My point was that “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written” is a good first approximation (but only that!) of what Duncan allegedly finds unpleasant about interacting with me, not that it’s a good first approximation of Duncan’s description of same.
This is incoherent. Said is hiding the supposer with this use of passive voice. A coherent rewrite of this sentence would either be:
My point was that “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written” is a good first approximation (but only that!) of what I, Said, allege that Duncan finds unpleasant about interacting with me, not that it’s a good first approximation of Duncan’s description of same.
or
My point was that “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written” is a good first approximation (but only that!) of what Duncan alleges that he finds unpleasant about interacting with me, not that it’s a good first approximation of Duncan’s description of same.
Both of these sentences are useless, since the first is just saying “I, Said, allege what I allege” and the second is just saying “what Duncan alleges is not what he alleges.”
(Or I guess, as a third version, what dxu or others are alleging?)
I note that Said has now done something between [accusing me of outright lying] and [accusing me of being fully incompetent to understand my own motivations and do accurate introspection] at least four or five times in this thread. I request moderator clarification on whether this is what we want happening a bunch on LessWrong. @Raemon
My current take is “this thread seems pretty bad overall and I wish everyone would stop, but I don’t have an easy succinct articulation of why and what the overall moderation policy is for things like this.” I’m trying to mostly focus on actually resolving a giant backlog of new users who need to be reviewed while thinking about our new policies, but expect to respond to this sometime in the next few days.
What I will say immediately to @Said Achmiz is “This point of this thread is not to prosecute your specific complaints about Duncan. Duncan banning you is the current moderation policy working as intended. If you want to argue about that, you should be directing your arguments at the LessWrong team, and you should be trying to identify and address our cruxes.”
I have more to say about this but it gets into an effortcomment that I want to allocate more time/attention to.
I’d note: I do think it’s an okay time to open up Said’s longstanding disagreements with LW moderation policy, but, like, all the previous arguments still apply. Said’s comments so far haven’t added new information we didn’t already consider.
I think it is better to start a new thread rather than engaging in this one, because this thread seems to be doing a weird mix of arguing moderation-abstract-policies while also trying to prosecute one particular case in a way that feels off.
What I will say immediately to @Said Achmiz is “This point of this thread is not to prosecute your specific complaints about Duncan. Duncan banning you is the current moderation policy working as intended. If you want to argue about that, you should be directing your arguments at the LessWrong team, and you should be trying to identify and address our cruxes.”
But that seems to me to be exactly what I have been doing. (Why else would I bother to write these comments? I have no interest in any of this except insofar as it affects Less Wrong.)
And how else can I do this, without reference to the most salient (indeed, the only!) specific example in which I have access to the facts? One cannot usefully debate such things in purely abstract fashion!
(Please note that as I have said, I have not accused Duncan of breaking any site rules or norms; he clearly has done no such thing.)
You currently look like you’re doing two things – arguing about what the author-moderation norms should be, and arguing whether/how we should adopt a particular set of norms that Duncan advocated. I think those two topics are getting muddied together and making the conversation worse.
My answer to the “whether/how should we adopt the norms in Basics of Rationalist Discourse?” is addressed here. If you disagree with that, I suggest replying to that with your concrete disagreement on that particular topic.
I think if you also want to open up “should LW change our ‘authors can moderate content’ policy”, I think it’s better to start a separate thread for that. Duncan’s blocking-of-you-and-others so far seems like a fairly central example of what the norms were intended to protect, on purpose, and so far you haven’t noted any example relating to the Duncan thread that seem… at all particularly unusual for how we expected authors to use the feature?
Like, yes, you can’t be confident whether an author blocks someone due to them disagreeing, or having a principled policy, or just being annoyed. But, we implemented the rules because “commenters are annoying” is actually a central existential threat to LessWrong.
If we thought it was actually distorting conversation in a bad way, we’d re-evaluate the policy. But I don’t see reason to think that’s happening (given that, for example, Zack went ahead and wrote a top-level post about stuff. It’s not obvious this outcome was better for Duncan, so we might revisit the policy for that reason, but, not for ‘important arguments are getting surpressed’ reasons).
Part of the whole point of the moderation policy is that it’s not the job of individual users to have to defend their right to use the moderation tools, so I do now concretely ask you to stop arguing about Duncan-in-particular.
You currently look like you’re doing two things – arguing about what the author-moderation norms should be, and arguing whether/how we should adopt a particular set of norms that Duncan advocated. I think those two topics are getting muddied together and making the conversation worse.
These two things are related, in the way to which I alluded in my very first comment on this topic. (Namely: the author-moderation feature shouldn’t exist [in its current form], because it gives rise to situations like this, where we can’t effectively discuss whether we should do something like adopting Duncan’s proposed norms.) I’m not just randomly conflating these two things for no reason!
My answer to the “whether/how should we adopt the norms in Basics of Rationalist Discourse?” is addressed here. If you disagree with that, I suggest replying to that with your concrete disagreement on that particular topic.
Uh… sorry, I don’t see how that comment is actually an answer to that question? It… doesn’t seem to be…
Duncan’s blocking-of-you-and-others so far seems like a fairly central example of what the norms were intended to protect, on purpose, and so far you haven’t noted any example relating to the Duncan thread that seem… at all particularly unusual for how we expected authors to use the feature?
Yes, of course! That’s why it makes perfect sense to discuss this case as illustrative of the broader question!
What I am saying is not “you guys made this feature, but now look, people are using it in a bad way which is totally not the way you intended or expected”. No! What I’m saying is “you guys made this feature, and people are using it in exactly the way you intended and expected, but we can now see that this is very bad”.
Like, yes, you can’t be confident whether an author blocks someone due to them disagreeing, or having a principled policy, or just being annoyed.
Those are not different things!
This really bears emphasizing: there is no difference between “banning people who disagree with you [robustly / in some other specific way]” and “finding some people (who happen to be the ones disagreeing with you [robustly/etc.] annoying, and banning them for (supposedly) that reason”[1] and “having a principled policy of doing any of the above”. “Finding people annoying, and quite reasonably banning them for being annoying” is simply how “banning people for disagreeing with you” feels from the inside.
But, we implemented the rules because “commenters are annoying” is actually a central existential threat to LessWrong.
Yes. Such things are central existential threats to many (perhaps most) discussion forums, and online communities in general.
But traditionally, this is handled by moderators.
The reason why this is necessary is well known: nemo judex in sua causa. Alice and Bob engage in disputation. Bob complains to the moderators that Alice is being annoying. Moderator Carol comes along, reads the exchange, and says one of two things:
“You’re right, Bob; Alice was out of line. Alice, stop that—on pain of censure.”
or
“Sorry, Bob, it looks like Alice hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s just disagreeing with you. No action is warranted against her; you’ll just have to deal with it.”
But if Bob is the moderator, then there’s no surprise if he judges the case unfairly, and renders the former verdict when the latter would be just!
If we thought it was actually distorting conversation in a bad way, we’d re-evaluate the policy. But I don’t see reason to think that’s happening (given that, for example, Zack went ahead and wrote a top-level post about stuff. It’s not obvious this outcome was better for Duncan, so we might revisit the policy for that reason, but, not for ‘important arguments are getting surpressed’ reasons).
Come now! Have you suddenly forgotten about “trivial inconveniences”, about “criticism being more expensive than praise”? You “don’t see reason to think” that any distortions result from this?! Writing top-level posts is effortful, costly in both time and willpower. What’s more, writing a top-level post just for the purpose of arguing with another member, who has banned you from his posts, is, for many (most?) people, something that feels socially awkward and weird and aversive (and quite understandably so). It reads like a social attack, in a way that simply commenting on their post does not. (I have great respect for Zack for having the determination and will to overcome these barriers, but not everyone is Zack. Most people, seeing that insistent and forceful criticism gets them banned from someone’s posts, will simply close the browser tab.)
In short, the suggestion that this isn’t distorting conversation seems to me to be manifestly untenable.
Part of the whole point of the moderation policy is that it’s not the job of individual users to have to defend their right to use the moderation tools, so I do now concretely ask you to stop arguing about Duncan-in-particular.
As you please.
However, you have also invited me to discuss the matter of the author-moderation feature in general. How do you propose that I do that, if I am forbidden to refer to the only example I have? (Especially since, as you note, it is a central example of the phenomenon in question.) It seems pretty clearly unfair to invite debate while handicapping one’s interlocutor in this way.
Well, more properly, “banning people for disagreeing” is generally a subset of “banning people for being annoying”. But we can generally expect it to be a proper subset only if the traditional sort of moderation is not taking place, because the complement (within the set of “people being annoying”) of “people disagreeing”—that is, people who are being annoying for other reasons—is generally handled by mods.
Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be ambiguous; I thought it would be clear that the intended meaning was more like (see below for details) the latter (“Duncan alleges that he”), and definitely not the former—since, as you say, the former interpretation is tautological.
(Though, yes, it also covers third parties, under the assumption—which so far seems to be borne out—that said third parties are taking as given what you [Duncan] claim re: what you find unpleasant.)
the second is just saying “what Duncan alleges is not what he alleges.”
No, not quite. Consider the following three things, which are all different:
(a) “Alice’s description of something which Alice says she finds unpleasant”
(b) “The thing Alice claims to find unpleasant, according to Alice’s description of it”
(c) “The thing Alice claims to find unpleasant, in (claimed, by someone who isn’t Alice) reality (which may differ from the thing as described by Alice)”
Obviously, (a) is of a different kind from (b) and (c). I was noting that I was not referring to (a), but instead to (c).
(An example: Alice may say “wow, that spider really scared me!”. In this case, (a) is “that spider” [note the double quote marks]; (b) is a spider [supposedly]; and (c) may be, for example, a harvestman [also supposedly].)
In other words: there’s some phenomenon which you claim to find unpleasant. We believe your self-report of your reaction to this thing. It remains, however, to characterize the thing in question. You offer some characterization. It seems to me that there’s nothing either incoherent or unusual about me disputing the characterization—without, in the process, doubting your self-report, accusing you of lying, claiming that you’re saying something other than what you’re saying, etc.
I note that Said has now done something between [accusing me of outright lying] and [accusing me of being fully incompetent to understand my own motivations and do accurate introspection]
Well, as I’ve said (several times), I don’t think that you’re lying. (You might be, of course; I’m no telepath. But it seems unlikely to me.)
Take a look, if you please, at my description of your perspective and actions, found at the end of this comment. As I say there, it’s my hope that you’ll find that characterization to be fair and accurate.
And certainly I don’t think that anything in that description can be called an accusation of lying, or anything much like lying (in the sense of consciously attempted deception of people other than oneself).
(We do often speak of “lying to yourself”—indeed, I’ve done so, in this conversation—and that seems to me to be an understandable enough usage; but, of course, “you’re lying to yourself” is a very different from just plain “you’re lying”. One may accuse someone who says “you’re lying to yourself” of Bulverism, perhaps, of argument-by-armchair-psychoanalysis, or some such thing, but we don’t say “he just called me a liar!”—because that’s not what happened, in this scenario.)
As far as “being fully incompetent to understand my own motivations and do accurate introspection” goes, well… no, that’s not exactly right either. But I would prefer to defer discussion of this point until you comment on whether my aforementioned description of your perspective seems to you to be accurate and fair.
This is incoherent. Said is hiding the supposer with this use of passive voice. A coherent rewrite of this sentence would either be:
or
Both of these sentences are useless, since the first is just saying “I, Said, allege what I allege” and the second is just saying “what Duncan alleges is not what he alleges.”
(Or I guess, as a third version, what dxu or others are alleging?)
I note that Said has now done something between [accusing me of outright lying] and [accusing me of being fully incompetent to understand my own motivations and do accurate introspection] at least four or five times in this thread. I request moderator clarification on whether this is what we want happening a bunch on LessWrong. @Raemon
My current take is “this thread seems pretty bad overall and I wish everyone would stop, but I don’t have an easy succinct articulation of why and what the overall moderation policy is for things like this.” I’m trying to mostly focus on actually resolving a giant backlog of new users who need to be reviewed while thinking about our new policies, but expect to respond to this sometime in the next few days.
What I will say immediately to @Said Achmiz is “This point of this thread is not to prosecute your specific complaints about Duncan. Duncan banning you is the current moderation policy working as intended. If you want to argue about that, you should be directing your arguments at the LessWrong team, and you should be trying to identify and address our cruxes.”
I have more to say about this but it gets into an effortcomment that I want to allocate more time/attention to.
I’d note: I do think it’s an okay time to open up Said’s longstanding disagreements with LW moderation policy, but, like, all the previous arguments still apply. Said’s comments so far haven’t added new information we didn’t already consider.
I think it is better to start a new thread rather than engaging in this one, because this thread seems to be doing a weird mix of arguing moderation-abstract-policies while also trying to prosecute one particular case in a way that feels off.
But that seems to me to be exactly what I have been doing. (Why else would I bother to write these comments? I have no interest in any of this except insofar as it affects Less Wrong.)
And how else can I do this, without reference to the most salient (indeed, the only!) specific example in which I have access to the facts? One cannot usefully debate such things in purely abstract fashion!
(Please note that as I have said, I have not accused Duncan of breaking any site rules or norms; he clearly has done no such thing.)
You currently look like you’re doing two things – arguing about what the author-moderation norms should be, and arguing whether/how we should adopt a particular set of norms that Duncan advocated. I think those two topics are getting muddied together and making the conversation worse.
My answer to the “whether/how should we adopt the norms in Basics of Rationalist Discourse?” is addressed here. If you disagree with that, I suggest replying to that with your concrete disagreement on that particular topic.
I think if you also want to open up “should LW change our ‘authors can moderate content’ policy”, I think it’s better to start a separate thread for that. Duncan’s blocking-of-you-and-others so far seems like a fairly central example of what the norms were intended to protect, on purpose, and so far you haven’t noted any example relating to the Duncan thread that seem… at all particularly unusual for how we expected authors to use the feature?
Like, yes, you can’t be confident whether an author blocks someone due to them disagreeing, or having a principled policy, or just being annoyed. But, we implemented the rules because “commenters are annoying” is actually a central existential threat to LessWrong.
If we thought it was actually distorting conversation in a bad way, we’d re-evaluate the policy. But I don’t see reason to think that’s happening (given that, for example, Zack went ahead and wrote a top-level post about stuff. It’s not obvious this outcome was better for Duncan, so we might revisit the policy for that reason, but, not for ‘important arguments are getting surpressed’ reasons).
Part of the whole point of the moderation policy is that it’s not the job of individual users to have to defend their right to use the moderation tools, so I do now concretely ask you to stop arguing about Duncan-in-particular.
These two things are related, in the way to which I alluded in my very first comment on this topic. (Namely: the author-moderation feature shouldn’t exist [in its current form], because it gives rise to situations like this, where we can’t effectively discuss whether we should do something like adopting Duncan’s proposed norms.) I’m not just randomly conflating these two things for no reason!
Uh… sorry, I don’t see how that comment is actually an answer to that question? It… doesn’t seem to be…
Yes, of course! That’s why it makes perfect sense to discuss this case as illustrative of the broader question!
What I am saying is not “you guys made this feature, but now look, people are using it in a bad way which is totally not the way you intended or expected”. No! What I’m saying is “you guys made this feature, and people are using it in exactly the way you intended and expected, but we can now see that this is very bad”.
Those are not different things!
This really bears emphasizing: there is no difference between “banning people who disagree with you [robustly / in some other specific way]” and “finding some people (who happen to be the ones disagreeing with you [robustly/etc.] annoying, and banning them for (supposedly) that reason”[1] and “having a principled policy of doing any of the above”. “Finding people annoying, and quite reasonably banning them for being annoying” is simply how “banning people for disagreeing with you” feels from the inside.
Yes. Such things are central existential threats to many (perhaps most) discussion forums, and online communities in general.
But traditionally, this is handled by moderators.
The reason why this is necessary is well known: nemo judex in sua causa. Alice and Bob engage in disputation. Bob complains to the moderators that Alice is being annoying. Moderator Carol comes along, reads the exchange, and says one of two things:
“You’re right, Bob; Alice was out of line. Alice, stop that—on pain of censure.”
or
“Sorry, Bob, it looks like Alice hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s just disagreeing with you. No action is warranted against her; you’ll just have to deal with it.”
But if Bob is the moderator, then there’s no surprise if he judges the case unfairly, and renders the former verdict when the latter would be just!
Come now! Have you suddenly forgotten about “trivial inconveniences”, about “criticism being more expensive than praise”? You “don’t see reason to think” that any distortions result from this?! Writing top-level posts is effortful, costly in both time and willpower. What’s more, writing a top-level post just for the purpose of arguing with another member, who has banned you from his posts, is, for many (most?) people, something that feels socially awkward and weird and aversive (and quite understandably so). It reads like a social attack, in a way that simply commenting on their post does not. (I have great respect for Zack for having the determination and will to overcome these barriers, but not everyone is Zack. Most people, seeing that insistent and forceful criticism gets them banned from someone’s posts, will simply close the browser tab.)
In short, the suggestion that this isn’t distorting conversation seems to me to be manifestly untenable.
As you please.
However, you have also invited me to discuss the matter of the author-moderation feature in general. How do you propose that I do that, if I am forbidden to refer to the only example I have? (Especially since, as you note, it is a central example of the phenomenon in question.) It seems pretty clearly unfair to invite debate while handicapping one’s interlocutor in this way.
Well, more properly, “banning people for disagreeing” is generally a subset of “banning people for being annoying”. But we can generally expect it to be a proper subset only if the traditional sort of moderation is not taking place, because the complement (within the set of “people being annoying”) of “people disagreeing”—that is, people who are being annoying for other reasons—is generally handled by mods.
Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be ambiguous; I thought it would be clear that the intended meaning was more like (see below for details) the latter (“Duncan alleges that he”), and definitely not the former—since, as you say, the former interpretation is tautological.
(Though, yes, it also covers third parties, under the assumption—which so far seems to be borne out—that said third parties are taking as given what you [Duncan] claim re: what you find unpleasant.)
No, not quite. Consider the following three things, which are all different:
(a) “Alice’s description of something which Alice says she finds unpleasant”
(b) “The thing Alice claims to find unpleasant, according to Alice’s description of it”
(c) “The thing Alice claims to find unpleasant, in (claimed, by someone who isn’t Alice) reality (which may differ from the thing as described by Alice)”
Obviously, (a) is of a different kind from (b) and (c). I was noting that I was not referring to (a), but instead to (c).
(An example: Alice may say “wow, that spider really scared me!”. In this case, (a) is “that spider” [note the double quote marks]; (b) is a spider [supposedly]; and (c) may be, for example, a harvestman [also supposedly].)
In other words: there’s some phenomenon which you claim to find unpleasant. We believe your self-report of your reaction to this thing. It remains, however, to characterize the thing in question. You offer some characterization. It seems to me that there’s nothing either incoherent or unusual about me disputing the characterization—without, in the process, doubting your self-report, accusing you of lying, claiming that you’re saying something other than what you’re saying, etc.
Well, as I’ve said (several times), I don’t think that you’re lying. (You might be, of course; I’m no telepath. But it seems unlikely to me.)
Take a look, if you please, at my description of your perspective and actions, found at the end of this comment. As I say there, it’s my hope that you’ll find that characterization to be fair and accurate.
And certainly I don’t think that anything in that description can be called an accusation of lying, or anything much like lying (in the sense of consciously attempted deception of people other than oneself).
(We do often speak of “lying to yourself”—indeed, I’ve done so, in this conversation—and that seems to me to be an understandable enough usage; but, of course, “you’re lying to yourself” is a very different from just plain “you’re lying”. One may accuse someone who says “you’re lying to yourself” of Bulverism, perhaps, of argument-by-armchair-psychoanalysis, or some such thing, but we don’t say “he just called me a liar!”—because that’s not what happened, in this scenario.)
As far as “being fully incompetent to understand my own motivations and do accurate introspection” goes, well… no, that’s not exactly right either. But I would prefer to defer discussion of this point until you comment on whether my aforementioned description of your perspective seems to you to be accurate and fair.
It was not; I both strong downvoted and, separately, strong disagreed.
(I missed the call to end the conversation; sorry for replying.)
(I’ve basically asked Said to stop replying here and would prefer everyone else to stop replying to as well)