did bad things that were unrelated to his rational posts and nobody in the mod team ever decided to justify or explain how his non-rationalist activities were relevant to banning him on this forum. That’s all blueiris was doing here, hey this poster has said other things in different forums which should impact your impression of this post.
leveraging negative intuitions and associations about
So we’re not allowed to leverage negative intuitions? Half the sequences is leveraging negative intuitions. Dying is bad, so let’s solve it! Leveraging intuitions is just a natural part of conversation. And if we’re to apply this ‘leveraging negative intuitions’ thing to Aella’s post, yeah you get the point.
All in all, banning blueiris like this was a terrible decision by the moderators. I don’t agree with parts of his comments, and I think overall they are poorly worded. He’s also getting combative with people in weird ways, even some that are anti-ban. But he’s also made some good points in his comment and that’s why he shouldn’t be banned. Because now we’re going to lose out on more of the sorts of excellent phrases like, “can talk herself out of any overtown window,” as was pointed out already. I have an immediate liking to this phrase and can see implicitly who it could apply to. But now he’s been banned and I’m sure his impression of the community has gone down and we’ve lost all future opportunity for good comments and turns of phrase of his.
I think blueiris could have gotten his point across and not faced any sort of downvoting or banning if he just used the standard modern jargon of Lesswrong. Which is basically what Ruby suggests. That’s kind of embarrassing for the community as well. Ruby’s aware that the Blueiris got donwvoted heavily mostly because because he didn’t use the silly forum jargon.
I appreciate this comment for explaining where you’re coming from, but also there’s a bunch I want to push back on. I feel like I’m maybe just responding to surface-level stuff here, and also I probably missed some of the surface-level badness, but… eh, I do think this stuff should be pushed back on, and I don’t think it’s worth me putting in the time to make this comment better, so here we are I guess. Gonna limit myself to two more replies in this subthread after this.
For one, you seem to be simply asserting without evidence or justification things that I think you should more properly flag as inferences, and explain why you think them.
Yes of course.
There wouldn’t be any controversy over this comment if it wasn’t heavily downvoted.
Ruby is being swayed by entirely the wrong factors
this post attracted plenty of new/outside community members who have downvoted the comment because it’s negative about Aella.
The reason that the comment sits at −63 over 38 votes … is because [that last thing]
They might seem obvious to you? But they’re not obvious to me, and I have no way of knowing if this is “frontier knows things I don’t”, “frontier is interpreting the relevant info differently than I am”, or “frontier is overconfident”.
It’s not necessarily bad to simply assert such things—there’s a lot of them, providing evidence for them is work, and so on. But I would have preferred if you made it clearer that you were doing it and knew you were doing it.
Ruby’s comment is saying that blueiris is exploiting moral gray areas
I don’t think Ruby says this?
and he cites just one specific example while he says such accusations “[need] to be backed up with examples.”
Well, whatever Ruby is accusing blueiris of doing, is something blueiris did in this very thread. I think that’s significant here. If Ruby says that blueiris did something, I can just look for myself and see whether that’s the case. Sometimes it’s not obvious, like something could have multiple competing interpretations, but like… there’s no specific relevant knowledge that Ruby has here that I don’t, and this is pretty close to common knowledge between Ruby and the reader of his comment.
Whereas blueiris is accusing Aella of doing mostly-unspecified things in mostly-unspecified times and places. Did she do those things? Do I think they reflect badly on her? I don’t know. If I want to decide, how am I to do so?
When blueiris did eventually give specific accusations, I clicked the links and thought they fell flat.
Also are we at the point where saying that there’s moral issues with porn isn’t allowable anymore? Because that’s what the first half of Ruby’s comment suggests.
No it doesn’t? “that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance” is important here.
Apparently this is a forum where you’re not allowed to say that porn is bad and working in porn is bad because porn producers make it easy for children to access it and porn gives them a warped view of sex which negatively affects their future social behavior.
Ridiculous strawman. blueiris said nothing even remotely like this.
Iadalboath was banned because he did bad things that were unrelated to his rational posts and nobody in the mod team ever decided to justify or explain how his non-rationalist activities were relevant to banning him on this forum.
This doesn’t ring true to me. Here is the ban announcement which you also commented on.
For one, you seem to be simply asserting without evidence or justification things that I think you should more properly flag as inferences, and explain why you think them.
this post attracted plenty of new/outside community members who have downvoted the comment because it’s negative about Aella.
Lot of vaguely positive comments from users who have few comments and posts, even less than me, who joined the site recently.
3: An account made after the date of this post and only comments things defending this post.
4: “your own feelings of discomfort and resentment towards a woman for holding more influence and using her social influence to speak to her view of the world” Frankly this should be a ban too given Ruby’s stated guidelines.
Linked to from twitter account with not a ton of followers but substantial engagement. Circumstantial evidence that those twitter followers who either already have lw accounts will be inclined to follow link and comment+vote on comments in post.
Simple math suggests that −63 karma over 38 votes is indicative of a lot of low karma users downvoting rather than a few high karma users downvoting or strong downvoting. Especially given that I don’t think there’s many folks who would upvote or strong upvote the comment. Just look at comments at equivalent positive scores. Typically only at 25-30 votes because of the way karma works as I’ve seen it.
This was obvious to me from just glancing over the post. It wasn’t obvious to you but I don’t know how much effort you put into figuring it out one way or the other. Maybe you already noticed all this and don’t think it indicates the comment was vote brigaded. If that’s the case I don’t know what evidence would convince you otherwise.
You also asked me:
Alternatively, do you think downvote counts affected Ruby’s final decision?
You’re aware that this is a question as to the inner workings of Ruby’s mind correct? You’re literally asking me to mind read here. And I responded with my most likely explanation for what I think was going on in his head and then you chide me for giving you an inference based on circumstantial evidence. Pretty ridiculous. It’s like I’m talking to Modesto who also asks me to make claims on issues that are very tough to make a claim on. Ruby noticed the downvotes, said he cared about them, and has not banned other comments that are content-wise very similar but have less downvotes. That’s very good evidence that the downvotes mattered to the final decision as far as evidence goes.
Well, whatever Ruby is accusing blueiris of doing, is something blueiris did in this very thread. I think that’s significant here. If Ruby says that blueiris did something, I can just look for myself and see whether that’s the case. Sometimes it’s not obvious, like something could have multiple competing interpretations, but like… there’s no specific relevant knowledge that Ruby has here that I don’t, and this is pretty close to common knowledge between Ruby and the reader of his comment.
I think you’re misunderstanding my comment on this part. Ruby says Blueiris’s comment is partially banworthy because he’s accusing Aella of exploiting a morally gray area without examples and justifications. Blueiris provides the examples and justifications. You may not like the examples and justifications, you may think they fall flat, etc., but blueiris does provide them and I think he makes some good points about evidence of manipulative behavior on the part of Aella and a willingness to exploit people. Yet Ruby makes the very same kind of accusations against blueiris and provides no better examples than did blueiris. Either both comments are ok or neither are.
Apparently this is a forum where you’re not allowed to say that porn is bad and working in porn is bad because porn producers make it easy for children to access it and porn gives them a warped view of sex which negatively affects their future social behavior.
Ridiculous strawman. blueiris said nothing even remotely like this.
Not a ridiculous strawman because it’s accurate. Moderators allow reliance on negative intuition for a plethora of other things, but apparently not for porn. Why is that? I’m still relying on negative intuitions even with my comment on porn there. Who’s to say it’s necessarily bad for kids to have a warped view of sex? Who’s to say kids having negative future social behavior is a bad thing overall? Negative intuition.
I also think comments like yours have a lot of badness that should be pushed back against. You’re asking for high levels of effort from your counterparty while not putting in much yourself. You’re saying there’s a lot of surface-level badness going on with my comments but not actually providing any interpretation or explanation of the situation yourself that disagrees. You say my explanation of the Ialdaboath thing[1] and how strongly the moderators connected his offline behavior to his lw postings “doesn’t ring true to me.” But you don’t provide any differing interpretation. It’s easy to just say something’s bad. It’s even easier to say something’s bad without even saying how. People can do that all day. It’s better to say something’s bad and this other thing is right and better than the bad thing.
Of course at that time too many commenters are asserting that the mods are not being open by explaining exactly how the allegations fit into the banning. The post ostensibly say that they’re not relevant. The top comment says that the mods aren’t being open about admitting that the allegations played a central, if not the supreme, role in the banning. My commenting back then was of a similar sort. I think most comments back then were made with the understanding that Ialdabaoth was being banned because of the allegations and the mods weren’t being open about it.
Re outside community members: yeah, that all seems like decent circumstantial evidence. (I had seen the users, not seen the link in the tweet, and not thought hard about the vote count.)
On the other hand, the tweet itself doesn’t have that much engagement, and the link to LW is behind another click—if you showed me that tweet and asked me to predict how many people would sign up to LW because of it, I would guess fewer than 5. I’d also say, I think a lot of people will upvote things on the basis of “this shouldn’t be so negative”, even when they wouldn’t upvote it from neutral.
I don’t feel like litigating this, because I’m not sure we disagree too much on “how likely is it that this happened”. Like, probably I think it’s less likely than you do, but I think our real disagreement is that according to me, you should have flagged it as inference.
Maybe you already noticed all this and don’t think it indicates the comment was vote brigaded. If that’s the case I don’t know what evidence would convince you otherwise.
Well, if Ruby or another mod looked at the vote patterns and told us that happened, I’d believe it. It’s possible that they treat vote counts as too private to want to do that. If I saw people admitting to coordinating to vote brigade the comment, I’d probably believe it. That seems unlikely.
But it might be the case that something is true, and also we’ll never get the kind of evidence that brings us from “this is our confident inference” to “we can just flatly assert this”.
You’re literally asking me to mind read here. And I responded with my most likely explanation for what I think was going on in his head and then you chide me for giving you an inference based on circumstantial evidence.
No, I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference. Recall: “It’s not necessarily bad to simply assert such things … But I would have preferred if you made it clearer that you were doing it and knew you were doing it.”
Ruby noticed the downvotes, said he cared about them, and has not banned other comments that are content-wise very similar but have less downvotes.
What comments are you thinking of, specifically? I don’t recall seeing any others that I’d have said were similar in content.
Blueiris provides the examples and justifications. You may not like the examples and justifications, you may think they fall flat, etc., but blueiris does provide them
I guess I’m not sure what examples and justifications you’re thinking of? The two links above came after they’d been banned and asked not to comment further, and there seems very little else? And yeah, I’m not really impressed by bad examples and failed justifications.
Yet Ruby makes the very same kind of accusations against blueiris and provides no better examples than did blueiris.
Does not ring true to me.
Not a ridiculous strawman because it’s accurate.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
Moderators allow reliance on negative intuition for a plethora of other things, but apparently not for porn.
I repeat: “that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance” is important here.
You’re asking for high levels of effort from your counterparty while not putting in much yourself.
Again: inference! You don’t know how much effort I put in but you flatly assert that I didn’t put in much. And you’re not being precise enough to be falsifiable; do you think I put in 20 minutes and should have put in an hour, or do you think I put in an hour and should have put in three, or what?
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
You’re saying there’s a lot of surface-level badness going on with my comments but not actually providing any interpretation or explanation of the situation yourself that disagrees.
I think a lot of the badness in your comments isn’t particularly related to the situation, so that seems fine to me.
You say my explanation of the Ialdaboath thing[1] and how strongly the moderators connected his offline behavior to his lw postings “doesn’t ring true to me.” But you don’t provide any differing interpretation.
Yeah, it would have been better if I gave an alternate description of how I saw things, but… I dunno, maybe not that much better? Like, if you say “the Hobbit is a book about eagles” I can say “no, the Hobbit is about...”—but the Hobbit can be about multiple things—even if I’m right, that doesn’t make you wrong. So really I might just as well say “no, that’s not what it’s about”, and then either we find some way for one of us to convince the other or we drop it.
Better yet might be for me to take your explanation of why you think the Hobbit is about eagles and say what seems off about it to me. Which might mean taking some bits and saying “no, this is wrong and this other thing would have been right”, and taking other bits and just saying “this is wrong”. (If you describe a scene that doesn’t exist in the book, what more can I say than “that scene doesn’t exist in the book”?)
But indeed I didn’t do any of this, because (despite what you may have thought) I’d already put in substantial effort and didn’t want to put in more. I did provide a link to where readers could at least check, and see whether they thought the thing you said rang true to them.
But okay, sure, to give a brief try: you say “he was banned for X and no one decided to justify or explain why X was relevant”. It seems to me that Vaniver gave a lengthy explanation of why he was banned, and it was not “for X” though X played into the decision in ways that I really don’t feel like trying to summarize. And when you say “he was banned for X” this seems like yet another assertion about people’s internal states, this time contradicted by the things they said. (Which doesn’t mean the assertion is wrong, to be clear, but I think you should flag the contradiction as well as the “I am asserting things I cannot observe”.) And then “no one decided to justify or explain” seems weird given how many words were written on the subject… like, it sounds like “this is just a thing that happened and people kept quiet about it”, where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons? I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true.
I don’t have the conversational norm of rote performance of using weasel words. If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”. I don’t think tacking on “I think” to the front of that adds much content. Anybody’s free to disagree with me as much as they want and that has nothing to do with whether I say “I think” or “it seems to me.” Everything is an inference.
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference. I might do that for some people in some cases, but not for you or most any other lw poster in an online forum.
What irks me though is that you don’t follow the communicative rules you’re asking me to follow. And that’s why your comments are disturbing. You’re asking me to hamstring my rhetorical ability using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true
where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons?
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
Where is your hedging? Where is your “I think” or “Probably”. These are as assertive as any of my comments. And they’re all inferences. Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences. That’s how people communicate and the posts don’t suffer for it. Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
This is a common, dark, rhetorical trick. You’re asking me to hamstring my ability to communicate while taking full advantage of the communicative tools at your disposal. So when I see a comment where, “I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference” I have absolutely no desire to acquiesce to the restrictive conversational rules being asked of me.
If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”.
Well, how high? Because by my count you’ve been wrong at least once in this thread when doing this (when you accused me of not putting in much effort). If say 1⁄10 of things you flatly assert are false, that’s not very impressive.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference.
Yeah, this is fair.
Like, I think your communication style is a bad fit for LW, but that doesn’t mean changing it is easy for you.
using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
None of your examples show me failing to live up to the standards I was asking of you. It’s possible I miscommunicated those standards, and it’s possible (even probable) I fail to live up to them in other places. But in these specific cases, I did not fail.
I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true
This is a claim about my own state of mind. I don’t need to hedge it, because in this case I’m confident about my observations of my own state of mind.
where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons?
The hedging here comes from the question mark and the following words, “I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is”.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
This is observation, not inference.
(Moreover, it’s observation based on shared data. Anyone can read the thread and verify its truth or falsehood for themselves, and anyone can know they can do that based on the context.)
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing. I don’t know if I can pinpoint it, and I don’t feel like trying right now. Might be worth trying at some point in future. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already something in the sequences about it. FWIW my sense is that there’s some combination of “how confident are you” and “where does your confidence come from” and probably also “how relevant is it” that weighs into the question. And, like, yeah it’s not great that I’m trying to enforce standards I can’t really articulate, but… I don’t think that sinks the whole idea.)
Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences.
I confess I’m not very curious about these, given the prior examples.
Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
I think most people are going to distinguish between “Sweden’s national currency is the Korona” (which I would not say given my current state of knowledge) and “Sweden’s national currency is… the Korona, I think?” (which I would).
Both of them might literally mean that I think Sweden’s national currency is the Korona, but I expect most people will think I’m quite confident in the first case and not very confident in the second.
Anyway, I’m out. Mostly? I, uh, assign at least 10% probability that if you comment further, you’ll make confident false claims about me. (You’ve already done that in more than 10% of your comments on this thread.) I dislike when that happens. So like, I want to leave open the possibility that if you do that I might jump in to say “no”, and I guess I want to leave open that possibility for other things you might say too… but I’m at least going to try hard not to put effort into replying to you again. (But if you do say things and I don’t reply, that is not an endorsement.) This might be a mistake, maybe I should just cut it out entirely, but let’s give it a go.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
This is observation, not inference.
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing.
You don’t understand what an inference is and your strawman reasoning of why this comment is inference wouldn’t fool anybody. “nothing even remotely like” is a subjective determination. It’s comparing two things and judging how similar you think they are. I think it’ similar to what he said. You think it’s dissimilar. But I’m fine with you saying it with as much assertiveness as you do because again, I don’t have your rule about inferences and hedging words.
We have disagreements about how assertive your comments are, you think they aren’t that assertive, or if they’re assertive they’re non-inferences, and assume they naturally fit into your stated communicative standards. I’ve demonstrated how that’s not true. A regular person might think, ok then if people can have reasonable disagreements as to how something can be interpreted as an inference. maybe I shouldn’t be telling others to use these weird communicative protocols that entirely rely on my own subjective classification of things as inference or not. You don’t do that. You write with more misplaced confidence than I have ever done in this thread. I’m not going to keep responding if you’re going to make incredibly poor strawmans of what I’m saying and fail to realize your own communicative failures.
I’ve thought about these comments now over several hours and I do indeed think they are quite bad. I have deleted one and may delete/lock others others in the subthreads.
It’s tricky to precisely specify the badness with explicit principles, but won’t succeed entirely here. A very strong element of the badness in the first comment above (“Your whole career...”) is leveraging negative intuitions and associations about working in porn that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance. Similarly, while I feel that accusations that someone is exploiting morally-grey areas really needs to be backed up with examples and relevance to the post.
I think there is a steelman-able core in your comments, but a different tact is needed for productive discussion. A quick sketch might be “I am concerned that you are using undue influence to push your agenda on an ongoing sensitive community matter without being upfront about that. I don’t feel that the method of persuasion here (using your personal story) is legitimate. This is not proper process. I find it frustrating that you’re doing this and that other people seem to like it” – I’m sure that’s not exactly true to what you’d say, but a comment phrased like that is something I could engage with, agreeing, disagreeing, questioning, etc.
I should have been clear in my message above, I am leaving the initial ban in place for the original accounts and for the subsequent accounts being made. The ongoing comment pattern continues to seem quite bad to me.
blueiris’s posts read to me as a combination of good concepts & poor quality attacks/attempts to defend leverage (or something?). Personally I’d mind the attacks more if they were more successful and/or less obvious I think? As-is they’re annoying but don’t seem very dangerous epistemically.
I found your comment surprising so I re-read blueiris’s comment and then realized that they actually had a reasonable point in their second paragraph. I think I basically only read the first paragraph, which read (and still reads) to me as an unwarranted ad hominem that has nothing to do with the content of the post, and then decided the second paragraph wasn’t worth reading and downvoted without bothering to read the whole thing.
I undid my downvote, but still feel like the first paragraph is bad enough that I don’t want to upvote either.
Oh, I think they identified him correctly and the things he says are optimized for manipulating the social hierarchy in his favor. But “talk her way out of any overton window” is a work of art and the purpose of the karma system should not be to let conflict theorists vote out the impostor.
(would have been better by saying "an" not "any", because then it's a nonchalant description of the novel's protagonist, not a demagogue's propaganda.)
...
...
I mean, if you can accuse any negative comment as doing that and ban their account (and really I am the only negative commenter) then I don’t really understand how you can call this a rational forum. I would get more rational replies on reddit or even the street corner. My comments are legitimate and it sounds like you just find them convincing.
I’m against the banning. Your comments are playing status games.
No status games, and again there’s a total double standard here, my account is literally anonymous zero-status and I am talking to a bunch of high-status people who are pulling their ~100K twitter followers into this thread.
I think you can go too far in enforcing civility on a forum. If users can brand-build on twitter (partly with a porn account), drive ~100K twitter followers to their post to upvote it, add an emotionally-salient personal narrative to their post, and influence ongoing moral issues in the community (with real consequences!), and dissenters get quietly blocked then I think you have probably gone too far.
And if Ad Hominems aren’t legitimate, then why is it legitimate to add a salient personal narrative? Isn’t that just an inverse ad hominem?
I banned your account. It would have been ideal to message/comment about it, but I didn’t have the time/attention to properly review or comment yesterday. Seeing an account at −168 karma with multiple severely negative comments, it seemed better to intervene before things got more out of hand, instead of doing nothing, even though I didn’t have the time to get all the context on the relevant thread.
I will hopefully get another chance in another couple of hours to review the thread and think about your comments. Please don’t comment in the meantime. If you want to contact me, use ruby@lesswrong.com, or the Intercom in the bottom right corner.
I mean what you’re writing has the right intellectual aesthetic but this is no different to just banning me for no reason. The stuff I’m saying really isn’t that bad and I am really the only seriously negative poster here. Aella knows how to get people to do things, anyone on the edge of the Bay Area community will know this, and the rationalists are really bad at ejecting manipulative people. It’s dangerous.
Just look at how she is controlling the narrative on her twitter account. She’s quoting stuff that nobody ever said in a way that makes people sympathetic to her ( https://mobile.twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1465397786107682817 ). She’s quote-tweeting dumb things from Nate Soares so he is more favorable to her while she is making this power play ( https://i.imgur.com/e0wxqsk.png ) … and I guess she just deleted it because it sounded too obvious.
This is all serious stuff. Other people don’t do it. You can’t mix this with an ongoing moral issue and to be honest it just shouldn’t be allowed in the community anyway.
I’ve responded overall to your comments here.
Regarding where I banned you without reason: I have a certain amount of trust in LessWrong’s members that my prior is that severely downvoted comments are probably quite bad*, especially if a quick glance makes it seem likely. It’s not enough to reach a final verdict, but it’s enough for me to want to hit the brakes even before I get a chance to full judge for myself. In this case, I think the voters were correct in direct in direction although perhaps not in magnitude.
Fwiw, while I think at least part of the content of this last comment is wrong, it seems fine to raise concerns in that style.
Lastly, I apologize that it took me quite so long to conduct a review in this case. I’ve been hard-pressed for time.
*Granted that more caution is required in community threads where there can be more tribalism.
Talking of controlling the narrative...
To be precise: she puts the words “talking from abuse” in quotation marks. I don’t think it’s a secret that quotation marks are often used for things other than direct quotes, and I don’t think her use of them here is unusual. It’s ambiguous, certainly, but not in a way that I read as deliberate.
(For that matter, how do you know nobody ever said the exact words “talking from abuse” in relation to her post? They aren’t in this thread, but they might be elsewhere for all I know, and I’m guessing for all you know. I don’t particularly think it matters—but apparently you think it matters, so this bears mentioning.)
Does it? The three tweets in question read
I can’t speak for anyone else, but this doesn’t make me feel particularly sympathetic to her? Nor the opposite, to be clear, it just… doesn’t generate strong emotions, and nor does it feel particularly engineered to? Reading these tweets, I think one learns approximately nothing about her own experiences or how she relates to them (e.g. she doesn’t describe them as abuse).
To be precise: three hours before she tweeted about the frame control thing, she tweeted a quote from Nate.
“power play” is not a neutral way to describe these tweets.
This is an inference and should be explicitly flagged as such. You do not have access to what is inside Aella’s mind.
I can still see it at https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1465357722245910541.
This is also an inference. The previous “I guess” kind of flags it as such, except that that also applies to the “she just deleted it”, so I think it should be more explicitly flagged.
For someone supposedly concerned about manipulative people, you don’t seem to be trying very hard to not be manipulative yourself.
I also want to flag that Ruby explicitly said
This seems like a clearly stated request. It’s the kind of request Ruby has explicit authority to make and enforce. It has two caveats making it less of an imposition than it might otherwise have been (it potentially expires after Ruby’s reviewed the thread, and Ruby gave you explicit permission to message him directly). And as far as I can tell you completely ignored it. I don’t think there are zero situations where it’s right to ignore such requests, but I do think that if you thought this was such a situation you should have explained why.
Apparently Ruby didn’t make a big deal out of this? So I feel kind of weird making a big deal of it myself, but… honestly, I’d be somewhat inclined to ban you just for this.
Whatever portions of your comment that are still viewable aren’t ban worthy in the least. Downvote amounts, especially on a post that has plenty of new commenters and was heavily advertised elsewhere, shouldn’t affect a moderator’s banning decision. I see from his comment that Ruby disagrees with this, but really don’t understand why. The types of content that beget downvotes isn’t the type of comment that begets deletion.
And the fact that Aella has every ability to just delete your comment if she would like to, without having to follow any rules, kinda cuts against the whole idea of moderator invention in a case like this at all.
I don’t agree with much of anything you’re saying in these comments though. There’s definitely other seriously negative comments besides yourself. The author tweeting someone else doesn’t have any relevance to this discussion at all. I think the post should be allowed just as your comments should be allowed.
Probably not super productive to get into, but I disagree with “aren’t ban worthy” and strongly disagree with “aren’t ban worthy in the least”.
It sounds from Ruby’s comment that downvote counts affected his decision to ban temporarily, until he’d had time to review and come to an actual decision. Do you think that’s bad? (And if so, is that a “there is a cost to this” or a “this is bad all things considered”? Like, it might be that ideally downvote counts wouldn’t affect this decision, but given the reality Ruby faces, it was right of him to let them do so.) Alternatively, do you think downvote counts affected Ruby’s final decision?
Yes of course. There wouldn’t be any controversy over this comment if it wasn’t heavily downvoted. People have been saying stuff like this on lw for years and it’s not been ban worthy. Ruby is being swayed by entirely the wrong factors and frankly it’s a little annoying to continue using a forum where a moderator is banning users because they were on the wrong end of a coordinated downvote brigade like this. The reason that the comment sits at −63 over 38 votes — I don’t think I’ve ever seen another comment go that low before — is because this post attracted plenty of new/outside community members who have downvoted the comment because it’s negative about Aella. Otherwise I would see a similar comment sitting at 0 or slightly negative.
My main issue is that Ruby himself isn’t even explaining why the ban is not ok.
What does this even mean? People accuse others all the time of exploiting morally grey areas without giving good examples. Half the posts about Leverage and MIRI and whatever are people arguing that they’re exploiting moral gray areas or implicitly accusing them of being morally depraved while providing either flimsy evidence or weird diatribes about demons and spirits. This post is accusing Aella’s father and many other people of being morally depraved. Telling people to cut off their empathy for other people. If anything should be banned for leveraging negative intuitions or accusations it’s this post.
Ruby’s comment is saying that blueiris is exploiting moral gray areas and he cites just one specific example while he says such accusations “[need] to be backed up with examples.” Of course blueiris himself gave an example of Aella exploiting moral gray areas but I guess it wasn’t a good enough example or something. Also are we at the point where saying that there’s moral issues with porn isn’t allowable anymore? Because that’s what the first half of Ruby’s comment suggests. Apparently this is a forum where you’re not allowed to say that porn is bad and working in porn is bad because porn producers make it easy for children to access it and porn gives them a warped view of sex which negatively affects their future social behavior.
We’re allowed to assume things are bad. When we talk about unfriendly AI we implicitly assume that it’s bad without having to explain why or justify it. Iadalboath was banned because he did bad things that were unrelated to his rational posts and nobody in the mod team ever decided to justify or explain how his non-rationalist activities were relevant to banning him on this forum. That’s all blueiris was doing here, hey this poster has said other things in different forums which should impact your impression of this post.
So we’re not allowed to leverage negative intuitions? Half the sequences is leveraging negative intuitions. Dying is bad, so let’s solve it! Leveraging intuitions is just a natural part of conversation. And if we’re to apply this ‘leveraging negative intuitions’ thing to Aella’s post, yeah you get the point.
All in all, banning blueiris like this was a terrible decision by the moderators. I don’t agree with parts of his comments, and I think overall they are poorly worded. He’s also getting combative with people in weird ways, even some that are anti-ban. But he’s also made some good points in his comment and that’s why he shouldn’t be banned. Because now we’re going to lose out on more of the sorts of excellent phrases like, “can talk herself out of any overtown window,” as was pointed out already. I have an immediate liking to this phrase and can see implicitly who it could apply to. But now he’s been banned and I’m sure his impression of the community has gone down and we’ve lost all future opportunity for good comments and turns of phrase of his.
I think blueiris could have gotten his point across and not faced any sort of downvoting or banning if he just used the standard modern jargon of Lesswrong. Which is basically what Ruby suggests. That’s kind of embarrassing for the community as well. Ruby’s aware that the Blueiris got donwvoted heavily mostly because because he didn’t use the silly forum jargon.
I appreciate this comment for explaining where you’re coming from, but also there’s a bunch I want to push back on. I feel like I’m maybe just responding to surface-level stuff here, and also I probably missed some of the surface-level badness, but… eh, I do think this stuff should be pushed back on, and I don’t think it’s worth me putting in the time to make this comment better, so here we are I guess. Gonna limit myself to two more replies in this subthread after this.
For one, you seem to be simply asserting without evidence or justification things that I think you should more properly flag as inferences, and explain why you think them.
They might seem obvious to you? But they’re not obvious to me, and I have no way of knowing if this is “frontier knows things I don’t”, “frontier is interpreting the relevant info differently than I am”, or “frontier is overconfident”.
It’s not necessarily bad to simply assert such things—there’s a lot of them, providing evidence for them is work, and so on. But I would have preferred if you made it clearer that you were doing it and knew you were doing it.
I don’t think Ruby says this?
Well, whatever Ruby is accusing blueiris of doing, is something blueiris did in this very thread. I think that’s significant here. If Ruby says that blueiris did something, I can just look for myself and see whether that’s the case. Sometimes it’s not obvious, like something could have multiple competing interpretations, but like… there’s no specific relevant knowledge that Ruby has here that I don’t, and this is pretty close to common knowledge between Ruby and the reader of his comment.
Whereas blueiris is accusing Aella of doing mostly-unspecified things in mostly-unspecified times and places. Did she do those things? Do I think they reflect badly on her? I don’t know. If I want to decide, how am I to do so?
When blueiris did eventually give specific accusations, I clicked the links and thought they fell flat.
No it doesn’t? “that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance” is important here.
Ridiculous strawman. blueiris said nothing even remotely like this.
This doesn’t ring true to me. Here is the ban announcement which you also commented on.
Lot of vaguely positive comments from users who have few comments and posts, even less than me, who joined the site recently.
1
2
3: An account made after the date of this post and only comments things defending this post.
4: “your own feelings of discomfort and resentment towards a woman for holding more influence and using her social influence to speak to her view of the world” Frankly this should be a ban too given Ruby’s stated guidelines.
5 see 3 above.
6: etc.
Linked to from twitter account with not a ton of followers but substantial engagement. Circumstantial evidence that those twitter followers who either already have lw accounts will be inclined to follow link and comment+vote on comments in post.
Simple math suggests that −63 karma over 38 votes is indicative of a lot of low karma users downvoting rather than a few high karma users downvoting or strong downvoting. Especially given that I don’t think there’s many folks who would upvote or strong upvote the comment. Just look at comments at equivalent positive scores. Typically only at 25-30 votes because of the way karma works as I’ve seen it.
This was obvious to me from just glancing over the post. It wasn’t obvious to you but I don’t know how much effort you put into figuring it out one way or the other. Maybe you already noticed all this and don’t think it indicates the comment was vote brigaded. If that’s the case I don’t know what evidence would convince you otherwise.
You also asked me:
You’re aware that this is a question as to the inner workings of Ruby’s mind correct? You’re literally asking me to mind read here. And I responded with my most likely explanation for what I think was going on in his head and then you chide me for giving you an inference based on circumstantial evidence. Pretty ridiculous. It’s like I’m talking to Modesto who also asks me to make claims on issues that are very tough to make a claim on. Ruby noticed the downvotes, said he cared about them, and has not banned other comments that are content-wise very similar but have less downvotes. That’s very good evidence that the downvotes mattered to the final decision as far as evidence goes.
I think you’re misunderstanding my comment on this part. Ruby says Blueiris’s comment is partially banworthy because he’s accusing Aella of exploiting a morally gray area without examples and justifications. Blueiris provides the examples and justifications. You may not like the examples and justifications, you may think they fall flat, etc., but blueiris does provide them and I think he makes some good points about evidence of manipulative behavior on the part of Aella and a willingness to exploit people. Yet Ruby makes the very same kind of accusations against blueiris and provides no better examples than did blueiris. Either both comments are ok or neither are.
Not a ridiculous strawman because it’s accurate. Moderators allow reliance on negative intuition for a plethora of other things, but apparently not for porn. Why is that? I’m still relying on negative intuitions even with my comment on porn there. Who’s to say it’s necessarily bad for kids to have a warped view of sex? Who’s to say kids having negative future social behavior is a bad thing overall? Negative intuition.
I also think comments like yours have a lot of badness that should be pushed back against. You’re asking for high levels of effort from your counterparty while not putting in much yourself. You’re saying there’s a lot of surface-level badness going on with my comments but not actually providing any interpretation or explanation of the situation yourself that disagrees. You say my explanation of the Ialdaboath thing[1] and how strongly the moderators connected his offline behavior to his lw postings “doesn’t ring true to me.” But you don’t provide any differing interpretation. It’s easy to just say something’s bad. It’s even easier to say something’s bad without even saying how. People can do that all day. It’s better to say something’s bad and this other thing is right and better than the bad thing.
Of course at that time too many commenters are asserting that the mods are not being open by explaining exactly how the allegations fit into the banning. The post ostensibly say that they’re not relevant. The top comment says that the mods aren’t being open about admitting that the allegations played a central, if not the supreme, role in the banning. My commenting back then was of a similar sort. I think most comments back then were made with the understanding that Ialdabaoth was being banned because of the allegations and the mods weren’t being open about it.
Re outside community members: yeah, that all seems like decent circumstantial evidence. (I had seen the users, not seen the link in the tweet, and not thought hard about the vote count.)
On the other hand, the tweet itself doesn’t have that much engagement, and the link to LW is behind another click—if you showed me that tweet and asked me to predict how many people would sign up to LW because of it, I would guess fewer than 5. I’d also say, I think a lot of people will upvote things on the basis of “this shouldn’t be so negative”, even when they wouldn’t upvote it from neutral.
I don’t feel like litigating this, because I’m not sure we disagree too much on “how likely is it that this happened”. Like, probably I think it’s less likely than you do, but I think our real disagreement is that according to me, you should have flagged it as inference.
Well, if Ruby or another mod looked at the vote patterns and told us that happened, I’d believe it. It’s possible that they treat vote counts as too private to want to do that. If I saw people admitting to coordinating to vote brigade the comment, I’d probably believe it. That seems unlikely.
But it might be the case that something is true, and also we’ll never get the kind of evidence that brings us from “this is our confident inference” to “we can just flatly assert this”.
No, I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference. Recall: “It’s not necessarily bad to simply assert such things … But I would have preferred if you made it clearer that you were doing it and knew you were doing it.”
What comments are you thinking of, specifically? I don’t recall seeing any others that I’d have said were similar in content.
I guess I’m not sure what examples and justifications you’re thinking of? The two links above came after they’d been banned and asked not to comment further, and there seems very little else? And yeah, I’m not really impressed by bad examples and failed justifications.
Does not ring true to me.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
I repeat: “that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance” is important here.
Again: inference! You don’t know how much effort I put in but you flatly assert that I didn’t put in much. And you’re not being precise enough to be falsifiable; do you think I put in 20 minutes and should have put in an hour, or do you think I put in an hour and should have put in three, or what?
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
I think a lot of the badness in your comments isn’t particularly related to the situation, so that seems fine to me.
Yeah, it would have been better if I gave an alternate description of how I saw things, but… I dunno, maybe not that much better? Like, if you say “the Hobbit is a book about eagles” I can say “no, the Hobbit is about...”—but the Hobbit can be about multiple things—even if I’m right, that doesn’t make you wrong. So really I might just as well say “no, that’s not what it’s about”, and then either we find some way for one of us to convince the other or we drop it.
Better yet might be for me to take your explanation of why you think the Hobbit is about eagles and say what seems off about it to me. Which might mean taking some bits and saying “no, this is wrong and this other thing would have been right”, and taking other bits and just saying “this is wrong”. (If you describe a scene that doesn’t exist in the book, what more can I say than “that scene doesn’t exist in the book”?)
But indeed I didn’t do any of this, because (despite what you may have thought) I’d already put in substantial effort and didn’t want to put in more. I did provide a link to where readers could at least check, and see whether they thought the thing you said rang true to them.
But okay, sure, to give a brief try: you say “he was banned for X and no one decided to justify or explain why X was relevant”. It seems to me that Vaniver gave a lengthy explanation of why he was banned, and it was not “for X” though X played into the decision in ways that I really don’t feel like trying to summarize. And when you say “he was banned for X” this seems like yet another assertion about people’s internal states, this time contradicted by the things they said. (Which doesn’t mean the assertion is wrong, to be clear, but I think you should flag the contradiction as well as the “I am asserting things I cannot observe”.) And then “no one decided to justify or explain” seems weird given how many words were written on the subject… like, it sounds like “this is just a thing that happened and people kept quiet about it”, where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons? I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true.
I don’t have the conversational norm of rote performance of using weasel words. If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”. I don’t think tacking on “I think” to the front of that adds much content. Anybody’s free to disagree with me as much as they want and that has nothing to do with whether I say “I think” or “it seems to me.” Everything is an inference.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference. I might do that for some people in some cases, but not for you or most any other lw poster in an online forum.
What irks me though is that you don’t follow the communicative rules you’re asking me to follow. And that’s why your comments are disturbing. You’re asking me to hamstring my rhetorical ability using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
Where is your hedging? Where is your “I think” or “Probably”. These are as assertive as any of my comments. And they’re all inferences. Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences. That’s how people communicate and the posts don’t suffer for it. Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
This is a common, dark, rhetorical trick. You’re asking me to hamstring my ability to communicate while taking full advantage of the communicative tools at your disposal. So when I see a comment where, “I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference” I have absolutely no desire to acquiesce to the restrictive conversational rules being asked of me.
Well, how high? Because by my count you’ve been wrong at least once in this thread when doing this (when you accused me of not putting in much effort). If say 1⁄10 of things you flatly assert are false, that’s not very impressive.
Yeah, this is fair.
Like, I think your communication style is a bad fit for LW, but that doesn’t mean changing it is easy for you.
None of your examples show me failing to live up to the standards I was asking of you. It’s possible I miscommunicated those standards, and it’s possible (even probable) I fail to live up to them in other places. But in these specific cases, I did not fail.
This is a claim about my own state of mind. I don’t need to hedge it, because in this case I’m confident about my observations of my own state of mind.
The hedging here comes from the question mark and the following words, “I dunno, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is”.
This is observation, not inference.
(Moreover, it’s observation based on shared data. Anyone can read the thread and verify its truth or falsehood for themselves, and anyone can know they can do that based on the context.)
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing. I don’t know if I can pinpoint it, and I don’t feel like trying right now. Might be worth trying at some point in future. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already something in the sequences about it. FWIW my sense is that there’s some combination of “how confident are you” and “where does your confidence come from” and probably also “how relevant is it” that weighs into the question. And, like, yeah it’s not great that I’m trying to enforce standards I can’t really articulate, but… I don’t think that sinks the whole idea.)
I confess I’m not very curious about these, given the prior examples.
I think most people are going to distinguish between “Sweden’s national currency is the Korona” (which I would not say given my current state of knowledge) and “Sweden’s national currency is… the Korona, I think?” (which I would).
Both of them might literally mean that I think Sweden’s national currency is the Korona, but I expect most people will think I’m quite confident in the first case and not very confident in the second.
Anyway, I’m out. Mostly? I, uh, assign at least 10% probability that if you comment further, you’ll make confident false claims about me. (You’ve already done that in more than 10% of your comments on this thread.) I dislike when that happens. So like, I want to leave open the possibility that if you do that I might jump in to say “no”, and I guess I want to leave open that possibility for other things you might say too… but I’m at least going to try hard not to put effort into replying to you again. (But if you do say things and I don’t reply, that is not an endorsement.) This might be a mistake, maybe I should just cut it out entirely, but let’s give it a go.
You don’t understand what an inference is and your strawman reasoning of why this comment is inference wouldn’t fool anybody. “nothing even remotely like” is a subjective determination. It’s comparing two things and judging how similar you think they are. I think it’ similar to what he said. You think it’s dissimilar. But I’m fine with you saying it with as much assertiveness as you do because again, I don’t have your rule about inferences and hedging words.
We have disagreements about how assertive your comments are, you think they aren’t that assertive, or if they’re assertive they’re non-inferences, and assume they naturally fit into your stated communicative standards. I’ve demonstrated how that’s not true. A regular person might think, ok then if people can have reasonable disagreements as to how something can be interpreted as an inference. maybe I shouldn’t be telling others to use these weird communicative protocols that entirely rely on my own subjective classification of things as inference or not. You don’t do that. You write with more misplaced confidence than I have ever done in this thread. I’m not going to keep responding if you’re going to make incredibly poor strawmans of what I’m saying and fail to realize your own communicative failures.
I’ve thought about these comments now over several hours and I do indeed think they are quite bad. I have deleted one and may delete/lock others others in the subthreads.
It’s tricky to precisely specify the badness with explicit principles, but won’t succeed entirely here. A very strong element of the badness in the first comment above (“Your whole career...”) is leveraging negative intuitions and associations about working in porn that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance. Similarly, while I feel that accusations that someone is exploiting morally-grey areas really needs to be backed up with examples and relevance to the post.
I think there is a steelman-able core in your comments, but a different tact is needed for productive discussion. A quick sketch might be “I am concerned that you are using undue influence to push your agenda on an ongoing sensitive community matter without being upfront about that. I don’t feel that the method of persuasion here (using your personal story) is legitimate. This is not proper process. I find it frustrating that you’re doing this and that other people seem to like it” – I’m sure that’s not exactly true to what you’d say, but a comment phrased like that is something I could engage with, agreeing, disagreeing, questioning, etc.
I should have been clear in my message above, I am leaving the initial ban in place for the original accounts and for the subsequent accounts being made. The ongoing comment pattern continues to seem quite bad to me.
blueiris’s posts read to me as a combination of good concepts & poor quality attacks/attempts to defend leverage (or something?). Personally I’d mind the attacks more if they were more successful and/or less obvious I think? As-is they’re annoying but don’t seem very dangerous epistemically.