I think this behavior of Nate’s is dumb and annoying and I appreciate you calling it out.
FWIW I very much doubt this is Nate executing a careful strategy to suppress negative information about him (his action was probably counterproductive from that perspective), I think he just has standards according to which it’s fine for him to do this when he thinks people are being dumb and annoying, and he thinks your comment is off-topic because he considers it irrelevant to the main thrust of his post.
After talking to someone about this a little, I’m a bit more sympathetic to Soares’s actions here; I think they were probably a mistake for pragmatic reasons, but I’m also sympathetic to arguments that LessWrong is better off if it’s a space where people enforce whatever commenting policies they like, and I don’t want to be part of social punishment if I don’t endorse the social punishment. So I partially retract the first part of my comment. Idk, I might think more about this.
Does it matter if it’s a conscious strategy? His internal experience might be “this is dumb and annoying”, but unless that’s uncorrelated with how a post reflects on him, the effect is going to be distorting the information people present about him in his posts.
I think this behavior of Nate’s is dumb and annoying and I appreciate you calling it out.
FWIW I very much doubt this is Nate executing a careful strategy to suppress negative information about him (his action was probably counterproductive from that perspective), I think he just has standards according to which it’s fine for him to do this when he thinks people are being dumb and annoying, and he thinks your comment is off-topic because he considers it irrelevant to the main thrust of his post.
After talking to someone about this a little, I’m a bit more sympathetic to Soares’s actions here; I think they were probably a mistake for pragmatic reasons, but I’m also sympathetic to arguments that LessWrong is better off if it’s a space where people enforce whatever commenting policies they like, and I don’t want to be part of social punishment if I don’t endorse the social punishment. So I partially retract the first part of my comment. Idk, I might think more about this.
Does it matter if it’s a conscious strategy? His internal experience might be “this is dumb and annoying”, but unless that’s uncorrelated with how a post reflects on him, the effect is going to be distorting the information people present about him in his posts.