I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior[1]. This would predictably eat dozens of hours of time across a bunch of people. If you think Nate’s advice is bad, maybe because you think that people following it risk behaving more like Nate (in the negative ways that you experienced), then I think you should make an argument to that effect directly, which seems more likely to accomplish (what I think is) your goal.
I would share your concern if TurnTrout or others were replying to everything Nate published in this way. But well… the original comment seemed reasonably relevant to the topic of the post and TurnTrout’s reply seemed relevant to the comment. So it seems like there’s likely a limiting principle here that would prevent your concern from being realized.
I would share your concern if TurnTrout or others were replying to everything Nate published in this way. But well… the original comment seemed reasonably relevant to the topic of the post and TurnTrout’s reply seemed relevant to the comment. So it seems like there’s likely a limiting principle here
I think there is a huge limiter. Consider that Nate’s inappropriate behavior towards Kurt Brown happened in 2017 & 2018 but resulted in no consequences until 5 and a half years later. This suggests that victims are massively under-supplying information due to high costs. We do not have an over-supply problem.
Let me share some of what I’ve learned from my own experience and reflection over the last two years, and speaking with ~10 people who recounted their own experiences.
Speaking out against powerful people is costly. Due to how tight-knit the community is, speaking out may well limit your professional opportunities, get you uninvited to crucial networking events, and reduce your chances of getting funding. Junior researchers may worry about displeased moderators thumbing the scales against future work they might want to share on the Alignment Forum. (And I imagine that junior, vulnerable community members are more likely to be mistreated to begin with.)
People who come forward will also have their motivations scrutinized. Were they being “too triggered”? This is exhausting, especially because (more hurt) → (more trauma) → (less equanimity). However, LessWrong culture demands equanimity while recounting trauma. If you show signs of pain or upset, or even verbally admit that you’re upset while writing calmly—you face accusations of irrationality. Alternatively, observers might invent false psychological narratives—claiming a grievance is actually about a romantic situation or a personal grudge—rather than engaging with the specific evidence and claims provided by the person who came forward.
But if abuse actually took place, then the victim is quite likely to feel upset! What sense, then, does it make to penalize people because they are upset, when that’s exactly what you’d see from many people who were abused?[1]
This irrational, insular set of incentives damages community health and subsidizes silence, which in turn reduces penalties for abuse.
Certainly, people should write clearly, honestly, and without unnecessary hostility. However, I’m critiquing “dismiss people who are mad or upset, even if they communicate appropriately.”
I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior
I totally agree, but I think that the topic of the post was pretty related to the things people have complained about before, so it’s more on topic than it would be on a random Nate post (e.g. it seems more relevant on that post than on most of Nate’s blog posts).
I agree it’s more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be, but the comment itself did not seem particularly aimed at arguing that Nate’s advice was bad or that following it would have undesirable consequences[1]. (I think the comments it was responding to were pretty borderline here.)
I think I am comfortable arguing that it would be bad if every post that Nate made on subjects like “how to communicate with people about AI x-risk” included people leaving comments with argument-free pointers to past Nate-drama.
The most recent post by Nate seemed good to me; I think its advice was more-than-sufficiently hedged and do not think that people moving in that direction on the margin would be bad for the world. If people think otherwise they should say so, and if they want to use Nate’s interpersonal foibles as evidence that the advice is bad that’s fine, though (obviously) I don’t expect I’d find such arguments very convincing.
I agree it’s more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be
It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.
The vast majority[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares’s personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.
If the post was along the lines of “I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication” or “I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion” or “I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]”, then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.
But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.
If people think otherwise they should say so
LessWrong seems to hold local validity in arguing as a core principle, or so I think. The process by which you argue for a conclusion is worth discussing, not just the conclusion itself.
He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place!
I don’t think just because you use a personal example in order to communicate (and possible defend) the core thesis of a post, that this hereby opens you up to have all vaguely-relevant personal information about you discussed and dissected in the comment section.
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
To be clear, that kind of information can be quite important to share for other reasons (and I have many times in the past written up my concerns with various community leaders both on LW and the EA Forum), but in as much as someone is trying to argue for any kind of generalized principles on a specific post, I think it’s definitely within the bounds of moderatable action if someone brings up a bunch of personal information in an aggressive way.
I do think that kind of stuff is often appropriate for other places on the site.
And to be clear, I think someone can succeed at raising the relevant points in a way that doesn’t predictably derail the whole discussion, and also signals appropriate respect for people’s public/private boundaries, but one should model this as a quite dicey operation that is reasonably likely to fail, and if someone wants to do this, I would expect attempts at cooperating and not letting the discussion fall into one of the standard internet demon thread attractors. If someone doesn’t have that skill, I think they shouldn’t attempt it (and just post the information somewhere else).
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
It does seem to me like an invitation[1] to say “Actually, I’ve spoken with a few of this guy’s previous managers and all three of them say he used the same strat on his projects at their firms, but his predictions were way off.”
But that’s not quite the crux of the matter; what’s critical (for you, at least) is the capacity to derail convos into off-topic Demon Threads, if there is too much aggression or not enough respect or too many boundaries broken.[2]
That’s not quite so critical for me, but I’m not a mod, and I have written enough about this already, and for that reason I shall stop it here.
I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior[1]. This would predictably eat dozens of hours of time across a bunch of people. If you think Nate’s advice is bad, maybe because you think that people following it risk behaving more like Nate (in the negative ways that you experienced), then I think you should make an argument to that effect directly, which seems more likely to accomplish (what I think is) your goal.
Which, not having previously expressed an opinion on, I’ll say once—sounds bad to me.
I would share your concern if TurnTrout or others were replying to everything Nate published in this way. But well… the original comment seemed reasonably relevant to the topic of the post and TurnTrout’s reply seemed relevant to the comment. So it seems like there’s likely a limiting principle here that would prevent your concern from being realized.
I think there is a huge limiter. Consider that Nate’s inappropriate behavior towards Kurt Brown happened in 2017 & 2018 but resulted in no consequences until 5 and a half years later. This suggests that victims are massively under-supplying information due to high costs. We do not have an over-supply problem.
Let me share some of what I’ve learned from my own experience and reflection over the last two years, and speaking with ~10 people who recounted their own experiences.
Speaking out against powerful people is costly. Due to how tight-knit the community is, speaking out may well limit your professional opportunities, get you uninvited to crucial networking events, and reduce your chances of getting funding. Junior researchers may worry about displeased moderators thumbing the scales against future work they might want to share on the Alignment Forum. (And I imagine that junior, vulnerable community members are more likely to be mistreated to begin with.)
People who come forward will also have their motivations scrutinized. Were they being “too triggered”? This is exhausting, especially because (more hurt) → (more trauma) → (less equanimity). However, LessWrong culture demands equanimity while recounting trauma. If you show signs of pain or upset, or even verbally admit that you’re upset while writing calmly—you face accusations of irrationality. Alternatively, observers might invent false psychological narratives—claiming a grievance is actually about a romantic situation or a personal grudge—rather than engaging with the specific evidence and claims provided by the person who came forward.
But if abuse actually took place, then the victim is quite likely to feel upset! What sense, then, does it make to penalize people because they are upset, when that’s exactly what you’d see from many people who were abused? [1]
This irrational, insular set of incentives damages community health and subsidizes silence, which in turn reduces penalties for abuse.
Certainly, people should write clearly, honestly, and without unnecessary hostility. However, I’m critiquing “dismiss people who are mad or upset, even if they communicate appropriately.”
I totally agree, but I think that the topic of the post was pretty related to the things people have complained about before, so it’s more on topic than it would be on a random Nate post (e.g. it seems more relevant on that post than on most of Nate’s blog posts).
I agree it’s more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be, but the comment itself did not seem particularly aimed at arguing that Nate’s advice was bad or that following it would have undesirable consequences[1]. (I think the comments it was responding to were pretty borderline here.)
I think I am comfortable arguing that it would be bad if every post that Nate made on subjects like “how to communicate with people about AI x-risk” included people leaving comments with argument-free pointers to past Nate-drama.
The most recent post by Nate seemed good to me; I think its advice was more-than-sufficiently hedged and do not think that people moving in that direction on the margin would be bad for the world. If people think otherwise they should say so, and if they want to use Nate’s interpersonal foibles as evidence that the advice is bad that’s fine, though (obviously) I don’t expect I’d find such arguments very convincing.
When keeping in mind its target audience.
It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.
The vast majority[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares’s personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.
If the post was along the lines of “I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication” or “I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion” or “I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]”, then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.
But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.
LessWrong seems to hold local validity in arguing as a core principle, or so I think. The process by which you argue for a conclusion is worth discussing, not just the conclusion itself.
but not the entirety
I don’t think just because you use a personal example in order to communicate (and possible defend) the core thesis of a post, that this hereby opens you up to have all vaguely-relevant personal information about you discussed and dissected in the comment section.
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
To be clear, that kind of information can be quite important to share for other reasons (and I have many times in the past written up my concerns with various community leaders both on LW and the EA Forum), but in as much as someone is trying to argue for any kind of generalized principles on a specific post, I think it’s definitely within the bounds of moderatable action if someone brings up a bunch of personal information in an aggressive way.
I do think that kind of stuff is often appropriate for other places on the site.
And to be clear, I think someone can succeed at raising the relevant points in a way that doesn’t predictably derail the whole discussion, and also signals appropriate respect for people’s public/private boundaries, but one should model this as a quite dicey operation that is reasonably likely to fail, and if someone wants to do this, I would expect attempts at cooperating and not letting the discussion fall into one of the standard internet demon thread attractors. If someone doesn’t have that skill, I think they shouldn’t attempt it (and just post the information somewhere else).
It does seem to me like an invitation[1] to say “Actually, I’ve spoken with a few of this guy’s previous managers and all three of them say he used the same strat on his projects at their firms, but his predictions were way off.”
But that’s not quite the crux of the matter; what’s critical (for you, at least) is the capacity to derail convos into off-topic Demon Threads, if there is too much aggression or not enough respect or too many boundaries broken.[2]
That’s not quite so critical for me, but I’m not a mod, and I have written enough about this already, and for that reason I shall stop it here.
Not the word I’d use, but this isn’t the time to litigate such matters
Plus other stuff like authors leaving the site, etc.
This seems like an argument for deleting TurnTrout’s post, but not the original comment, which was on topic.