Hey, first just wanted to say thanks and love and respect. The moderation team did such an amazing job bringing LW back from nearly defunct into the thriving place it is now. I’m not so active in posting now, but check the site logged out probably 3-5 times a week and my life is much better for it.
After that, a few ideas:
(1) While I don’t 100% agree with every point he made, I think Duncan Sabien did an incredible job with “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1 - perhaps a boiled-down canonical version of that could be created. Obviously the pressure to get something like that perfect would be high, so maybe something like “Our rough thoughts on how to be a good a contributor here, which might get updated from time to time”. Or just link Duncan’s piece as “non-canonical for rules but a great starting place.” I’d hazard a guess that 90% of regular users here agree with at least 70% of it? If everyone followed all of Sabien’s guidelines, there’d be a rather high quality standard.
(2) I wonder if there’s some reasonably precise questions you could ask new users to check for understanding and could be there as a friendly-ish guidepost if a new user is going wayward. Your example—“(for example: “beliefs are probabilistic, not binary, and you should update them incrementally”)”—seems like a really good one. Obviously those should be incredibly non-contentious, but something that would demonstrate a core understanding. Perhaps 3-5 of those, maybe something that a person formally writes up some commentary on their personal blog before posting?
(3) It’s fallen from its peak glory years, but sonsofsamhorn.net might be an interesting reference case to look at — it was one of the top analytical sports discussion forums for quite a while. At the height of its popularity, many users wanted to join but wouldn’t understand the basics—for instance, that a poorly-positioned player on defense making a flashy “diving play” to get the baseball wasn’t a sign of good defense, but rather a sign that that player has a fundamental weakness in their game, which could be investigated more deeply with statistics—and we can’t just trust flashy replay videos to be accurate indicators of defensive skill. (Defense in American baseball is particularly hard to measure and sometimes contentious.) What SOSH did was create an area called “The Sandbox” which was relatively unrestricted — spam and abuse still weren’t permitted of course, but the standard of rigor was a lot lower. Regular members would engage in Sandbox threads from time to time, and users who made excellent posts and comments in The Sandbox would get invited to full membership. Probably not needed at the current scale level, but might be worth starting to think about for a long-term solution if LW keeps growing.
Thanks so much for everything you and the team do.
I did the have the idea of there being regions with varying standards and barriers, in particular places where new users cannot comment easily and place where they can, as an idea.
This feels like a/the natural solution. In particular, what occurred to me was:
Make LW about rationality again.
Expand the Alignment Forum:
2.1. By default, everything is as it is currently: a small set of users post, comment, and upvote, and that’s what people see by default.
2.2. There’s another section that’s open to whoever.
The reasoning being that the influx is specifically about AI, not just a big influx.
The idea of AF having both a passing-the-current-AF-bar section and a passing-the-current-LW-bar section is intriguing to me. With some thought about labeling etc., it could be a big win for non-alignment people (since LW can suppress alignment content more aggressively by default), and a big win for people trying to get into alignment (since they can host their stuff on a more professional-looking dedicated alignment site), and no harm done to the current AF people (since the LW-bar section would be clearly labeled and lower on the frontpage).
I like this direction, but I’m not sure how broadly one would want to define rationality: Would a post collecting quotes about intracranial ultrasound stimulation for meditation enhancement be rationality related enough? What about weird quantified self experiments?
In general I appreciate LessWrong because it is so much broader than other fora, while still staying interesting.
I do agree Duncan’s post is pretty good, and while I don’t think it’s perfect I don’t really have an alternative I think is better for new users getting a handle on the culture here.
I’d be willing to put serious effort into editing/updating/redrafting the two sections that got the most constructive pushback, if that would help tip things over the edge.
If you could add QAs, this could turn into a certificate that one has verifiably read or copy&past what LessWrong expects its users to know before writing under some tag (with a specific set of QAs for each main tags). Of course LW could also certify that this or that trusted user is welcome on all tags, and chose what tag can or can’t appear in front page.
I vaguely remember being not on board with that one and downvoting it. Basics of Rationalist Discourse doesn’t seem to get to the core of what rationality is, and seems to preclude other approaches that might be valuable. Too strict and misses the point. I would hate for this to become the standard.
I don’t really have an alternative I think is better for new users getting a handle on the culture here
Culture is not systematically rationality (dath ilan wasn’t built in a day). Not having an alternative that’s better can coexist with this particular thing not being any good for same purpose. And a thing that’s any good could well be currently infeasible to make, for anyone.
Zack’s post describes the fundamental difficulty with this project pretty well. Adherence to most rules of discourse is not systematically an improvement for processes of finding truth, and there is a risk of costly cargo cultist activities, even if they are actually good for something else. The cost could be negativeselection by culture, losing its stated purpose.
There is no way that a post which some (otherwise non-banned) members of the site are banned from commenting on should be used as an onboarding tool for the site culture. The very fact of such bannings is a clear demonstration of the post’s unsuitability for purpose.
How does the fact of such bannings demonstrate the post’s unsuitability for purpose?
I think it doesn’t. For instance, I think the following scenario is clearly possible:
There are users A and B who detest one another for entirely non-LW-related reasons. (Maybe they had a messy and distressing divorce or something.)
A and B are both valuable contributors to LW, as long as they stay away from one another.
A and B ban one another from commenting on their posts, because they detest one another. (Or, more positively, because they recognize that if they start interacting then sooner or later they will start behaving towards one another in unhelpful ways.)
A writes an excellent post about LW culture, and bans B from it just like A bans B from all their posts (and vice versa).
If you think that Duncan’s post specifically shouldn’t be an LW-culture-onboarding tool because he banned you specifically from commenting on it, then I think you need reasons tied to the specifics of the post, or the specifics of your banning, or both.
(To be clear: I am not claiming that you don’t have any such reasons, nor that Duncan is right to ban you from commenting on his frontpaged posts, nor that Duncan’s “basics” post is good, nor am I claiming the opposite of any of those. I’m just saying that the thing you’re saying doesn’t follow from the thing you’re saying it follows from.)
I suspect that you know perfectly well that the sort of scenario you describe doesn’t apply here. (If, by some chance, you did not know this: I affirm it now. There is no “messy and distressing divorce”, or any such thing; indeed I have never interacted with Duncan, in any way, in any venue other than on Less Wrong.)
The other people in question were, to my knowledge, also banned from commenting on Duncan’s posts due to their criticism of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” (or due to related discussions, on related topics on Less Wrong), and likewise have no such “out of band” relationship with Duncan.
(All of this was, I think, obvious from context. But now it has been said explicitly. Given these facts, your objection does not apply.)
I did not claim that my scenario describes the actual situation; in fact, it should be very obvious from my last two paragraphs that I thought (and think) it likely not to.
What I claimed (and still claim) is that the mere fact that some people are banned from commenting on Duncan’s frontpage posts is not on its own anything like a demonstration that any particular post he may have written isn’t worthy of being used for LW culture onboarding.
Evidently you think that some more specific features of the situation do have that consequence. But you haven’t said what those more specific features are, nor how they have that consequence.
Actually, elsewhere in the thread you’ve said something that at least gestures in that direction:
the point is that if the conversational norms cannot be discussed openly [...] there’s no reason to believe that they’re good norms. How were they vetted? [...] the more people are banned from commenting on the norms as a consequence of their criticism of said norms, the less we should believe that the norms are any good!
I don’t think this argument works. (There may well be a better version of it, along the lines of “There seem to be an awful lot of people Duncan is unable or unwilling to get on with on LW. That suggests that there’s something wrong with his style of interaction, or with how he deals with other people’s styles of interaction. And that suggests that we should be very skeptical of anything he writes that purports to tell us what’s a good style of interaction”. But that would be a different argument.)
It’s not true that the norms can’t be discussed openly; at least, it seems to me that in general “there are a few people who aren’t allowed to talk in place X” is importantly different from “there are a few people who aren’t allowed to talk about the thing that’s mostly talked about in place X” which in turn is importantly different from “the thing that’s mostly talked about in place X cannot be discussed openly”.
It does matter how extensively they’ve been discussed, and that question is worth asking. Part of the answer is that right now that post has 179 comments. Another part is that in fact quite a few of those comments are from you.
If it were true that criticizing Duncan’s proposed norms gets you banned from interacting with Duncan (and hence from commenting on that post) then indeed that would be a problem. I do not get the impression that that’s true. In particular, to whatever extent it’s true that you were banned “as a consequence of [your] criticism of said norms”, I think that has to be interpreted as “as a consequence of the manner of your criticism of said norms” as opposed to “as a consequence of the fact that you criticized said norms” or “as a consequence of the content of your criticism of said norms”, and I don’t think there’s any particular conflict between “these norms have been subject to robust debate” and “some people argued about them in a way Duncan found disagreeable enough to trigger a ban”.
(Again, it might be that Duncan is too sensitive to some styles of argument, or too ban-happy, or something, and that that is reason to be skeptical of his proposed principles. Again, that’s a different argument.)
In particular, to whatever extent it’s true that you were banned “as a consequence of [your] criticism of said norms”, I think that has to be interpreted as “as a consequence of the manner of your criticism of said norms” as opposed to “as a consequence of the fact that you criticized said norms” or “as a consequence of the content of your criticism of said norms”
This is false.
I don’t think there’s any particular conflict between “these norms have been subject to robust debate” and “some people argued about them in a way Duncan found disagreeable enough to trigger a ban”.
There certainly is a conflict, if “the way Duncan found disagreeable” is “robust”.
(Again, it might be that Duncan is too sensitive to some styles of argument, or too ban-happy, or something, and that that is reason to be skeptical of his proposed principles. Again, that’s a different argument.)
Sorry, no. It’s the very argument in question. The “styles of argument” are “the ones that are directly critical of the heart of the claims being made”.
It is at best debatable that “this is false”. Duncan (who, of course, is the person who did the banning) explicitly denies that you were banned for criticizing his proposed norms. Maybe he’s just lying, but it’s certainly not obvious that he is and it looks to me as if he isn’t.
Duncan has also been pretty explicit about what he dislikes about your interactions with him, and what he says he objects to is definitely not simply “robust disagreement”. Again, of course it’s possible he’s just lying; again, I don’t see any reason to think he is.
You are claiming very confidently, as if it’s a matter of common knowledge, that Duncan banned you from commenting on his frontpage posts because he can’t accept direct criticism of his claims and proposals. I do not see any reason to think that that is true. You have not, so far as I can see, given any reason to think it is true. I think you should stop making that claim without either justification or it-seems-to-me-that hedging.
(Since it’s fairly clear[1] that this is a matter of something like enmity rather than mere disagreement and in such contexts everything is liable to be taken as a declaration of What Side One Is On, I will say that I think both you and Duncan are clear net-positive contributors to LW, that I am pretty sure I understand what each of you finds intolerable about the other, and that I have zero intention of picking a side in the overall fight.)
[1] So it seems to me. I suspect you disagree, and perhaps Duncan does too, but this is the sort of thing it is very easy to deceive oneself about.
You are claiming very confidently, as if it’s a matter of common knowledge
As a decoupled aside, something not being a matter of common knowledge is not grounds for making claims of it less confidently, it’s only grounds for a tiny bit of acknowledgment of this not being common knowledge, or of the claim not being expected to be persuasive in isolation.
I agree. If you are very certain of X but X isn’t common knowledge (actually, “common knowledge” in the technical sense isn’t needed, it’s something like “agreed on by basically everyone around you”) then it’s fine to say e.g. “I am very certain of X, from which I infer Y”, but I think there is something rude about simply saying “X, therefore Y” without any acknowledgement that some of your audience may disagree with X. (It feels as if the subtext is “if you don’t agree with X then you’re too ignorant/stupid/crazy for me to care at all what you think”.)
In practice, it’s rather common to do the thing I’m claiming is rude. I expect I do it myself from time to time. But I think it would be better if we didn’t.
My point is that this concern is adequately summarized by something like “claiming without acknowledgment/disclaimers”, but not “claiming confidently” (which would change credence in the name of something that’s not correctness).
I disagree that this is a problem in most cases (acknowledgment is a cost, and usually not informative), but acknowledge that this is debatable. Similarly to the forms of politeness the require more words, as opposed to forms of politeness that, all else equal, leave the message length unchanged. Acknowledgment is useful where it’s actually in doubt.
In this case, Said is both (1) claiming the thing very confidently, when it seems pretty clear to me that that confidence is not warranted, and (2) claiming it as if it’s common knowledge, when it seems pretty clear to me that it’s far from being common knowledge.
It is at best debatable that “this is false”. Duncan (who, of course, is the person who did the banning) explicitly denies that you were banned for criticizing his proposed norms.
But of course he would deny it. As I’ve said, that’s the problem with giving members the power to ban people from their posts: it creates a conflict of interest. It lets people ban commenters for simply disagreeing with them, while being able to claim that it’s for some other reason. Why would Duncan say “yeah, I banned these people because I don’t like it when people point out the flaws in my arguments, the ways in which something I’ve written makes no sense, etc.”? It would make him look pretty bad to admit that, wouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t he instead say that he banned the people in question for some respectable reason? What downside is there, for him?
And given that, why in the world would we believe him when he says such things? Why would we ever believe any post author who, after banning a commenter who’s made a bunch of posts disagreeing with said author, claims that the ban was actually for some other reason? It doesn’t make any sense at all to take such claims seriously!
The reason why the “ban people from your own post(s)” feature is bad is that it gives people an incentive to make such false claims, not just to deceive others (that would be merely bad) but—much worse!—to deceive themselves about their reasons for issuing bans.
Duncan has also been pretty explicit about what he dislikes about your interactions with him, and what he says he objects to is definitely not simply “robust disagreement”. Again, of course it’s possible he’s just lying; again, I don’t see any reason to think he is.
The obvious reason to think so is that, having written something which is deserving of strong criticism—something which is seriously flawed, etc.—both letting people point this out, in clear and unmerciful terms, and banning them but admitting that you’ve banned them because you can’t take criticism, is unpleasant. (The latter more so than the former… or so we might hope!) Given the option to simply declare that the critics have supposedly violated some supposed norm (and that their violation is so terrible, so absolutely intolerable, that it outweighs the benefit of permitting their criticisms to be posted—quite a claim!), it would take an implausible, an almost superhuman, degree of integrity and force of will to resist doing just that. (Which is why it’s so bad to offer the option.)
it’s fairly clear[1] that this is a matter of something like enmity rather than mere disagreement
I have no idea where you think such “enmity” could come from. As I said, I haven’t interacted with Duncan in any venue except on Less Wrong, ever. I have no personal feelings, positive or negative, toward him.
on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things
Duncan has said at some length what he claims to find unpleasant about interacting with you, it isn’t just “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written”, and it is (to me) very plausible that someone might find it unpleasant and annoying
(I’m pretty sure that) other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts.
You don’t give any concrete reason for disbelieving the plausible explanations Duncan gives, you just say—as you could say regardless of the facts of the matter in this case—that of course someone banning someone from commenting on their posts won’t admit to doing so for lousy reasons. No doubt that’s true, but that doesn’t mean they all are doing it for lousy reasons.
It seems pretty obvious to me where enmity could come from. You and Duncan have said a bunch of negative things about one another in public; it is absolutely commonplace to resent having people say negative things about you in public. Maybe it all started with straightforward disagreement about some matter of fact, but where we are now is that interactions between you and Duncan tend to get hostile, and this happens faster and further than (to me) seems adequately explained just by disagreements on the points ostensibly at issue.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I was not at all claiming that whatever enmity there might be started somewhere other than LW.)
[ I don’t follow either participant closely enough to have a strong opinion on the disagreement, aside from noting that the disagreement seems to use a lot of words, and not a lot of effort to distill their own positions toward a crux, as opposed to attacking/defending. ]
on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things
In the case of contentious or adversarial discussions, people say incorrect and misleading things . “more likely true than false” is a uselessly low bar for seeking any truth or basing any decisions on.
on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things
This is a claim so general as to be meaningless. If we knew absolutely nothing except “a person said a thing”, then retreating to this sort of maximally-vague prior might be relevant. But we in fact are discussing a quite specific situation, with quite specific particular and categorical features. There is no good reason to believe that the quoted prior survives that descent to specificity unscathed (and indeed it seems clear to me that it very much does not).
it isn’t just “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written”
It’s slightly more specific, of course—but this is, indeed, a good first approximation.
it is (to me) very plausible that someone might find it unpleasant and annoying
Of course it is! What is surprising about the fact that being challenged on your claims, being asked to give examples of alleged principles, having your theories questioned, having your arguments picked apart, and generally being treated as though you’re basically just some dude saying things which could easily be wrong in all sorts of ways, is unpleasant and annoying? People don’t like such things! On the scale of “man bites dog” to the reverse thereof, this particular insight is all the way at the latter end.
The whole point of this collective exercise that we’re engaged in, with the “rationality” and the “sanity waterline” and all that, is to help each other overcome this sort of resistance, and thereby to more consistently and quickly approach truth.
(I’m pretty sure that) other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts.
Let’s see some examples, then we can talk.
You don’t give any concrete reason for disbelieving the plausible explanations Duncan gives, you just say—as you could say regardless of the facts of the matter in this case—that of course someone banning someone from commenting on their posts won’t admit to doing so for lousy reasons. No doubt that’s true, but that doesn’t mean they all are doing it for lousy reasons.
If Alice criticizes one of Bob’s posts, and Bob immediately or shortly thereafter bans Alice from commenting on Bob’s posts, the immediate default assumption should be that the criticism was the reason for the ban. Knowing nothing else, just based on these bare facts, we should jump right to the assumption that Bob’s reasons for banning Alice were lousy.
If we then learn that Bob has banned multiple people who criticized him robustly/forcefully/etc., and Bob claim that the bans in all of these cases were for good reasons, valid reasons, definitely not just “these people criticized me”… then unless Bob has some truly heroic evidence (of the sort that, really, it is almost never possible to get), his claims should be laughed out of the room.
(Indeed, I’ll go further and say that the default assumption—though a slightly weaker default—in all cases of anyone banning anyone else[1] from commenting on their posts is that the ban was for lousy reasons. Yes, in some cases that default is overridden by some exceptional circumstances. But until we learn of such circumstances, evaluate them, and judge them to be good reasons for such a ban, we should assume that the reasons are bad.)
And the problem here isn’t that our hypothetical Bob, or the actual Duncan, is a bad person, a liar, etc. Nothing of the sort need be true! (And in Duncan’s case, I think that probably nothing of the sort is true.) But it would be very foolish of us to simply take someone’s word in a case like this.
Again, this is the whole problem with the “post authors can ban people from their posts” feature—that it creates such situations, where people are tempted (by intellectual vanity—a terrible temptation indeed) to do things which instantly cast them in a bad light, because they cannot be distinguished from the actions of someone who is either unable (due to failure of reasoning or knowledge) or unwilling (due to weakness of ego or lack of integrity) to submit their ideas and writing to proper scrutiny. (That they truly believe themselves to be acting from only the purest motives is, of course, quite beside the point; the power of self-deception is hardly news to us, around these parts.)
It seems pretty obvious to me where enmity could come from.
If there’s any “enmity” (and I remain unsure that any such thing exists), it’s wholly one-sided. I haven’t said anything about or to Duncan that I wouldn’t say to anyone, should the situation warrant it. And I don’t think (though I haven’t gone through all my comments to verify this, but I can think of no exceptions) that I’ve said anything which I wouldn’t stand by.
With the exception of, say, obvious spammers or cranks or other such egregious malefactors whom most reasonable observers would expect to just be banned from the whole forum.
You continue to assert, with apparent complete confidence, a claim about Duncan’s motivations that (1) Duncan denies, (2) evidently seems to at least two people (me and dxu) to be far from obviously true, and (3) you provide no evidence for that engages with any specifics at all. The trouble with 3 is that it cuts you off from the possibility of getting less wrong. If in fact Duncan’s motivations were not as you think they are, how could you come to realise that?
(Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t, because you judge that in the situation we’re in the behaviour of someone with the motivations you claim is indistinguishable from that of someone with the motivations Duncan claims, and you’re willing to bite that bullet.)
I don’t agree with your analysis of the Alice/Bob situation. I think that in the situation as described, given only the information you give, we should be taking seriously at least these hypotheses: (1) Bob is just very ban-happy and bans anyone who criticizes him, (2) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, but the reason that happens is that he’s unreasonably provoking them, (3) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, for reasons that don’t reflect badly on Bob. And also various hybrids—it’s easy to envisage situations where 1,2,3 are all important aspects of what’s going on. And to form a firm opinion between 1,2,3 we need more information. For instance, what did Alice’s criticism actually look like? What did Bob say about his reasons? How have other people who are neither Alice nor Bob interpreted what happened?
Here’s Duncan’s actual description of what he says he finds unpleasant about interacting with you; it’s from Zack’s response to Duncan’s proposed discourse norms. (What happened next was that you made a brief reply, Duncan claimed that it was a demonstration of the exact dynamic he was complaining about, and said “Goodbye, Said”; I take it that’s the point at which he banned you from commenting on his frontpage posts. So I think it’s reasonable to take it as his account of why-Duncan-banned-Said.
I find that interacting with Said is overwhelmingly net negative; most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks with the entitlement of a spoiled princeling. I think his mode of engagement is super unrewarding and makes a supermajority of the threads he participates in worse, by dint of draining away all the energy and recursively proliferating non-cruxy rabbitholes. It has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer. I do not care to spend any more energy whatsoever correcting the misconceptions that he is extremely skilled at producing, ad infinitum, and I shan’t do so any longer; he’s welcome to carry on being however confused or wrong he wants to be about the points I’m making; I don’t find his confusion to be a proxy for any of the audiences whose understanding I care about.
Now, it seems clear to me that (1) if Duncan felt that way about interacting with you, it would be a very plausible explanation for the ban; (2) Duncan’s claimed perception does somewhat match my impression of your commenting style on LW (though I would not frame it nearly as negatively as he did; as already mentioned I think your presence on LW is clearly net positive); (3) I accordingly find it plausible that Duncan is fairly accurately describing his own subjective reasons for not wanting to interact with you.
Of course all of that is consistent with Duncan actually being upset by being criticized and then casting about for rationalizations. But, again, it doesn’t appear to me that he does anything like this every time someone strongly disagrees with him. In addition to dxu’s example in a sibling of this comment (to which you objected that the disagreement there wasn’t “robust”; like dxu I think it would be helpful to understand what you actually mean by “robust” and e.g. whether it implies what most people would call “rude”), here are a few more things people have said to Duncan without getting any sort of ban:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gbdqMaADqxMDwtgaf/exposure-to-lizardman-is-lethal?commentId=sneYCBckEFvL2hJdm and the thread descending from it (link is to jaspax saying that one of Duncan’s examples in the “lizardman” post is badly wrong; much of the subsequent discussion is a lengthy and vigorous dispute between tailcalled and Duncan; Duncan has not blocked either jaspax or tailcalled). There is a lot of other strong-disagreement-with-Duncan in that thread. One instance did result in Duncan blocking the user in question, but the fact that it’s currently sitting at −31/-28 suggests that Duncan isn’t the only person who considers it obnoxious.
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, think that Duncan is unusually willing to block people from commenting on his posts. But I don’t think “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him” is a tenable position unless you are defining “robustly” in a nonstandard way.
You continue to assert, with apparent complete confidence, a claim about Duncan’s motivations that (1) Duncan denies
Of course he denies it. I already explained that we’d expect him to deny it if it were true. Come on! This is extremely obvious stuff. Why would he not deny it?
And if indeed he’d deny it if it were true, and obviously would also deny it if it were false, then it’s not evidence. Right? Bayes!
(2) evidently seems to at least two people (me and dxu) to be far from obviously true,
Yes, many people on Less Wrong have implausible degrees of “charity” in their priors on human behavior.
and (3) you provide no evidence for that engages with any specifics at all. The trouble with 3 is that it cuts you off from the possibility of getting less wrong.
But of course it does no such thing! It means merely that I have a strong prior, and have seen no convincing evidence against.
If in fact Duncan’s motivations were not as you think they are, how could you come to realise that?
Same way I come to realize anything else: updating on evidence. (But it’d have to be some evidence!)
(Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t, because you judge that in the situation we’re in the behaviour of someone with the motivations you claim is indistinguishable from that of someone with the motivations Duncan claims, and you’re willing to bite that bullet.)
Pretty close to indistinguishable, yeah.
I don’t agree with your analysis of the Alice/Bob situation. I think that in the situation as described, given only the information you give, we should be taking seriously at least these hypotheses: (1) Bob is just very ban-happy and bans anyone who criticizes him, (2) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, but the reason that happens is that he’s unreasonably provoking them, (3) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, for reasons that don’t reflect badly on Bob. And also various hybrids—it’s easy to envisage situations where 1,2,3 are all important aspects of what’s going on.
(1) is the obvious default (because it’s quite common and ordinary). (2) seems to rest on the meaning of “unreasonably”; I think we can mostly conflate it with (3). And (3) certainly happens but isn’t anywhere close to the default.
Also, your (1) says “anyone”, but it could also be “anyone over a certain threshold of criticism strength/salience/etc.”. That makes it even more the obvious default.
And to form a firm opinion between 1,2,3 we need more information. For instance, what did Alice’s criticism actually look like? What did Bob say about his reasons? How have other people who are neither Alice nor Bob interpreted what happened?
Well, for one thing, “what did Bob say” can’t be given much weight, as I noted above.
The interpretation of third parties seems mostly irrelevant. If Carol observes the situation, she can reach her own conclusion without consulting Dave. Dave’s opinion shouldn’t be any kind of meaningful input into Carol’s evaluation.
As for “what did Alice’s criticism look like”, sure. We have to confirm that there aren’t any personal insults in there, for instance. Easy enough.
Here’s Duncan’s actual description of what he says he finds unpleasant about interacting with you … Now, it seems clear to me that (1) if Duncan felt that way about interacting with you, it would be a very plausible explanation for the ban … I accordingly find it plausible that Duncan is fairly accurately describing his own subjective reasons for not wanting to interact with you.
Yes, of course! I agree completely! In the quoted bit, Duncan says pretty much exactly what we’d expect him to say if what he were very annoyed at being repeatedly questioned, challenged, and contradicted by some other commenter, in ways that he found himself unable to convincingly respond to, and which inability made him look bad. It makes sense that Duncan would, indeed, describe said commenter’s remarks in tendentious ways, using emotionally charges descriptions with strongly negative valence but few details, and that he would dismiss said commenter’s contributions as irrelevant, unimportant, and unworthy of engagement. It is totally unsurprising both that Duncan would experience aversive feelings when interacting with said commenter, and that he would report so experiencing.
Of course all of that is consistent with Duncan actually being upset by being criticized and then casting about for rationalizations.
You don’t say…
Actually, even “rationalizations” is too harsh. It’s more like “describing in a negative light things that are actually neutral or positive”. And the “casting about” absolutely need not (and, indeed, is unlikely to be) conscious.
And I know I’ve been hammering on this point, but I’m going to do it again: this is the problem with the “authors can ban users from their posts” feature. It gives LW participants an incentive to have these sorts of entirely genuine and not at all faked emotional responses. (See this old comment thread by Vladimir_M for elaboration on the idea.) As I’ve said, I don’t think that Duncan is lying!
But, again, it doesn’t appear to me that he does anything like this every time someone strongly disagrees with him. In addition to dxu’s example in a sibling of this comment (to which you objected that the disagreement there wasn’t “robust”; like dxu I think it would be helpful to understand what you actually mean by “robust” and e.g. whether it implies what most people would call “rude”)
Nah, I don’t mean “rude”. But let’s take a look at your examples:
JBlack commenting on the “you don’t exist” post
User JBlack made a single comment on a single post by Duncan. Why ban him? What would that accomplish? Duncan isn’t some sort of unthinking ban-bot; he’s a quite intelligent person who, as far as I can tell, is generally capable of behaving reasonably with respect to his goals. Expecting that he’d ban JBlack as a result of this single comment doesn’t make much sense, even if we took everything I said about Duncan’s disposition were wholly true! It’s not even much of a criticism!
“the gears to ascension” commenting on the “sazen” post
A brief exchange, at which point the user in question seems to have been deterred from commenting further. Their two comments were also downvoted, which is significant.
(Note, however, that if I were betting on “who will Duncan ban next”, user “the gears to ascension” would certainly be in the running—but not because of this one comment thread that you linked there.)
link is to jaspax saying that one of Duncan’s examples in the “lizardman” post is badly wrong; much of the subsequent discussion is a lengthy and vigorous dispute between tailcalled and Duncan
User jaspax made one comment on that post (and hasn’t commented on any of Duncan’s other posts, as far as I can find on a quick skim). User tailcalled is a more plausible candidate. I would likewise expect a ban if they commented in similar fashion on one or more subsequent posts by Duncan (this seems to have been the first such interaction).
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, think that Duncan is unusually willing to block people from commenting on his posts. But I don’t think “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him” is a tenable position unless you are defining “robustly” in a nonstandard way.
For one thing, I didn’t say “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him”. What I said (in response to your “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts”) was “Let’s see some examples, then we can talk”. Well, we’ve got one example now (the last one, with tailcalled), so we can talk.
Like I said before—Duncan’s a smart guy, not some sort of ban-bot who reflexively bans anyone who disagrees with him. Here’s what seems to me to be the heuristic:
Some other user X comments on Duncan’s posts, criticizing Duncan in ways that he can’t easily counter.
Duncan does not consider the criticism to be fair or productive.
The critical comments are upvoted and/or endorsed or supported by others; there is no (or insufficient) convincing counter from any sympathetic third parties.
The gestalt impression left with most readers seems likely to be one of Duncan being mistaken/unreasonable/wrong/etc.
Duncan feels that this impression is false and unfair (he considers himself to have been in the right; see #2).
User X comments on more than one post of Duncan’s, and seems likely to continue to comment on his future posts.
X is undeterred by Duncan’s attempted pushback. (And why would they be? See #3.)
In such a scenario, the only way (other than leaving Less Wrong, or simply ceasing to write posts, which amounts to the same thing) to stop X from continuing to cast Duncan and his ideas and claims in a bad light—which Duncan feels is undeserved—is to ban X from his posts. So that’s what Duncan does.
Does this seem so far-fetched? I don’t think so. Indeed it seems almost reasonable, doesn’t it? I think there’s even a good chance that Duncan himself might endorse this characterization! (I certainly hope so, anyway; I’ve tried to ensure that there’s nothing in this description that would be implausible for Duncan to assent to.)
You say that if you were wrong about Duncan’s motivations then you would discover “by updating on evidence” but I don’t understand what sort of evidence you could possibly see that would make you update enough to make any difference. (Again, maybe this is a bullet you bite and you’re content with just assuming bad faith and having no realistic way to discover if you’re wrong.)
Although you say “Bayes!” it seems to me that what you’re actually doing involves an uncomfortable amount of (something like) snapping probabilities to 0 and 1. That’s a thing everyone does at least a bit, because we need to prune our hypothesis spaces to manageable size, but I think in this case it’s making your reasoning invalid.
E.g., you say: Duncan would deny your accusation if it were true, and he would deny it if it were false, hence his denial tells us nothing. But that’s all an oversimplification. If it were true, he might admit it; people do in fact not-so-infrequently admit it when they do bad things and get called out on it. Or he might deny it in a less specific way, rather than presenting a concrete explanation of what he did. Or he might just say nothing. (It’s not like your accusation had been made when he originally said what he did.) Or he might present a concrete explanation that is substantially less plausible than the one he actually presented. So his denial does tell us something. Obviously not as much as if no one ever lied, deceived themselves, etc., but still something.
… I need to be a bit more precise, because there are two different versions of your accusation and the details of the calculation are different in the two cases. A1 is “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with being robustly criticized”. A2 is something like “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with robustly criticized, but he was unaware that that was his real reason and sincerely thought he was doing it because of how Said goes about criticizing, the things he objects to being things that many others might also object to”. The claim “if it were true then he would behave that way” is much truer about A2 than about A1, but it is also much less probable a priori. (Compare “God created the universe 6000 years ago” with “God created the universe 6000 years ago, and carefully made it look exactly the same as it would have if it were billions of years old”: the evidence that makes the former very unlikely is powerless against the latter, but that is not in fact an advantage of the latter.)
So, anyway, we have A1 and A2, and the alternative B: that Duncan blocked Said on account of features of Said’s interaction-style that genuinely don’t basically come down to “Said pointed out deficiencies in what Duncan said”. (Because to whatever extent Duncan’s objections are other things, whether they’re reasonable or not, his blocking of Said after Said said negative things about Duncan’s proposed norms doesn’t indicate that robust discussion of those norms is impossible.) You say that some version of A is an “obvious default”. Maybe so, but here again I think you’re rounding-to-0-and-1. How obvious a default? How much more likely than B? It seems to me that A1 is obviously not more than, say, 4:1 favoured over B. (I am not sure it’s favoured over B at all; 4:1 is not my best estimate, it’s my most generous estimate.) And how much evidence does Duncan’s own account of his motivations offer for B over A1? I think at least 2:1.
In other words, even if we agree that (1) Duncan’s words aren’t very much evidence of his motivations (most of the time, when someone says something it’s much more than 2:1 evidence in favour of that thing being true) and (2) the bad-faith scenario is a priori substantially more likely than the good-faith one, with what seem to me actually realistic numbers we don’t get more than 2:1 odds for bad faith over good faith.
I claim that that is very much not sufficient grounds for writing as if the bad-faith explanation is definitely correct. (And I reiterate that 2:1 for bad over good is not my best estimate, it’s my most charitable-to-Said’s-position estimate.)
(“Ah, but I meant A2 not A1!”. Fine, but A2 implies A1 and cannot be more probable than A1.)
As you refine your proposed Duncan-blocking-model, it seems to me, it becomes less capable of supporting the criticism you were originally making on the basis of Duncan’s blocking behaviour. You weren’t very specific about exactly what that criticism was—rather, you gestured broadly towards the fact of the blocking and invited us all to conclude that Duncan’s proposed norms are bad, without saying anything about your reasoning—and it still isn’t perfectly clear to me exactly how we’re supposed to get from the blocking-related facts to any conclusion about the merits of the proposed norms. But it seems like it has to be something along the lines of (a) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour has ensured that his proposals don’t get the sort of robust debate they should get before being treated as norms” and/or (b) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour demonstrates that his discourse-preferences are bad, so we shouldn’t be adopting guidelines he proposes”; and as we move from the original implicit “Duncan blocks everyone who disagrees with him” (which, no, you did not say explicitly in those words, nor did you say anything explicitly, but it definitely seemed like that was pretty much what you were gesturing at) to “Duncan blocks people who disagree with him persistently in multiple posts, in ways he considers unfair, and are in no way mollified by his responses to that disagreement”, the amount of support the proposition offers for (a) and/or (b) decreases considerably.
Incidentally, I am fairly sure that the vagueness I am being a bit complainy about in the previous paragraph is much the same thing (or part of the same thing) as Duncan was referring to when he said
most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks
and one reason why I find Duncan’s account of his motivations more plausible than your rival account (not only as a description of the conscious motivations he permits himself to be aware of, but as a description of the actual causal history) is that the reasons he alleges do seem to me to correspond to elements of your behaviour that aren’t just a matter of making cogent criticisms that he doesn’t have good answers to.
I think you would do well to notice the extent to which your account of Duncan’s motivations is seemingly optimized to present you in a good light, and consider whether some of the psychological mechanisms you think are at work in Duncan might be at work in you too. No one likes to admit that someone else has presented cogent criticisms of their position that they can’t answer, true. But, also, no one likes to admit that when they thought they were presenting cogent criticisms they were being needlessly rude and uncooperative.
Also, while we’re on the subject of your model of Duncan’s motivations: a key element of that model seems to be that Duncan has trouble coping with criticisms that he can’t refute. But when looking for examples of other people disagreeing robustly with Duncan, I found several cases where other people made criticisms to which he responded along the lines of “Yes, I agree; that’s a deficiency in what I wrote.”. So criticisms Duncan can’t refute, as such, don’t seem to send him off the rails: maybe there’s an ingredient in the process that leads to his blocking people, but it can’t be the only ingredient.
[EDITED to add:] It is not clear to me whether this discussion is making much useful progress. It is quite likely that my next reply in this thread will be along the lines of “Here are answers to specific questions/criticisms; beyond that, I don’t think it’s productive for me to continue”.
I think I do want to ask everyone to stop this conversation because it seems weirdly anchored on one particular example, that, as far as I can tell, was basically a central of what we wanted the author-moderation norms to be for in Meta-tations on Moderation, and they shouldn’t be getting dragged through a trial-like thing for following the rules we gave them.
If I had an easy lock-thread button I’d probably have hit that ~last night. We do have a lock thread functionality but it’s a bit annoying to use.
they shouldn’t be getting dragged through a trial-like thing for following the rules we gave them
They don’t need to be personally involved. The rules protect author’s posts, they don’t give the author immunity from being discussed somewhere else.
This situation is a question that merits discussion, with implications for general policy. It might have no place in this particular thread, but it should have a place somewhere convenient (perhaps some sort of dedicated meta “subreddit”, or under a meta tag). Not discussing particular cases restricts allowed forms of argument, distorts understanding in systematic ways.
Please feel free to contact me via private message if you’re interested in continuing the discussion. But if you want to leave things here, that’s also perfectly fine. (Strictly speaking, the ball at this point is in my court, but I wouldn’t presume to take the discussion to PM unilaterally; my guess is that you don’t think that’s particularly worth the effort, and that seems to me to be a reasonable view.)
This is a claim so general as to be meaningless. If we knew absolutely nothing except “a person said a thing”, then retreating to this sort of maximally-vague prior might be relevant. But we in fact are discussing a quite specific situation, with quite specific particular and categorical features. There is no good reason to believe that the quoted prior survives that descent to specificity unscathed (and indeed it seems clear to me that it very much does not).
The prior does in fact survive, in the absence of evidence that pushes one’s conclusion away from it. And this evidence, I submit, you have not provided. (And the inferences you do put forth as evidence are—though this should be obvious from my previous sentence—not valid as inferences; more on this below.)
it isn’t just “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written”
It’s slightly more specific, of course—but this is, indeed, a good first approximation.
This is a substantially load-bearing statement. It would appear that Duncan denies this, that gjm thinks otherwise as well, and (to add a third person to the tally) I also find this claim suspicious. Numerical popularity of course does not determine the truth (or falsity) of a claim, but in such a case I think it behooves you to offer some additional evidence for your claim, beyond merely stating it as a brute fact. To wit:
What, of the things that Duncan has written in explanation of his decision to ban you from commenting on his posts (as was the subject matter being discussed in the quoted part of the grandparent comment, with the complete sentence being “Duncan has said at some length what he claims to find unpleasant about interacting with you, it isn’t just ‘Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written’, and it is (to me) very plausible that someone might find it unpleasant and annoying”), do you claim “approximates” the explanation that he did so because you “keep finding mistakes in what he has written”? I should like to see a specific remark from him that you think is reasonably construed as such.
(I’m pretty sure that) other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts.
Let’s see some examples, then we can talk.
I present myself as an example; I confirm that, after leaving this comment expressing clear disagreement with Duncan, I have not been banned from commenting on any of his posts.
I am (moreover) quite confident in my ability to find additional such examples if necessary, but in lieu of that, I will instead question the necessity of such: did you, Said Achmiz, (prior to my finding an example) honestly expect/suspect that there were no such examples to be found? This would seem to equate to a belief that Duncan has banned anyone and everyone who has dared to disagree with him in the past, which in turn would (given his prolific writing and posting behavior) imply that he should have a substantial fraction of the regular LW commentariat banned—which should have been extremely obviously false to you from the start!
Indeed, this observation has me questioning the reliability of your stance on this particular issue, since the tendency to get things like this wrong suggests a model of (this subregion of) reality so deeply flawed, little to no wisdom avails to be extracted.
If Alice criticizes one of Bob’s posts, and Bob immediately or shortly thereafter bans Alice from commenting on Bob’s posts, the immediate default assumption should be that the criticism was the reason for the ban. Knowing nothing else, just based on these bare facts, we should jump right to the assumption that Bob’s reasons for banning Alice were lousy.
As alluded to in the quote/response pair at the beginning of this comment, this is not a valid inference. What you propose is a valid probabilistic inference in the setting where we are presented only with the information you describe (although even then the strength of update justified by such information is limited at best). Nonetheless, there are plenty of remaining hypotheses consistent with the information in question, and which have (hence) not been ruled out merely by observing Bob to have banned Alice.
For example, suppose it is the case that Alice (in addition to criticizing Bob’s object-level points) also takes it upon herself to include, in each of her comments, a remark to the effect that Bob is physically unattractive. I don’t expect it controversial to suggest that this behavior would be considered inappropriate by the standards, not just of LW, but of any conversational forum that considers itself to have standards at all; and if Bob then proceeded to ban Alice for such provocations, we would not consider this evidence that he cannot tolerate criticism. The reason for the ban, after all, would have been explained, and thus screened off, leaving us with no reason to suspect him of banning Alice for “lousy reasons”.
No doubt you will claim, here, that the situation is not relevantly analogous, since you have not, in fact, insulted Duncan’s physical appearance. But the claim that you have not, in any of your prior interactions with him, engaged in a style of discourse that made him think of you as an unusually unlikely-to-be-productive commenter, is, I think, unsupported. And if he had perceived you as such, why, this might then be perceived as sufficient grounds to remove the possibility of such unproductive interactions going forward, and to make that decision independent of the quality (or, indeed, existence) of your object-level criticisms.
The prior does in fact survive, in the absence of evidence that pushes one’s conclusion away from it.
Categories like “conflicts of interest”, “discussions about who should be banned”, “arguments about moderation in cases in which you’re involved”, etc., already constitute “evidence” that push the conclusion away from the prior of “on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things”, without even getting into anything more specific.
I should like to see a specific remark from him that you think is reasonably construed as such.
You’ve misunderstood. 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.
I present myself as an example; I confirm that, after leaving this comment expressing clear disagreement with Duncan, I have not been banned from commenting on any of his posts.
A single circumspectly disagreeing comment on a tangential, secondary (tertiary? quaternary?) point, buried deep in a subthread, having minimal direct bearing on the claims in the post under which it’s posted. “Robust disagreement”, this ain’t.
(Don’t get me wrong—it’s a fine comment, and I see that I strong-upvoted it at the time. But it sure is not anything at all like an example of the thing I asked for examples of.)
I am (moreover) quite confident in my ability to find additional such examples if necessary
Please do. So far, the example count remains at zero.
but in lieu of that, I will instead question the necessity of such: did you, Said Achmiz, (prior to my finding an example) honestly expect/suspect that there were no such examples to be found?
Given that you did not, in fact, find an example, I think that this question remains unmotivated.
This would seem to equate to a belief that Duncan has banned anyone and everyone who has dared to disagree with him in the past, which in turn would (given his prolific writing and posting behavior) imply that he should have a substantial fraction of the regular LW commentariat banned—which should have been extremely obviously false to you from the start!
Most people don’t bother to think about other people’s posts in sufficient detail and sufficiently critically to have anything much to say about them.
Of the remainder, some agree with Duncan.
Of the remainder of those, many don’t care enough to engage in arguments, disagreements, etc., of any sort.
Of the remainder of those, many are either naturally disinclined to criticize forcefully, to press the criticism, to make points which are embarrassing or uncomfortable, etc., or else are deterred from doing so by the threat of moderation.
That cuts the candidate pool down to a small handful.
Separately, recall that Duncan has (I think more than once now) responded to similar situations by leaving (or “leaving”) Less Wrong. (What is the significance of his choice to respond this time by banning people instead of leaving the site again, I do not know. I suppose it’s an improvement, such as it is, though obviously I’d prefer it if he did neither of these things.)
That cuts out a lot of “the past”.
We then observe that Duncan has now banned more people from commenting on his frontpage posts than any other user of the site (twice as many as the runner-up).
So my request for examples of the alleged phenomenon wherein “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts” is not so absurd, after all.
Indeed, this observation has me questioning the reliability of your stance on this particular issue, since the tendency to get things like this wrong suggests a model of (this subregion of) reality so deeply flawed, little to no wisdom avails to be extracted.
I think that, on the contrary, it is you who should re-examine your stance on the matter. Perhaps the absurdity heuristic, coupled with a too-hasty jump to a conclusion, has led you astray?
As alluded to in the quote/response pair at the beginning of this comment, this is not a valid inference. What you propose is a valid probabilistic inference in the setting where we are presented only with the information you describe (although even then the strength of update justified by such information is limited at best). Nonetheless, there are plenty of remaining hypotheses consistent with the information in question, and which have (hence) not been ruled out merely by observing Bob to have banned Alice.
That’s why I said “default”.
For example, suppose it is the case that Alice (in addition to criticizing Bob’s object-level points) also takes it upon herself to include, in each of her comments, a remark to the effect that Bob is physically unattractive.
That would be one of those “exceptional circumstances” I referred to. Do you claim such circumstances obtain in the case at hand?
I don’t expect it controversial to suggest that this behavior would be considered inappropriate by the standards, not just of LW, but of any conversational forum that considers itself to have standards at all
This is why I specifically noted that I was referring to people who hadn’t been banned from the site. Surely the LW moderators would see fit to censure a commenter for such behavior, since, as you suggest, it would be quite beyond the pale in any civilized discussion forum.
and if Bob then proceeded to ban Alice for such provocations, we would not consider this evidence that he cannot tolerate criticism. The reason for the ban, after all, would have been explained, and thus screened off, leaving us with no reason to suspect him of banning Alice for “lousy reasons”.
All of this, as I said, was quite comprehensively covered in the comment to which you’re responding. (I begin to suspect that you did not read it very carefully.)
No doubt you will claim, here, that the situation is not relevantly analogous, since you have not, in fact, insulted Duncan’s physical appearance.
Indeed…
But the claim that you have not, in any of your prior interactions with him, engaged in a style of discourse that made him think of you as an unusually unlikely-to-be-productive commenter, is, I think, unsupported.
But of course I never claimed anything like this. What the heck sort of strawman is this? Where is it coming from? And what relevance does it have?
And if he had perceived you as such, why, this might then be perceived as sufficient grounds to remove the possibility of such unproductive interactions going forward, and to make that decision independent of the quality (or, indeed, existence) of your object-level criticisms.
What is this passive-voice “might then be perceived” business? Do you perceive this to be the case?
It seems like you are saying something like “if Bob decides that he is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with Alice, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts”. Are you, in fact, saying that? If not—what are you saying?
Categories like “conflicts of interest”, “discussions about who should be banned”, “arguments about moderation in cases in which you’re involved”, etc., already constitute “evidence” that push the conclusion away from the prior of “on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things”, without even getting into anything more specific.
The strength of the evidence is, in fact, a relevant input. And of the evidential strength conferred by the style of reasoning employed here, much has already been written.
You’ve misunderstood. 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.
Then your response to gjm’s point seems misdirected, as the sentence you were quoting from his comment explicitly specifies that it concerns what Duncan himself said. Furthermore, I find it unlikely that this is an implication you could have missed, given that the first quote-block above speaks specifically of the likelihood that “people” (Duncan) may or may not say false things with regards to a topic in which they are personally invested; indeed, this back-and-forth stemmed from discussion of that initial point!
Setting that aside, however, there is a further issue to be noted (one which, if anything, is more damning than the previous), which is that—having now (apparently) detached our notion of what is being “approximated” from any particular set of utterances—we are left with the brute claim that “‘Said keeps finding mistakes in what Duncan have written’ is a good approximation of what Duncan finds unpleasant about interacting with Said”—a claim for which I don’t see how you could defend even having positive knowledge of, much less its truth value! After all, neither of us has telepathic access to Duncan’s inner thoughts, and so the claim that his ban of you was been motivated by some factor X—which factor he in fact explicitly denies having exerted an influence—is speculation at best, and psychologizing at worst.
A single circumspectly disagreeing comment on a tangential, secondary (tertiary? quaternary?) point, buried deep in a subthread, having minimal direct bearing on the claims in the post under which it’s posted. “Robust disagreement”, this ain’t.
I appreciate the starkness of this response. Specifically, your response makes it quite clear that the word “robust” is carrying essentially entirety of the weight of your argument. However, you don’t appear to have operationalized this anywhere in your comment, and (unfortunately) I confess myself unclear as to what you mean by it. “Disagreement” is obvious enough, which is why I was able to provide an example on such short notice, but if you wish me to procure an example of whatever you are calling “robust disagreement”, you will have to explain in more detail what this thing is, and (hopefully) why it matters!
I am (moreover) quite confident in my ability to find additional such examples if necessary
Please do. So far, the example count remains at zero.
but in lieu of that, I will instead question the necessity of such: did you, Said Achmiz, (prior to my finding an example) honestly expect/suspect that there were no such examples to be found?
Given that you did not, in fact, find an example, I think that this question remains unmotivated.
[...]
So my request for examples of the alleged phenomenon wherein “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts” is not so absurd, after all.
It is my opinion that the response to the previous quoted block also serves adequately as a response to these miscellaneous remarks.
Indeed, this observation has me questioning the reliability of your stance on this particular issue, since the tendency to get things like this wrong suggests a model of (this subregion of) reality so deeply flawed, little to no wisdom avails to be extracted.
I think that, on the contrary, it is you who should re-examine your stance on the matter. Perhaps the absurdity heuristic, coupled with a too-hasty jump to a conclusion, has led you astray?
This question is, in fact, somewhat difficult to answer as of this exact moment, since the answer depends in large part on the meaning of a term (“robustness”) whose contextual usage you have not yet concretely operationalized. I of course invite such an operationalization, and would be delighted to reconsider my stance if presented with a good one; until that happens, however, I confess myself skeptical of what (in my estimation) amounts to an uncashed promissory note.
As alluded to in the quote/response pair at the beginning of this comment, this is not a valid inference. What you propose is a valid probabilistic inference in the setting where we are presented only with the information you describe (although even then the strength of update justified by such information is limited at best). Nonetheless, there are plenty of remaining hypotheses consistent with the information in question, and which have (hence) not been ruled out merely by observing Bob to have banned Alice.
That’s why I said “default”.
Well. Let’s review what you actually said, shall we?
If Alice criticizes one of Bob’s posts, and Bob immediately or shortly thereafter bans Alice from commenting on Bob’s posts, the immediate default assumption should be that the criticism was the reason for the ban. Knowing nothing else, just based on these bare facts, we should jump right to the assumption that Bob’s reasons for banning Alice were lousy.
Rereading, it appears that the word you singled out (“default”) was in fact part of a significantly longer phrase (which you even italicized for emphasis); and this phrase, I think, conveys a notion substantially stronger than the weakened version you appear to have retreated to in response to my pushback. We are presented with the idea, not just of a “default” state, but an immediate assumption regarding Bob’s motives—quite a forceful assertion to make!
An assumption with what confidence level, might I ask? And (furthermore) what kind of extraordinarily high “default” confidence level must you postulate, sufficient to outweigh other, more situationally specific forms of evidence, such as—for example—the opinions of onlookers (as conveyed through third-party comments such as gjm’s or mine, as well as through voting behavior)?
For example, suppose it is the case that Alice (in addition to criticizing Bob’s object-level points) also takes it upon herself to include, in each of her comments, a remark to the effect that Bob is physically unattractive.
That would be one of those “exceptional circumstances” I referred to. Do you claim such circumstances obtain in the case at hand?
I claim that Duncan so claims, and that (moreover) you have thus far made no move to refute that claim directly, preferring instead to appeal to priors wherever possible (a theme present throughout many of the individual quote/response pairs in this comment). Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Duncan’s claim here is correct—but as time goes on and I continue to observe [what appear to me to be] attempts to avoid analyzing the situation on the object level, I do admit that one side’s position starts to look increasingly favored over the other!
(Having said that, I realize that the above may come off as “taking sides” to some extent, and so—both for your benefit and for the benefit of onlookers—I would like to stress for myself the same point gjm stressed upthread, which is that I consider both Said and Duncan to be strong positive contributors to LW content/culture, and would be accordingly sad to see either one of them go. That I am to some extent “defending” Duncan in this instance is not in any way a broader indictment of Said—only of the accusations of misconduct he [appears to me to be] leveling at Duncan.)
and if Bob then proceeded to ban Alice for such provocations, we would not consider this evidence that he cannot tolerate criticism. The reason for the ban, after all, would have been explained, and thus screened off, leaving us with no reason to suspect him of banning Alice for “lousy reasons”.
All of this, as I said, was quite comprehensively covered in the comment to which you’re responding. (I begin to suspect that you did not read it very carefully.)
Perhaps the topic of discussion (as you have construed it) differs substantially from how I see it, because this statement is, so far as I can tell, simply false. Of course, it should be easy enough to disconfirm this merely by pointing out the specific part of the grandparent comment you believe addresses the point I made inside of the nested quote block; and so I will await just such a response.
But the claim that you have not, in any of your prior interactions with him, engaged in a style of discourse that made him think of you as an unusually unlikely-to-be-productive commenter, is, I think, unsupported.
But of course I never claimed anything like this. What the heck sort of strawman is this? Where is it coming from? And what relevance does it have?
Well, by the law of the excluded middle, can I take your seeming disavowal of this claim as an admission that its negation holds—in other words, that you have, in fact, engaged with Duncan in ways that he considers unproductive? If so, the relevance of this point seems nakedly obvious to me: if you are, in fact, (so far as Duncan can tell) an unproductive presence in the comment section of his posts, then… well, I might as well let my past self of ~4 hours ago say it:
And if he had perceived you as such, why, this might then be perceived as sufficient grounds to remove the possibility of such unproductive interactions going forward, and to make that decision independent of the quality (or, indeed, existence) of your object-level criticisms.
What is this passive-voice “might then be perceived” business? Do you perceive this to be the case?
It seems like you are saying something like “if Bob decides that he is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with Alice, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts”. Are you, in fact, saying that? If not—what are you saying?
And in response to this, I can only say: the sentence within quotation marks is very nearly the opposite of what I am saying—which, phrased within the same framing, would go like this:
“If Bob decides that Alice is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with him, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts.”
We’re not talking about a commutative operation here; it does in fact matter, whose name goes where!
I appreciate the starkness of this response. Specifically, your response makes it quite clear that the word “robust” is carrying essentially entirety of the weight of your argument. However, you don’t appear to have operationalized this anywhere in your comment, and (unfortunately) I confess myself unclear as to what you mean by it. “Disagreement” is obvious enough, which is why I was able to provide an example on such short notice, but if you wish me to procure an example of whatever you are calling “robust disagreement”, you will have to explain in more detail what this thing is, and (hopefully) why it matters!
Well. Let’s review what you actually said, shall we? …
Yes. A strong default. I stand by what I said.
An assumption with what confidence level, might I ask?
A high one.
And (furthermore) what kind of extraordinarily high “default” confidence level must you postulate
This seems to me to be only an ordinarily high “default” confidence level, for things like this.
sufficient to outweigh other, more situationally specific forms of evidence, such as—for example—the opinions of onlookers (as conveyed through third-party comments such as gjm’s or mine
See my above-linked reply to gjm, re: “the opinions of onlookers”.
as well as through voting behavior)?
People on Less Wrong downvote for things other than “this is wrong”. You know this. (Indeed, this is wholly consonant with the designed purpose of the karma vote.)
I claim that Duncan so claims, and that (moreover) you have thus far made no move to refute that claim directly, preferring instead to appeal to priors wherever possible (a theme present throughout many of the individual quote/response pairs in this comment). Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Duncan’s claim here is correct—but as time goes on and I continue to observe [what appear to me to be] attempts to avoid analyzing the situation on the object level, I do admit that one side’s position starts to look increasingly favored over the other!
Likewise see my above-linked reply to gjm.
All of this, as I said, was quite comprehensively covered in the comment to which you’re responding. (I begin to suspect that you did not read it very carefully.)
Perhaps the topic of discussion (as you have construed it) differs substantially from how I see it, because this statement is, so far as I can tell, simply false. Of course, it should be easy enough to disconfirm this merely by pointing out the specific part of the grandparent comment you believe addresses the point I made inside of the nested quote block; and so I will await just such a response.
I refer there to the three quote–reply pairs above that one.
accusations of misconduct
I must object to this. I don’t think what I’ve accused Duncan of can be fairly called “misconduct”. He’s broken no rules or norms of Less Wrong, as far as I can tell. Everything he’s done is allowed (and even, in some sense, encouraged) by the site rules. He hasn’t done anything underhanded or deliberately deceptive, hasn’t made factually false claims, etc. It does not seem to me that either Duncan, or Less Wrong’s moderation team, would consider any of his behavior in this matter to be blameworthy. (I could be wrong about this, of course, but that would surprise me.)
Well, by the law of the excluded middle, can I take your seeming disavowal of this claim as an admission that its negation holds—in other words, that you have, in fact, engaged with Duncan in ways that he considers unproductive?
Yes, of course. Duncan has said as much, repeatedly. It would be strange to disbelieve him on this.
Just as obviously, I don’t agree with his characterization!
(As before, see my above-linked reply to gjm for more details.)
And if he had perceived you as such, why, this might then be perceived as sufficient grounds to remove the possibility of such unproductive interactions going forward, and to make that decision independent of the quality (or, indeed, existence) of your object-level criticisms.
What is this passive-voice “might then be perceived” business? Do you perceive this to be the case?
It seems like you are saying something like “if Bob decides that he is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with Alice, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts”. Are you, in fact, saying that? If not—what are you saying?
And in response to this, I can only say: the sentence within quotation marks is very nearly the opposite of what I am saying—which, phrased within the same framing, would go like this:
“If Bob decides that Alice is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with him, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts.”
We’re not talking about a commutative operation here; it does in fact matter, whose name goes where!
This seems clearly wrong to me. The operation is of course commutative; it doesn’t matter in the least whose name goes where. In any engagement between Alice and Bob, Alice can decide that Bob is engaging unproductively, at the same time as Bob decides that Alice is engaging unproductively. And of course Bob isn’t going to decide that it’s he who is the one engaging unproductively with Alice (and vice-versa).
And both formulations can be summarized as “Bob decides that he is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with Alice” (regardless of whether Bob or Alice is allegedly to blame; Bob, clearly, will hold the latter view; Alice, the former).
In any case, you have now made your view clear enough:
“If Bob decides that Alice is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with him, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts.”
All I can say is that this, too, seems clearly wrong to me (for reasons which I’ve already described in some detail).
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.
(Adhering to Ray’s request of making <1 reply per hour, though in this case I was already planning to do so.)
The above fails to note something analogous to “arrested while driving ≠ arrested for driving.”
It is not in fact the case that anyone was blocked for disagreeing with or criticizing the things that I had written, though it is true that a couple of people have been blocked while disagreeing or criticizing.
EDIT: I went and looked up the fancy words for this: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
What they were blocked for was not disagreement. I shall not enumerate the dozens-if-not-hundreds of people who have disagreed with me often and at length (and even sometimes with some vehemence) without being blocked, but I’ll note that you can find multiple instances of people on my block list disagreeing with me previously in ways that were just fine.
Metaphor: if you were to disagree with someone while throwing bricks at them, subsequently going “aHA! They blocked me for disagreeing!” would be disingenuous.
I didn’t say anything about “blocked for disagreeing [or criticizing]”. (Go ahead, check!)
What I said was:
The other people in question were, to my knowledge, also banned from commenting on Duncan’s posts due to their criticism of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” (or due to related discussions, on related topics on Less Wrong)
Here Said is, as far as I can tell, arguing that “blocked for disagreeing or criticizing” is not straightforwardly synonymous with “blocked due to disagreeing or criticizing.”
In any event, none of the people in question were blocked for disagreeing or criticizing, and (saying it the other way too, just in case I’m missing some meaningful semantic difference) none of them were blocked due to disagreeing or criticizing, either.
I again mention that it’s not at all hard to find instances of people disagreeing with me or criticizing me or my ideas quite hard, without getting blocked, and that there are even plentiful instances of several of the blocked people having done so in the past (which did not, in the past, result in them getting blocked).
I think the important bit from Said’s perspective is that these people were blocked for reasons not-related-to whether they had something useful to say about those rules, so we may be missing important things.
I’ll reiterate Habryka’s take on “I do think if we were to canonize some version of the rules, that should be in a place that everyone can comment on.” And I’d go on to say: on that post we also should relax some of the more opinionated rules about how to comment. i.e. we should avoid boxing ourselves in so that it’s hard to criticize the rules in practice.
I think a separate thing Said cares about is that there is some period for arguing about the rules before they “get canonized.” I do think there should be at least some period for this, but not worried about it being particularly long because
a) the mod team has had tons of time to think about what norms are good and people have had tons of time to argue, and I think this is mostly going to be cementing things that were already de-facto site norms,
b) people can still argue about the rules after the fact (and I think comments on The Rules post, and top level posts about site norms, should have at least some more leeway about how to argue. I think there’ll probably still be some norms like, ‘don’t do ad hominem attacks’ but don’t expect that to actually cause an issue)
That said, I certainly don’t promise that everyone will be happy with the rules, the process here will not be democratic, it’ll be the judgment of the LW mod team.
Or an indication that some otherwise non-banned members of the site are actually kind of poor at exhibiting one or more of the basics of rationalist discourse and have been tolerated on LW for other reasons unrelated to their quality as thinkers, reasoners, and conversational partners.
For instance, they might think that, because they can’t think of a way, this means that there literally exists no way for a thing to be true (or be prone to using exaggerated language that communicates that even though it doesn’t reflect their actual belief).
(The Basics post was written because I felt it was needed on LW, because there are people who engage in frequent violation of good discourse norms and get away with it because it’s kind of tricky to point at precisely what they’re doing that’s bringing down the quality of the conversations. That doesn’t mean that my particular formulation was correct (I have already offered above to make changes to the two weakest sections), but it is not, in fact, the case, that [a user who’s been barred from commenting but otherwise still welcome on LW as a whole] is necessarily in possession of good critique. Indeed they might be, but they might also be precisely the kind of user who was the casus belli of the post in the first place.)
All of this is irrelevant, because the point is that if the conversational norms cannot be discussed openly (by people who otherwise aren’t banned from the site for being spammers or something similarly egregious), then there’s no reason to believe that they’re good norms. How were they vetted? How were they arrived at? Why should we trust that they’re not, say, chock-full of catastrophic problems? (Indeed, the more people[1] are banned from commenting on the norms as a consequence of their criticism of said norms, the less we should believe that the norms are any good!)
Of all the posts on the site, the post proposing new site norms is the one that should be subjected to the greatest scrutiny—and yet it’s also the post[2] from which more critics have been banned than from almost any other. This is an extremely bad sign.
Weighted by karma (as a proxy for “not just some random person off the street, but someone whom the site and its participants judge to have worthwhile things to say”). (The ratio of “total karma of people banned from commenting on ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” to “karma of author of ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” is approximately 3:1. If karma represents some measure of “Less Wrong, as a site and a community, has endorsed this person as someone whose participation in discussions here is a positive good”—and the OP here suggests that it does, indeed, represent that—what does it mean that the so-called “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” cannot even bear discussion by people who are, collectively, so relatively well-regarded?)
For what it’s worth, the high level point here seems right to me (I am not trying to chime into the rest of the discussion about whether the ban system is a good idea in the first place).
If we canonize something like Duncan’s post I agree that we should do something like copy over a bunch of it into a new post, give prominent attribution to Duncan at the very top of the post, explain how it applies to our actual moderation policy, and then we should maintain our own ban list.
I think Duncan’s post is great, but I think when we canonize something like this it doesn’t make sense for Duncan’s ban list to carry over to the more canonized version.
This is certainly well and good, but it seems to me that the important thing is to do something like this before canonizing anything. Otherwise, it’s a case of “feel free to discuss this, but nothing will come of it, because the decision’s already been made”.
The whole point of community discussion of something like this is to serve as input into any decisions made. If you decide first, it’s too late to discuss. This is exactly what makes the author-determined ban lists so extraordinarily damaging in a case like this, where the post in question is on a “meta” topic (setting aside for the moment whether they’re good or bad in general).
The most interesting thing you said is left to your footnote:
The ratio of “total karma of people banned from commenting on ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” to “karma of author of ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” is approximately 3:1.
I would love to see if this pattern is also present in other posts.
There should be some mechanism to judge posts / comments that have a mix of good and bad karma, especially since there are two measures of this now. In the olden-days it still would have been possible to do, since an overall score of “0” could still be a very high-quality information signal, if the total number of votes is high. This is only even more the case now.
Indeed, the more people[1] are banned from commenting on the norms as a consequence of their criticism of said norms, the less we should believe that the norms are any good!
At issue is whether low-quality debate is ever fruitful. That piece of data in your footnote suggests that the issue might instead be whether or not there even is low-quality debate, or at least whether or not we can rely on moderators’ judgement calls or the sum of all (weighted) votes to make such calls.
That piece of data in your footnote suggests that the issue might instead be whether or not there even is low-quality debate, or at least whether or not we can rely on moderators’ judgement calls or the sum of all (weighted) votes to make such calls.
Certainly we can’t rely on the judgment of post authors! (And I am not even talking about this case in particular, but—just in general, for post authors to have the power to make such calls introduces a massive conflict of interest, and incentivizes ego-driven cognitive distortions. This is why the “post authors can ban people from their posts” feature is so corrosive to anything resembling good and useful discussion… truly, it seems to me like an egregious, and entirely unforced, mistake in system design.)
The mistake in system design started with the implementation of downvoting, but I have more complicated reasoning for this. If you have a system that implements downvoting, the reason for having that feature in place is to prevent ideas that are not easily argued away from being repeated. I tend to be skeptical of such systems because I tend to believe that if ideas are not easily argued away, they are more likely to have merit to them. If you have a post which argues for the enforcement of certain norms which push down specific kinds of ideas that are hard to argue away, one of which is the very idea that this ought to be done, it creates the impression that there are certain dogmas which can no longer be defended in open dialogue.
I am not sure that I’d go quite that far, but I certainly sympathize with the sentiment.
If you have a post which argues for the enforcement of certain norms which push down specific kinds of ideas that are hard to argue away, one of which is the very idea that this ought to be done, it creates the impression that there are certain dogmas which can no longer be defended in open dialogue.
… it is not, in fact, the case, that [a user who’s been barred from commenting but otherwise still welcome on LW as a whole] is necessarily in possession of good critique. Indeed they might be, but they might also be precisely the kind of user who was the casus belli of the post in the first place.)
Note, by the way, that these two things are not at all mutually exclusive. It might, indeed, be the case that the post was motivated by some kinds of people/critiques—which have/are good critiques. (Indeed that’s one of the most important and consequential sorts of criticism of the post: that among its motivations was one or more bad motivations, which we should not endorse, and which we should, in fact, oppose, as following it would have bad effects.)
(I think this is a thread that, if I had a “slow mode” button to make users take longer to reply, I’d probably have clicked it right about now. I don’t have such a button, but Said and @Duncan_Sabien can you guys a) hold off for a couple hours on digging into this and b) generally take ~an hour in between replies here if you were gonna keep going)
Ah. So, these people have banned duncan from commenting on their frontpage posts? or, duncan has banned them from commenting on his frontpage posts? I guess you’re implying the latter.
Zack_M_Davis JenniferRM AnnaSalamon Said Achmiz M. Y. Zuo LVSN
Agreed w.r.t. “basic questions” we could ask new users. The subreddit /r/ControlProblem now makes people take a quiz before they can post, to filter for people who e.g. know and care about the orthogonality thesis. (The quiz is pretty easy to pass if you’re familiar with the basic ideas of AI safety/alignment/DontKillEveryoneism.)
Hey, first just wanted to say thanks and love and respect. The moderation team did such an amazing job bringing LW back from nearly defunct into the thriving place it is now. I’m not so active in posting now, but check the site logged out probably 3-5 times a week and my life is much better for it.
After that, a few ideas:
(1) While I don’t 100% agree with every point he made, I think Duncan Sabien did an incredible job with “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1 - perhaps a boiled-down canonical version of that could be created. Obviously the pressure to get something like that perfect would be high, so maybe something like “Our rough thoughts on how to be a good a contributor here, which might get updated from time to time”. Or just link Duncan’s piece as “non-canonical for rules but a great starting place.” I’d hazard a guess that 90% of regular users here agree with at least 70% of it? If everyone followed all of Sabien’s guidelines, there’d be a rather high quality standard.
(2) I wonder if there’s some reasonably precise questions you could ask new users to check for understanding and could be there as a friendly-ish guidepost if a new user is going wayward. Your example—“(for example: “beliefs are probabilistic, not binary, and you should update them incrementally”)”—seems like a really good one. Obviously those should be incredibly non-contentious, but something that would demonstrate a core understanding. Perhaps 3-5 of those, maybe something that a person formally writes up some commentary on their personal blog before posting?
(3) It’s fallen from its peak glory years, but sonsofsamhorn.net might be an interesting reference case to look at — it was one of the top analytical sports discussion forums for quite a while. At the height of its popularity, many users wanted to join but wouldn’t understand the basics—for instance, that a poorly-positioned player on defense making a flashy “diving play” to get the baseball wasn’t a sign of good defense, but rather a sign that that player has a fundamental weakness in their game, which could be investigated more deeply with statistics—and we can’t just trust flashy replay videos to be accurate indicators of defensive skill. (Defense in American baseball is particularly hard to measure and sometimes contentious.) What SOSH did was create an area called “The Sandbox” which was relatively unrestricted — spam and abuse still weren’t permitted of course, but the standard of rigor was a lot lower. Regular members would engage in Sandbox threads from time to time, and users who made excellent posts and comments in The Sandbox would get invited to full membership. Probably not needed at the current scale level, but might be worth starting to think about for a long-term solution if LW keeps growing.
Thanks so much for everything you and the team do.
I did the have the idea of there being regions with varying standards and barriers, in particular places where new users cannot comment easily and place where they can, as an idea.
This feels like a/the natural solution. In particular, what occurred to me was:
Make LW about rationality again.
Expand the Alignment Forum: 2.1. By default, everything is as it is currently: a small set of users post, comment, and upvote, and that’s what people see by default. 2.2. There’s another section that’s open to whoever.
The reasoning being that the influx is specifically about AI, not just a big influx.
The idea of AF having both a passing-the-current-AF-bar section and a passing-the-current-LW-bar section is intriguing to me. With some thought about labeling etc., it could be a big win for non-alignment people (since LW can suppress alignment content more aggressively by default), and a big win for people trying to get into alignment (since they can host their stuff on a more professional-looking dedicated alignment site), and no harm done to the current AF people (since the LW-bar section would be clearly labeled and lower on the frontpage).
I didn’t think it through very carefully though.
I like this direction, but I’m not sure how broadly one would want to define rationality: Would a post collecting quotes about intracranial ultrasound stimulation for meditation enhancement be rationality related enough? What about weird quantified self experiments?
In general I appreciate LessWrong because it is so much broader than other fora, while still staying interesting.
Well, at least we can say, “whatever LW has been, minus most AI stuff”.
I do agree Duncan’s post is pretty good, and while I don’t think it’s perfect I don’t really have an alternative I think is better for new users getting a handle on the culture here.
I’d be willing to put serious effort into editing/updating/redrafting the two sections that got the most constructive pushback, if that would help tip things over the edge.
If you could add QAs, this could turn into a certificate that one has verifiably read or copy&past what LessWrong expects its users to know before writing under some tag (with a specific set of QAs for each main tags). Of course LW could also certify that this or that trusted user is welcome on all tags, and chose what tag can or can’t appear in front page.
I vaguely remember being not on board with that one and downvoting it. Basics of Rationalist Discourse doesn’t seem to get to the core of what rationality is, and seems to preclude other approaches that might be valuable. Too strict and misses the point. I would hate for this to become the standard.
Culture is not systematically rationality (dath ilan wasn’t built in a day). Not having an alternative that’s better can coexist with this particular thing not being any good for same purpose. And a thing that’s any good could well be currently infeasible to make, for anyone.
Zack’s post describes the fundamental difficulty with this project pretty well. Adherence to most rules of discourse is not systematically an improvement for processes of finding truth, and there is a risk of costly cargo cultist activities, even if they are actually good for something else. The cost could be negative selection by culture, losing its stated purpose.
I would vastly prefer new users to read it than to not read anything at all.
There is no way that a post which some (otherwise non-banned) members of the site are banned from commenting on should be used as an onboarding tool for the site culture. The very fact of such bannings is a clear demonstration of the post’s unsuitability for purpose.
How does the fact of such bannings demonstrate the post’s unsuitability for purpose?
I think it doesn’t. For instance, I think the following scenario is clearly possible:
There are users A and B who detest one another for entirely non-LW-related reasons. (Maybe they had a messy and distressing divorce or something.)
A and B are both valuable contributors to LW, as long as they stay away from one another.
A and B ban one another from commenting on their posts, because they detest one another. (Or, more positively, because they recognize that if they start interacting then sooner or later they will start behaving towards one another in unhelpful ways.)
A writes an excellent post about LW culture, and bans B from it just like A bans B from all their posts (and vice versa).
If you think that Duncan’s post specifically shouldn’t be an LW-culture-onboarding tool because he banned you specifically from commenting on it, then I think you need reasons tied to the specifics of the post, or the specifics of your banning, or both.
(To be clear: I am not claiming that you don’t have any such reasons, nor that Duncan is right to ban you from commenting on his frontpaged posts, nor that Duncan’s “basics” post is good, nor am I claiming the opposite of any of those. I’m just saying that the thing you’re saying doesn’t follow from the thing you’re saying it follows from.)
I suspect that you know perfectly well that the sort of scenario you describe doesn’t apply here. (If, by some chance, you did not know this: I affirm it now. There is no “messy and distressing divorce”, or any such thing; indeed I have never interacted with Duncan, in any way, in any venue other than on Less Wrong.)
The other people in question were, to my knowledge, also banned from commenting on Duncan’s posts due to their criticism of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” (or due to related discussions, on related topics on Less Wrong), and likewise have no such “out of band” relationship with Duncan.
(All of this was, I think, obvious from context. But now it has been said explicitly. Given these facts, your objection does not apply.)
I did not claim that my scenario describes the actual situation; in fact, it should be very obvious from my last two paragraphs that I thought (and think) it likely not to.
What I claimed (and still claim) is that the mere fact that some people are banned from commenting on Duncan’s frontpage posts is not on its own anything like a demonstration that any particular post he may have written isn’t worthy of being used for LW culture onboarding.
Evidently you think that some more specific features of the situation do have that consequence. But you haven’t said what those more specific features are, nor how they have that consequence.
Actually, elsewhere in the thread you’ve said something that at least gestures in that direction:
I don’t think this argument works. (There may well be a better version of it, along the lines of “There seem to be an awful lot of people Duncan is unable or unwilling to get on with on LW. That suggests that there’s something wrong with his style of interaction, or with how he deals with other people’s styles of interaction. And that suggests that we should be very skeptical of anything he writes that purports to tell us what’s a good style of interaction”. But that would be a different argument.)
It’s not true that the norms can’t be discussed openly; at least, it seems to me that in general “there are a few people who aren’t allowed to talk in place X” is importantly different from “there are a few people who aren’t allowed to talk about the thing that’s mostly talked about in place X” which in turn is importantly different from “the thing that’s mostly talked about in place X cannot be discussed openly”.
It does matter how extensively they’ve been discussed, and that question is worth asking. Part of the answer is that right now that post has 179 comments. Another part is that in fact quite a few of those comments are from you.
If it were true that criticizing Duncan’s proposed norms gets you banned from interacting with Duncan (and hence from commenting on that post) then indeed that would be a problem. I do not get the impression that that’s true. In particular, to whatever extent it’s true that you were banned “as a consequence of [your] criticism of said norms”, I think that has to be interpreted as “as a consequence of the manner of your criticism of said norms” as opposed to “as a consequence of the fact that you criticized said norms” or “as a consequence of the content of your criticism of said norms”, and I don’t think there’s any particular conflict between “these norms have been subject to robust debate” and “some people argued about them in a way Duncan found disagreeable enough to trigger a ban”.
(Again, it might be that Duncan is too sensitive to some styles of argument, or too ban-happy, or something, and that that is reason to be skeptical of his proposed principles. Again, that’s a different argument.)
This is false.
There certainly is a conflict, if “the way Duncan found disagreeable” is “robust”.
Sorry, no. It’s the very argument in question. The “styles of argument” are “the ones that are directly critical of the heart of the claims being made”.
It is at best debatable that “this is false”. Duncan (who, of course, is the person who did the banning) explicitly denies that you were banned for criticizing his proposed norms. Maybe he’s just lying, but it’s certainly not obvious that he is and it looks to me as if he isn’t.
Duncan has also been pretty explicit about what he dislikes about your interactions with him, and what he says he objects to is definitely not simply “robust disagreement”. Again, of course it’s possible he’s just lying; again, I don’t see any reason to think he is.
You are claiming very confidently, as if it’s a matter of common knowledge, that Duncan banned you from commenting on his frontpage posts because he can’t accept direct criticism of his claims and proposals. I do not see any reason to think that that is true. You have not, so far as I can see, given any reason to think it is true. I think you should stop making that claim without either justification or it-seems-to-me-that hedging.
(Since it’s fairly clear[1] that this is a matter of something like enmity rather than mere disagreement and in such contexts everything is liable to be taken as a declaration of What Side One Is On, I will say that I think both you and Duncan are clear net-positive contributors to LW, that I am pretty sure I understand what each of you finds intolerable about the other, and that I have zero intention of picking a side in the overall fight.)
[1] So it seems to me. I suspect you disagree, and perhaps Duncan does too, but this is the sort of thing it is very easy to deceive oneself about.
As a decoupled aside, something not being a matter of common knowledge is not grounds for making claims of it less confidently, it’s only grounds for a tiny bit of acknowledgment of this not being common knowledge, or of the claim not being expected to be persuasive in isolation.
I agree. If you are very certain of X but X isn’t common knowledge (actually, “common knowledge” in the technical sense isn’t needed, it’s something like “agreed on by basically everyone around you”) then it’s fine to say e.g. “I am very certain of X, from which I infer Y”, but I think there is something rude about simply saying “X, therefore Y” without any acknowledgement that some of your audience may disagree with X. (It feels as if the subtext is “if you don’t agree with X then you’re too ignorant/stupid/crazy for me to care at all what you think”.)
In practice, it’s rather common to do the thing I’m claiming is rude. I expect I do it myself from time to time. But I think it would be better if we didn’t.
My point is that this concern is adequately summarized by something like “claiming without acknowledgment/disclaimers”, but not “claiming confidently” (which would change credence in the name of something that’s not correctness).
I disagree that this is a problem in most cases (acknowledgment is a cost, and usually not informative), but acknowledge that this is debatable. Similarly to the forms of politeness the require more words, as opposed to forms of politeness that, all else equal, leave the message length unchanged. Acknowledgment is useful where it’s actually in doubt.
In this case, Said is both (1) claiming the thing very confidently, when it seems pretty clear to me that that confidence is not warranted, and (2) claiming it as if it’s common knowledge, when it seems pretty clear to me that it’s far from being common knowledge.
But of course he would deny it. As I’ve said, that’s the problem with giving members the power to ban people from their posts: it creates a conflict of interest. It lets people ban commenters for simply disagreeing with them, while being able to claim that it’s for some other reason. Why would Duncan say “yeah, I banned these people because I don’t like it when people point out the flaws in my arguments, the ways in which something I’ve written makes no sense, etc.”? It would make him look pretty bad to admit that, wouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t he instead say that he banned the people in question for some respectable reason? What downside is there, for him?
And given that, why in the world would we believe him when he says such things? Why would we ever believe any post author who, after banning a commenter who’s made a bunch of posts disagreeing with said author, claims that the ban was actually for some other reason? It doesn’t make any sense at all to take such claims seriously!
The reason why the “ban people from your own post(s)” feature is bad is that it gives people an incentive to make such false claims, not just to deceive others (that would be merely bad) but—much worse!—to deceive themselves about their reasons for issuing bans.
The obvious reason to think so is that, having written something which is deserving of strong criticism—something which is seriously flawed, etc.—both letting people point this out, in clear and unmerciful terms, and banning them but admitting that you’ve banned them because you can’t take criticism, is unpleasant. (The latter more so than the former… or so we might hope!) Given the option to simply declare that the critics have supposedly violated some supposed norm (and that their violation is so terrible, so absolutely intolerable, that it outweighs the benefit of permitting their criticisms to be posted—quite a claim!), it would take an implausible, an almost superhuman, degree of integrity and force of will to resist doing just that. (Which is why it’s so bad to offer the option.)
I have no idea where you think such “enmity” could come from. As I said, I haven’t interacted with Duncan in any venue except on Less Wrong, ever. I have no personal feelings, positive or negative, toward him.
We would believe it because
on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things
Duncan has said at some length what he claims to find unpleasant about interacting with you, it isn’t just “Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written”, and it is (to me) very plausible that someone might find it unpleasant and annoying
(I’m pretty sure that) other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts.
You don’t give any concrete reason for disbelieving the plausible explanations Duncan gives, you just say—as you could say regardless of the facts of the matter in this case—that of course someone banning someone from commenting on their posts won’t admit to doing so for lousy reasons. No doubt that’s true, but that doesn’t mean they all are doing it for lousy reasons.
It seems pretty obvious to me where enmity could come from. You and Duncan have said a bunch of negative things about one another in public; it is absolutely commonplace to resent having people say negative things about you in public. Maybe it all started with straightforward disagreement about some matter of fact, but where we are now is that interactions between you and Duncan tend to get hostile, and this happens faster and further than (to me) seems adequately explained just by disagreements on the points ostensibly at issue.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I was not at all claiming that whatever enmity there might be started somewhere other than LW.)
[ I don’t follow either participant closely enough to have a strong opinion on the disagreement, aside from noting that the disagreement seems to use a lot of words, and not a lot of effort to distill their own positions toward a crux, as opposed to attacking/defending. ]
In the case of contentious or adversarial discussions, people say incorrect and misleading things . “more likely true than false” is a uselessly low bar for seeking any truth or basing any decisions on.
This is a claim so general as to be meaningless. If we knew absolutely nothing except “a person said a thing”, then retreating to this sort of maximally-vague prior might be relevant. But we in fact are discussing a quite specific situation, with quite specific particular and categorical features. There is no good reason to believe that the quoted prior survives that descent to specificity unscathed (and indeed it seems clear to me that it very much does not).
It’s slightly more specific, of course—but this is, indeed, a good first approximation.
Of course it is! What is surprising about the fact that being challenged on your claims, being asked to give examples of alleged principles, having your theories questioned, having your arguments picked apart, and generally being treated as though you’re basically just some dude saying things which could easily be wrong in all sorts of ways, is unpleasant and annoying? People don’t like such things! On the scale of “man bites dog” to the reverse thereof, this particular insight is all the way at the latter end.
The whole point of this collective exercise that we’re engaged in, with the “rationality” and the “sanity waterline” and all that, is to help each other overcome this sort of resistance, and thereby to more consistently and quickly approach truth.
Let’s see some examples, then we can talk.
If Alice criticizes one of Bob’s posts, and Bob immediately or shortly thereafter bans Alice from commenting on Bob’s posts, the immediate default assumption should be that the criticism was the reason for the ban. Knowing nothing else, just based on these bare facts, we should jump right to the assumption that Bob’s reasons for banning Alice were lousy.
If we then learn that Bob has banned multiple people who criticized him robustly/forcefully/etc., and Bob claim that the bans in all of these cases were for good reasons, valid reasons, definitely not just “these people criticized me”… then unless Bob has some truly heroic evidence (of the sort that, really, it is almost never possible to get), his claims should be laughed out of the room.
(Indeed, I’ll go further and say that the default assumption—though a slightly weaker default—in all cases of anyone banning anyone else[1] from commenting on their posts is that the ban was for lousy reasons. Yes, in some cases that default is overridden by some exceptional circumstances. But until we learn of such circumstances, evaluate them, and judge them to be good reasons for such a ban, we should assume that the reasons are bad.)
And the problem here isn’t that our hypothetical Bob, or the actual Duncan, is a bad person, a liar, etc. Nothing of the sort need be true! (And in Duncan’s case, I think that probably nothing of the sort is true.) But it would be very foolish of us to simply take someone’s word in a case like this.
Again, this is the whole problem with the “post authors can ban people from their posts” feature—that it creates such situations, where people are tempted (by intellectual vanity—a terrible temptation indeed) to do things which instantly cast them in a bad light, because they cannot be distinguished from the actions of someone who is either unable (due to failure of reasoning or knowledge) or unwilling (due to weakness of ego or lack of integrity) to submit their ideas and writing to proper scrutiny. (That they truly believe themselves to be acting from only the purest motives is, of course, quite beside the point; the power of self-deception is hardly news to us, around these parts.)
If there’s any “enmity” (and I remain unsure that any such thing exists), it’s wholly one-sided. I haven’t said anything about or to Duncan that I wouldn’t say to anyone, should the situation warrant it. And I don’t think (though I haven’t gone through all my comments to verify this, but I can think of no exceptions) that I’ve said anything which I wouldn’t stand by.
With the exception of, say, obvious spammers or cranks or other such egregious malefactors whom most reasonable observers would expect to just be banned from the whole forum.
You continue to assert, with apparent complete confidence, a claim about Duncan’s motivations that (1) Duncan denies, (2) evidently seems to at least two people (me and dxu) to be far from obviously true, and (3) you provide no evidence for that engages with any specifics at all. The trouble with 3 is that it cuts you off from the possibility of getting less wrong. If in fact Duncan’s motivations were not as you think they are, how could you come to realise that?
(Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t, because you judge that in the situation we’re in the behaviour of someone with the motivations you claim is indistinguishable from that of someone with the motivations Duncan claims, and you’re willing to bite that bullet.)
I don’t agree with your analysis of the Alice/Bob situation. I think that in the situation as described, given only the information you give, we should be taking seriously at least these hypotheses: (1) Bob is just very ban-happy and bans anyone who criticizes him, (2) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, but the reason that happens is that he’s unreasonably provoking them, (3) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, for reasons that don’t reflect badly on Bob. And also various hybrids—it’s easy to envisage situations where 1,2,3 are all important aspects of what’s going on. And to form a firm opinion between 1,2,3 we need more information. For instance, what did Alice’s criticism actually look like? What did Bob say about his reasons? How have other people who are neither Alice nor Bob interpreted what happened?
Here’s Duncan’s actual description of what he says he finds unpleasant about interacting with you; it’s from Zack’s response to Duncan’s proposed discourse norms. (What happened next was that you made a brief reply, Duncan claimed that it was a demonstration of the exact dynamic he was complaining about, and said “Goodbye, Said”; I take it that’s the point at which he banned you from commenting on his frontpage posts. So I think it’s reasonable to take it as his account of why-Duncan-banned-Said.
Now, it seems clear to me that (1) if Duncan felt that way about interacting with you, it would be a very plausible explanation for the ban; (2) Duncan’s claimed perception does somewhat match my impression of your commenting style on LW (though I would not frame it nearly as negatively as he did; as already mentioned I think your presence on LW is clearly net positive); (3) I accordingly find it plausible that Duncan is fairly accurately describing his own subjective reasons for not wanting to interact with you.
Of course all of that is consistent with Duncan actually being upset by being criticized and then casting about for rationalizations. But, again, it doesn’t appear to me that he does anything like this every time someone strongly disagrees with him. In addition to dxu’s example in a sibling of this comment (to which you objected that the disagreement there wasn’t “robust”; like dxu I think it would be helpful to understand what you actually mean by “robust” and e.g. whether it implies what most people would call “rude”), here are a few more things people have said to Duncan without getting any sort of ban:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yepKvM5rsvbpix75G/you-don-t-exist-duncan?commentId=ZChwgNps7KactBaHh (JBlack commenting on the “you don’t exist” post; more dismissive than disagreeing; how much that matters depends on just what your model of Duncan is); see also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yepKvM5rsvbpix75G/you-don-t-exist-duncan?commentId=H65ffCkthuDfkJafp (Charlie Steiner commenting on the same post, also kinda dismissive and rude, though my model of your model of Duncan isn’t all that bothered by it)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k9dsbn8LZ6tTesDS3/sazen?commentId=LdDqFSijLievEQiQv (“the gears to ascension” commenting on the “sazen” post; alleges that the whole post is a bad idea while apparently misunderstanding it badly; Duncan is clearly annoyed but no ban)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gbdqMaADqxMDwtgaf/exposure-to-lizardman-is-lethal?commentId=sneYCBckEFvL2hJdm and the thread descending from it (link is to jaspax saying that one of Duncan’s examples in the “lizardman” post is badly wrong; much of the subsequent discussion is a lengthy and vigorous dispute between tailcalled and Duncan; Duncan has not blocked either jaspax or tailcalled). There is a lot of other strong-disagreement-with-Duncan in that thread. One instance did result in Duncan blocking the user in question, but the fact that it’s currently sitting at −31/-28 suggests that Duncan isn’t the only person who considers it obnoxious.
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, think that Duncan is unusually willing to block people from commenting on his posts. But I don’t think “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him” is a tenable position unless you are defining “robustly” in a nonstandard way.
Of course he denies it. I already explained that we’d expect him to deny it if it were true. Come on! This is extremely obvious stuff. Why would he not deny it?
And if indeed he’d deny it if it were true, and obviously would also deny it if it were false, then it’s not evidence. Right? Bayes!
Yes, many people on Less Wrong have implausible degrees of “charity” in their priors on human behavior.
But of course it does no such thing! It means merely that I have a strong prior, and have seen no convincing evidence against.
Same way I come to realize anything else: updating on evidence. (But it’d have to be some evidence!)
Pretty close to indistinguishable, yeah.
(1) is the obvious default (because it’s quite common and ordinary). (2) seems to rest on the meaning of “unreasonably”; I think we can mostly conflate it with (3). And (3) certainly happens but isn’t anywhere close to the default.
Also, your (1) says “anyone”, but it could also be “anyone over a certain threshold of criticism strength/salience/etc.”. That makes it even more the obvious default.
Well, for one thing, “what did Bob say” can’t be given much weight, as I noted above.
The interpretation of third parties seems mostly irrelevant. If Carol observes the situation, she can reach her own conclusion without consulting Dave. Dave’s opinion shouldn’t be any kind of meaningful input into Carol’s evaluation.
As for “what did Alice’s criticism look like”, sure. We have to confirm that there aren’t any personal insults in there, for instance. Easy enough.
Yes, of course! I agree completely! In the quoted bit, Duncan says pretty much exactly what we’d expect him to say if what he were very annoyed at being repeatedly questioned, challenged, and contradicted by some other commenter, in ways that he found himself unable to convincingly respond to, and which inability made him look bad. It makes sense that Duncan would, indeed, describe said commenter’s remarks in tendentious ways, using emotionally charges descriptions with strongly negative valence but few details, and that he would dismiss said commenter’s contributions as irrelevant, unimportant, and unworthy of engagement. It is totally unsurprising both that Duncan would experience aversive feelings when interacting with said commenter, and that he would report so experiencing.
You don’t say…
Actually, even “rationalizations” is too harsh. It’s more like “describing in a negative light things that are actually neutral or positive”. And the “casting about” absolutely need not (and, indeed, is unlikely to be) conscious.
And I know I’ve been hammering on this point, but I’m going to do it again: this is the problem with the “authors can ban users from their posts” feature. It gives LW participants an incentive to have these sorts of entirely genuine and not at all faked emotional responses. (See this old comment thread by Vladimir_M for elaboration on the idea.) As I’ve said, I don’t think that Duncan is lying!
Nah, I don’t mean “rude”. But let’s take a look at your examples:
User JBlack made a single comment on a single post by Duncan. Why ban him? What would that accomplish? Duncan isn’t some sort of unthinking ban-bot; he’s a quite intelligent person who, as far as I can tell, is generally capable of behaving reasonably with respect to his goals. Expecting that he’d ban JBlack as a result of this single comment doesn’t make much sense, even if we took everything I said about Duncan’s disposition were wholly true! It’s not even much of a criticism!
A brief exchange, at which point the user in question seems to have been deterred from commenting further. Their two comments were also downvoted, which is significant.
(Note, however, that if I were betting on “who will Duncan ban next”, user “the gears to ascension” would certainly be in the running—but not because of this one comment thread that you linked there.)
User jaspax made one comment on that post (and hasn’t commented on any of Duncan’s other posts, as far as I can find on a quick skim). User tailcalled is a more plausible candidate. I would likewise expect a ban if they commented in similar fashion on one or more subsequent posts by Duncan (this seems to have been the first such interaction).
For one thing, I didn’t say “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him”. What I said (in response to your “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts”) was “Let’s see some examples, then we can talk”. Well, we’ve got one example now (the last one, with tailcalled), so we can talk.
Like I said before—Duncan’s a smart guy, not some sort of ban-bot who reflexively bans anyone who disagrees with him. Here’s what seems to me to be the heuristic:
Some other user X comments on Duncan’s posts, criticizing Duncan in ways that he can’t easily counter.
Duncan does not consider the criticism to be fair or productive.
The critical comments are upvoted and/or endorsed or supported by others; there is no (or insufficient) convincing counter from any sympathetic third parties.
The gestalt impression left with most readers seems likely to be one of Duncan being mistaken/unreasonable/wrong/etc.
Duncan feels that this impression is false and unfair (he considers himself to have been in the right; see #2).
User X comments on more than one post of Duncan’s, and seems likely to continue to comment on his future posts.
X is undeterred by Duncan’s attempted pushback. (And why would they be? See #3.)
In such a scenario, the only way (other than leaving Less Wrong, or simply ceasing to write posts, which amounts to the same thing) to stop X from continuing to cast Duncan and his ideas and claims in a bad light—which Duncan feels is undeserved—is to ban X from his posts. So that’s what Duncan does.
Does this seem so far-fetched? I don’t think so. Indeed it seems almost reasonable, doesn’t it? I think there’s even a good chance that Duncan himself might endorse this characterization! (I certainly hope so, anyway; I’ve tried to ensure that there’s nothing in this description that would be implausible for Duncan to assent to.)
Do you disagree?
You say that if you were wrong about Duncan’s motivations then you would discover “by updating on evidence” but I don’t understand what sort of evidence you could possibly see that would make you update enough to make any difference. (Again, maybe this is a bullet you bite and you’re content with just assuming bad faith and having no realistic way to discover if you’re wrong.)
Although you say “Bayes!” it seems to me that what you’re actually doing involves an uncomfortable amount of (something like) snapping probabilities to 0 and 1. That’s a thing everyone does at least a bit, because we need to prune our hypothesis spaces to manageable size, but I think in this case it’s making your reasoning invalid.
E.g., you say: Duncan would deny your accusation if it were true, and he would deny it if it were false, hence his denial tells us nothing. But that’s all an oversimplification. If it were true, he might admit it; people do in fact not-so-infrequently admit it when they do bad things and get called out on it. Or he might deny it in a less specific way, rather than presenting a concrete explanation of what he did. Or he might just say nothing. (It’s not like your accusation had been made when he originally said what he did.) Or he might present a concrete explanation that is substantially less plausible than the one he actually presented. So his denial does tell us something. Obviously not as much as if no one ever lied, deceived themselves, etc., but still something.
… I need to be a bit more precise, because there are two different versions of your accusation and the details of the calculation are different in the two cases. A1 is “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with being robustly criticized”. A2 is something like “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with robustly criticized, but he was unaware that that was his real reason and sincerely thought he was doing it because of how Said goes about criticizing, the things he objects to being things that many others might also object to”. The claim “if it were true then he would behave that way” is much truer about A2 than about A1, but it is also much less probable a priori. (Compare “God created the universe 6000 years ago” with “God created the universe 6000 years ago, and carefully made it look exactly the same as it would have if it were billions of years old”: the evidence that makes the former very unlikely is powerless against the latter, but that is not in fact an advantage of the latter.)
So, anyway, we have A1 and A2, and the alternative B: that Duncan blocked Said on account of features of Said’s interaction-style that genuinely don’t basically come down to “Said pointed out deficiencies in what Duncan said”. (Because to whatever extent Duncan’s objections are other things, whether they’re reasonable or not, his blocking of Said after Said said negative things about Duncan’s proposed norms doesn’t indicate that robust discussion of those norms is impossible.) You say that some version of A is an “obvious default”. Maybe so, but here again I think you’re rounding-to-0-and-1. How obvious a default? How much more likely than B? It seems to me that A1 is obviously not more than, say, 4:1 favoured over B. (I am not sure it’s favoured over B at all; 4:1 is not my best estimate, it’s my most generous estimate.) And how much evidence does Duncan’s own account of his motivations offer for B over A1? I think at least 2:1.
In other words, even if we agree that (1) Duncan’s words aren’t very much evidence of his motivations (most of the time, when someone says something it’s much more than 2:1 evidence in favour of that thing being true) and (2) the bad-faith scenario is a priori substantially more likely than the good-faith one, with what seem to me actually realistic numbers we don’t get more than 2:1 odds for bad faith over good faith.
I claim that that is very much not sufficient grounds for writing as if the bad-faith explanation is definitely correct. (And I reiterate that 2:1 for bad over good is not my best estimate, it’s my most charitable-to-Said’s-position estimate.)
(“Ah, but I meant A2 not A1!”. Fine, but A2 implies A1 and cannot be more probable than A1.)
As you refine your proposed Duncan-blocking-model, it seems to me, it becomes less capable of supporting the criticism you were originally making on the basis of Duncan’s blocking behaviour. You weren’t very specific about exactly what that criticism was—rather, you gestured broadly towards the fact of the blocking and invited us all to conclude that Duncan’s proposed norms are bad, without saying anything about your reasoning—and it still isn’t perfectly clear to me exactly how we’re supposed to get from the blocking-related facts to any conclusion about the merits of the proposed norms. But it seems like it has to be something along the lines of (a) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour has ensured that his proposals don’t get the sort of robust debate they should get before being treated as norms” and/or (b) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour demonstrates that his discourse-preferences are bad, so we shouldn’t be adopting guidelines he proposes”; and as we move from the original implicit “Duncan blocks everyone who disagrees with him” (which, no, you did not say explicitly in those words, nor did you say anything explicitly, but it definitely seemed like that was pretty much what you were gesturing at) to “Duncan blocks people who disagree with him persistently in multiple posts, in ways he considers unfair, and are in no way mollified by his responses to that disagreement”, the amount of support the proposition offers for (a) and/or (b) decreases considerably.
Incidentally, I am fairly sure that the vagueness I am being a bit complainy about in the previous paragraph is much the same thing (or part of the same thing) as Duncan was referring to when he said
and one reason why I find Duncan’s account of his motivations more plausible than your rival account (not only as a description of the conscious motivations he permits himself to be aware of, but as a description of the actual causal history) is that the reasons he alleges do seem to me to correspond to elements of your behaviour that aren’t just a matter of making cogent criticisms that he doesn’t have good answers to.
I think you would do well to notice the extent to which your account of Duncan’s motivations is seemingly optimized to present you in a good light, and consider whether some of the psychological mechanisms you think are at work in Duncan might be at work in you too. No one likes to admit that someone else has presented cogent criticisms of their position that they can’t answer, true. But, also, no one likes to admit that when they thought they were presenting cogent criticisms they were being needlessly rude and uncooperative.
Also, while we’re on the subject of your model of Duncan’s motivations: a key element of that model seems to be that Duncan has trouble coping with criticisms that he can’t refute. But when looking for examples of other people disagreeing robustly with Duncan, I found several cases where other people made criticisms to which he responded along the lines of “Yes, I agree; that’s a deficiency in what I wrote.”. So criticisms Duncan can’t refute, as such, don’t seem to send him off the rails: maybe there’s an ingredient in the process that leads to his blocking people, but it can’t be the only ingredient.
[EDITED to add:] It is not clear to me whether this discussion is making much useful progress. It is quite likely that my next reply in this thread will be along the lines of “Here are answers to specific questions/criticisms; beyond that, I don’t think it’s productive for me to continue”.
I think I do want to ask everyone to stop this conversation because it seems weirdly anchored on one particular example, that, as far as I can tell, was basically a central of what we wanted the author-moderation norms to be for in Meta-tations on Moderation, and they shouldn’t be getting dragged through a trial-like thing for following the rules we gave them.
If I had an easy lock-thread button I’d probably have hit that ~last night. We do have a lock thread functionality but it’s a bit annoying to use.
They don’t need to be personally involved. The rules protect author’s posts, they don’t give the author immunity from being discussed somewhere else.
This situation is a question that merits discussion, with implications for general policy. It might have no place in this particular thread, but it should have a place somewhere convenient (perhaps some sort of dedicated meta “subreddit”, or under a meta tag). Not discussing particular cases restricts allowed forms of argument, distorts understanding in systematic ways.
Replying just to acknowledge that I’ve seen this and am entirely content to drop it here.
Tangentially, isn’t there already plenty of onboarding material that’s had input from most of the moderating team?
Just not including the stuff that hasn’t been vetted by a large majority/unanimity of the team seems to be straightforward.
Apologies, but I have now been forbidden from discussing the matter further.
Please feel free to contact me via private message if you’re interested in continuing the discussion. But if you want to leave things here, that’s also perfectly fine. (Strictly speaking, the ball at this point is in my court, but I wouldn’t presume to take the discussion to PM unilaterally; my guess is that you don’t think that’s particularly worth the effort, and that seems to me to be a reasonable view.)
The prior does in fact survive, in the absence of evidence that pushes one’s conclusion away from it. And this evidence, I submit, you have not provided. (And the inferences you do put forth as evidence are—though this should be obvious from my previous sentence—not valid as inferences; more on this below.)
This is a substantially load-bearing statement. It would appear that Duncan denies this, that gjm thinks otherwise as well, and (to add a third person to the tally) I also find this claim suspicious. Numerical popularity of course does not determine the truth (or falsity) of a claim, but in such a case I think it behooves you to offer some additional evidence for your claim, beyond merely stating it as a brute fact. To wit:
What, of the things that Duncan has written in explanation of his decision to ban you from commenting on his posts (as was the subject matter being discussed in the quoted part of the grandparent comment, with the complete sentence being “Duncan has said at some length what he claims to find unpleasant about interacting with you, it isn’t just ‘Said keeps finding mistakes in what I have written’, and it is (to me) very plausible that someone might find it unpleasant and annoying”), do you claim “approximates” the explanation that he did so because you “keep finding mistakes in what he has written”? I should like to see a specific remark from him that you think is reasonably construed as such.
I present myself as an example; I confirm that, after leaving this comment expressing clear disagreement with Duncan, I have not been banned from commenting on any of his posts.
I am (moreover) quite confident in my ability to find additional such examples if necessary, but in lieu of that, I will instead question the necessity of such: did you, Said Achmiz, (prior to my finding an example) honestly expect/suspect that there were no such examples to be found? This would seem to equate to a belief that Duncan has banned anyone and everyone who has dared to disagree with him in the past, which in turn would (given his prolific writing and posting behavior) imply that he should have a substantial fraction of the regular LW commentariat banned—which should have been extremely obviously false to you from the start!
Indeed, this observation has me questioning the reliability of your stance on this particular issue, since the tendency to get things like this wrong suggests a model of (this subregion of) reality so deeply flawed, little to no wisdom avails to be extracted.
As alluded to in the quote/response pair at the beginning of this comment, this is not a valid inference. What you propose is a valid probabilistic inference in the setting where we are presented only with the information you describe (although even then the strength of update justified by such information is limited at best). Nonetheless, there are plenty of remaining hypotheses consistent with the information in question, and which have (hence) not been ruled out merely by observing Bob to have banned Alice.
For example, suppose it is the case that Alice (in addition to criticizing Bob’s object-level points) also takes it upon herself to include, in each of her comments, a remark to the effect that Bob is physically unattractive. I don’t expect it controversial to suggest that this behavior would be considered inappropriate by the standards, not just of LW, but of any conversational forum that considers itself to have standards at all; and if Bob then proceeded to ban Alice for such provocations, we would not consider this evidence that he cannot tolerate criticism. The reason for the ban, after all, would have been explained, and thus screened off, leaving us with no reason to suspect him of banning Alice for “lousy reasons”.
No doubt you will claim, here, that the situation is not relevantly analogous, since you have not, in fact, insulted Duncan’s physical appearance. But the claim that you have not, in any of your prior interactions with him, engaged in a style of discourse that made him think of you as an unusually unlikely-to-be-productive commenter, is, I think, unsupported. And if he had perceived you as such, why, this might then be perceived as sufficient grounds to remove the possibility of such unproductive interactions going forward, and to make that decision independent of the quality (or, indeed, existence) of your object-level criticisms.
Categories like “conflicts of interest”, “discussions about who should be banned”, “arguments about moderation in cases in which you’re involved”, etc., already constitute “evidence” that push the conclusion away from the prior of “on the whole, people are more likely to say true things than false things”, without even getting into anything more specific.
You’ve misunderstood. 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.
A single circumspectly disagreeing comment on a tangential, secondary (tertiary? quaternary?) point, buried deep in a subthread, having minimal direct bearing on the claims in the post under which it’s posted. “Robust disagreement”, this ain’t.
(Don’t get me wrong—it’s a fine comment, and I see that I strong-upvoted it at the time. But it sure is not anything at all like an example of the thing I asked for examples of.)
Please do. So far, the example count remains at zero.
Given that you did not, in fact, find an example, I think that this question remains unmotivated.
Most people don’t bother to think about other people’s posts in sufficient detail and sufficiently critically to have anything much to say about them.
Of the remainder, some agree with Duncan.
Of the remainder of those, many don’t care enough to engage in arguments, disagreements, etc., of any sort.
Of the remainder of those, many are either naturally disinclined to criticize forcefully, to press the criticism, to make points which are embarrassing or uncomfortable, etc., or else are deterred from doing so by the threat of moderation.
That cuts the candidate pool down to a small handful.
Separately, recall that Duncan has (I think more than once now) responded to similar situations by leaving (or “leaving”) Less Wrong. (What is the significance of his choice to respond this time by banning people instead of leaving the site again, I do not know. I suppose it’s an improvement, such as it is, though obviously I’d prefer it if he did neither of these things.)
That cuts out a lot of “the past”.
We then observe that Duncan has now banned more people from commenting on his frontpage posts than any other user of the site (twice as many as the runner-up).
So my request for examples of the alleged phenomenon wherein “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts” is not so absurd, after all.
I think that, on the contrary, it is you who should re-examine your stance on the matter. Perhaps the absurdity heuristic, coupled with a too-hasty jump to a conclusion, has led you astray?
That’s why I said “default”.
That would be one of those “exceptional circumstances” I referred to. Do you claim such circumstances obtain in the case at hand?
This is why I specifically noted that I was referring to people who hadn’t been banned from the site. Surely the LW moderators would see fit to censure a commenter for such behavior, since, as you suggest, it would be quite beyond the pale in any civilized discussion forum.
All of this, as I said, was quite comprehensively covered in the comment to which you’re responding. (I begin to suspect that you did not read it very carefully.)
Indeed…
But of course I never claimed anything like this. What the heck sort of strawman is this? Where is it coming from? And what relevance does it have?
What is this passive-voice “might then be perceived” business? Do you perceive this to be the case?
It seems like you are saying something like “if Bob decides that he is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with Alice, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts”. Are you, in fact, saying that? If not—what are you saying?
The strength of the evidence is, in fact, a relevant input. And of the evidential strength conferred by the style of reasoning employed here, much has already been written.
Then your response to gjm’s point seems misdirected, as the sentence you were quoting from his comment explicitly specifies that it concerns what Duncan himself said. Furthermore, I find it unlikely that this is an implication you could have missed, given that the first quote-block above speaks specifically of the likelihood that “people” (Duncan) may or may not say false things with regards to a topic in which they are personally invested; indeed, this back-and-forth stemmed from discussion of that initial point!
Setting that aside, however, there is a further issue to be noted (one which, if anything, is more damning than the previous), which is that—having now (apparently) detached our notion of what is being “approximated” from any particular set of utterances—we are left with the brute claim that “‘Said keeps finding mistakes in what Duncan have written’ is a good approximation of what Duncan finds unpleasant about interacting with Said”—a claim for which I don’t see how you could defend even having positive knowledge of, much less its truth value! After all, neither of us has telepathic access to Duncan’s inner thoughts, and so the claim that his ban of you was been motivated by some factor X—which factor he in fact explicitly denies having exerted an influence—is speculation at best, and psychologizing at worst.
I appreciate the starkness of this response. Specifically, your response makes it quite clear that the word “robust” is carrying essentially entirety of the weight of your argument. However, you don’t appear to have operationalized this anywhere in your comment, and (unfortunately) I confess myself unclear as to what you mean by it. “Disagreement” is obvious enough, which is why I was able to provide an example on such short notice, but if you wish me to procure an example of whatever you are calling “robust disagreement”, you will have to explain in more detail what this thing is, and (hopefully) why it matters!
It is my opinion that the response to the previous quoted block also serves adequately as a response to these miscellaneous remarks.
This question is, in fact, somewhat difficult to answer as of this exact moment, since the answer depends in large part on the meaning of a term (“robustness”) whose contextual usage you have not yet concretely operationalized. I of course invite such an operationalization, and would be delighted to reconsider my stance if presented with a good one; until that happens, however, I confess myself skeptical of what (in my estimation) amounts to an uncashed promissory note.
Well. Let’s review what you actually said, shall we?
Rereading, it appears that the word you singled out (“default”) was in fact part of a significantly longer phrase (which you even italicized for emphasis); and this phrase, I think, conveys a notion substantially stronger than the weakened version you appear to have retreated to in response to my pushback. We are presented with the idea, not just of a “default” state, but an immediate assumption regarding Bob’s motives—quite a forceful assertion to make!
An assumption with what confidence level, might I ask? And (furthermore) what kind of extraordinarily high “default” confidence level must you postulate, sufficient to outweigh other, more situationally specific forms of evidence, such as—for example—the opinions of onlookers (as conveyed through third-party comments such as gjm’s or mine, as well as through voting behavior)?
I claim that Duncan so claims, and that (moreover) you have thus far made no move to refute that claim directly, preferring instead to appeal to priors wherever possible (a theme present throughout many of the individual quote/response pairs in this comment). Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Duncan’s claim here is correct—but as time goes on and I continue to observe [what appear to me to be] attempts to avoid analyzing the situation on the object level, I do admit that one side’s position starts to look increasingly favored over the other!
(Having said that, I realize that the above may come off as “taking sides” to some extent, and so—both for your benefit and for the benefit of onlookers—I would like to stress for myself the same point gjm stressed upthread, which is that I consider both Said and Duncan to be strong positive contributors to LW content/culture, and would be accordingly sad to see either one of them go. That I am to some extent “defending” Duncan in this instance is not in any way a broader indictment of Said—only of the accusations of misconduct he [appears to me to be] leveling at Duncan.)
Perhaps the topic of discussion (as you have construed it) differs substantially from how I see it, because this statement is, so far as I can tell, simply false. Of course, it should be easy enough to disconfirm this merely by pointing out the specific part of the grandparent comment you believe addresses the point I made inside of the nested quote block; and so I will await just such a response.
Well, by the law of the excluded middle, can I take your seeming disavowal of this claim as an admission that its negation holds—in other words, that you have, in fact, engaged with Duncan in ways that he considers unproductive? If so, the relevance of this point seems nakedly obvious to me: if you are, in fact, (so far as Duncan can tell) an unproductive presence in the comment section of his posts, then… well, I might as well let my past self of ~4 hours ago say it:
And in response to this, I can only say: the sentence within quotation marks is very nearly the opposite of what I am saying—which, phrased within the same framing, would go like this:
“If Bob decides that Alice is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with him, then that is a good and honorable reason for Bob to ban Alice from commenting on his posts.”
We’re not talking about a commutative operation here; it does in fact matter, whose name goes where!
Please see my reply to gjm.
Yes. A strong default. I stand by what I said.
A high one.
This seems to me to be only an ordinarily high “default” confidence level, for things like this.
See my above-linked reply to gjm, re: “the opinions of onlookers”.
People on Less Wrong downvote for things other than “this is wrong”. You know this. (Indeed, this is wholly consonant with the designed purpose of the karma vote.)
Likewise see my above-linked reply to gjm.
I refer there to the three quote–reply pairs above that one.
I must object to this. I don’t think what I’ve accused Duncan of can be fairly called “misconduct”. He’s broken no rules or norms of Less Wrong, as far as I can tell. Everything he’s done is allowed (and even, in some sense, encouraged) by the site rules. He hasn’t done anything underhanded or deliberately deceptive, hasn’t made factually false claims, etc. It does not seem to me that either Duncan, or Less Wrong’s moderation team, would consider any of his behavior in this matter to be blameworthy. (I could be wrong about this, of course, but that would surprise me.)
Yes, of course. Duncan has said as much, repeatedly. It would be strange to disbelieve him on this.
Just as obviously, I don’t agree with his characterization!
(As before, see my above-linked reply to gjm for more details.)
This seems clearly wrong to me. The operation is of course commutative; it doesn’t matter in the least whose name goes where. In any engagement between Alice and Bob, Alice can decide that Bob is engaging unproductively, at the same time as Bob decides that Alice is engaging unproductively. And of course Bob isn’t going to decide that it’s he who is the one engaging unproductively with Alice (and vice-versa).
And both formulations can be summarized as “Bob decides that he is unlikely to engage in productive discussion with Alice” (regardless of whether Bob or Alice is allegedly to blame; Bob, clearly, will hold the latter view; Alice, the former).
In any case, you have now made your view clear enough:
All I can say is that this, too, seems clearly wrong to me (for reasons which I’ve already described in some detail).
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)
(Adhering to Ray’s request of making <1 reply per hour, though in this case I was already planning to do so.)
The above fails to note something analogous to “arrested while driving ≠ arrested for driving.”
It is not in fact the case that anyone was blocked for disagreeing with or criticizing the things that I had written, though it is true that a couple of people have been blocked while disagreeing or criticizing.
EDIT: I went and looked up the fancy words for this: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
What they were blocked for was not disagreement. I shall not enumerate the dozens-if-not-hundreds of people who have disagreed with me often and at length (and even sometimes with some vehemence) without being blocked, but I’ll note that you can find multiple instances of people on my block list disagreeing with me previously in ways that were just fine.
Metaphor: if you were to disagree with someone while throwing bricks at them, subsequently going “aHA! They blocked me for disagreeing!” would be disingenuous.
I didn’t say anything about “blocked for disagreeing [or criticizing]”. (Go ahead, check!)
What I said was:
To deny this, it seems to me, is untenable.
Here Said is, as far as I can tell, arguing that “blocked for disagreeing or criticizing” is not straightforwardly synonymous with “blocked due to disagreeing or criticizing.”
In any event, none of the people in question were blocked for disagreeing or criticizing, and (saying it the other way too, just in case I’m missing some meaningful semantic difference) none of them were blocked due to disagreeing or criticizing, either.
I again mention that it’s not at all hard to find instances of people disagreeing with me or criticizing me or my ideas quite hard, without getting blocked, and that there are even plentiful instances of several of the blocked people having done so in the past (which did not, in the past, result in them getting blocked).
I think the important bit from Said’s perspective is that these people were blocked for reasons not-related-to whether they had something useful to say about those rules, so we may be missing important things.
I’ll reiterate Habryka’s take on “I do think if we were to canonize some version of the rules, that should be in a place that everyone can comment on.” And I’d go on to say: on that post we also should relax some of the more opinionated rules about how to comment. i.e. we should avoid boxing ourselves in so that it’s hard to criticize the rules in practice.
I think a separate thing Said cares about is that there is some period for arguing about the rules before they “get canonized.” I do think there should be at least some period for this, but not worried about it being particularly long because
a) the mod team has had tons of time to think about what norms are good and people have had tons of time to argue, and I think this is mostly going to be cementing things that were already de-facto site norms,
b) people can still argue about the rules after the fact (and I think comments on The Rules post, and top level posts about site norms, should have at least some more leeway about how to argue. I think there’ll probably still be some norms like, ‘don’t do ad hominem attacks’ but don’t expect that to actually cause an issue)
That said, I certainly don’t promise that everyone will be happy with the rules, the process here will not be democratic, it’ll be the judgment of the LW mod team.
Strong upvote, strong agree.
Or an indication that some otherwise non-banned members of the site are actually kind of poor at exhibiting one or more of the basics of rationalist discourse and have been tolerated on LW for other reasons unrelated to their quality as thinkers, reasoners, and conversational partners.
For instance, they might think that, because they can’t think of a way, this means that there literally exists no way for a thing to be true (or be prone to using exaggerated language that communicates that even though it doesn’t reflect their actual belief).
(The Basics post was written because I felt it was needed on LW, because there are people who engage in frequent violation of good discourse norms and get away with it because it’s kind of tricky to point at precisely what they’re doing that’s bringing down the quality of the conversations. That doesn’t mean that my particular formulation was correct (I have already offered above to make changes to the two weakest sections), but it is not, in fact, the case, that [a user who’s been barred from commenting but otherwise still welcome on LW as a whole] is necessarily in possession of good critique. Indeed they might be, but they might also be precisely the kind of user who was the casus belli of the post in the first place.)
All of this is irrelevant, because the point is that if the conversational norms cannot be discussed openly (by people who otherwise aren’t banned from the site for being spammers or something similarly egregious), then there’s no reason to believe that they’re good norms. How were they vetted? How were they arrived at? Why should we trust that they’re not, say, chock-full of catastrophic problems? (Indeed, the more people[1] are banned from commenting on the norms as a consequence of their criticism of said norms, the less we should believe that the norms are any good!)
Of all the posts on the site, the post proposing new site norms is the one that should be subjected to the greatest scrutiny—and yet it’s also the post[2] from which more critics have been banned than from almost any other. This is an extremely bad sign.
Weighted by karma (as a proxy for “not just some random person off the street, but someone whom the site and its participants judge to have worthwhile things to say”). (The ratio of “total karma of people banned from commenting on ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” to “karma of author of ‘Basics of Rationalist Discourse’” is approximately 3:1. If karma represents some measure of “Less Wrong, as a site and a community, has endorsed this person as someone whose participation in discussions here is a positive good”—and the OP here suggests that it does, indeed, represent that—what does it mean that the so-called “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” cannot even bear discussion by people who are, collectively, so relatively well-regarded?)
Technically, the user. But that hardly changes the point.
For what it’s worth, the high level point here seems right to me (I am not trying to chime into the rest of the discussion about whether the ban system is a good idea in the first place).
If we canonize something like Duncan’s post I agree that we should do something like copy over a bunch of it into a new post, give prominent attribution to Duncan at the very top of the post, explain how it applies to our actual moderation policy, and then we should maintain our own ban list.
I think Duncan’s post is great, but I think when we canonize something like this it doesn’t make sense for Duncan’s ban list to carry over to the more canonized version.
This is certainly well and good, but it seems to me that the important thing is to do something like this before canonizing anything. Otherwise, it’s a case of “feel free to discuss this, but nothing will come of it, because the decision’s already been made”.
The whole point of community discussion of something like this is to serve as input into any decisions made. If you decide first, it’s too late to discuss. This is exactly what makes the author-determined ban lists so extraordinarily damaging in a case like this, where the post in question is on a “meta” topic (setting aside for the moment whether they’re good or bad in general).
The most interesting thing you said is left to your footnote:
I would love to see if this pattern is also present in other posts.
There should be some mechanism to judge posts / comments that have a mix of good and bad karma, especially since there are two measures of this now. In the olden-days it still would have been possible to do, since an overall score of “0” could still be a very high-quality information signal, if the total number of votes is high. This is only even more the case now.
At issue is whether low-quality debate is ever fruitful. That piece of data in your footnote suggests that the issue might instead be whether or not there even is low-quality debate, or at least whether or not we can rely on moderators’ judgement calls or the sum of all (weighted) votes to make such calls.
Certainly we can’t rely on the judgment of post authors! (And I am not even talking about this case in particular, but—just in general, for post authors to have the power to make such calls introduces a massive conflict of interest, and incentivizes ego-driven cognitive distortions. This is why the “post authors can ban people from their posts” feature is so corrosive to anything resembling good and useful discussion… truly, it seems to me like an egregious, and entirely unforced, mistake in system design.)
The mistake in system design started with the implementation of downvoting, but I have more complicated reasoning for this. If you have a system that implements downvoting, the reason for having that feature in place is to prevent ideas that are not easily argued away from being repeated. I tend to be skeptical of such systems because I tend to believe that if ideas are not easily argued away, they are more likely to have merit to them. If you have a post which argues for the enforcement of certain norms which push down specific kinds of ideas that are hard to argue away, one of which is the very idea that this ought to be done, it creates the impression that there are certain dogmas which can no longer be defended in open dialogue.
I am not sure that I’d go quite that far, but I certainly sympathize with the sentiment.
And with this, I entirely agree.
Note, by the way, that these two things are not at all mutually exclusive. It might, indeed, be the case that the post was motivated by some kinds of people/critiques—which have/are good critiques. (Indeed that’s one of the most important and consequential sorts of criticism of the post: that among its motivations was one or more bad motivations, which we should not endorse, and which we should, in fact, oppose, as following it would have bad effects.)
(I think this is a thread that, if I had a “slow mode” button to make users take longer to reply, I’d probably have clicked it right about now. I don’t have such a button, but Said and @Duncan_Sabien can you guys a) hold off for a couple hours on digging into this and b) generally take ~an hour in between replies here if you were gonna keep going)
who are the banned users? I’m not sure how to access the list and would like it mildly immortalized in case you change it later.
See lesswrong.com/moderation
I don’t see any bans related to that post there.
See the lower section, on user bans.
Ah. So, these people have banned duncan from commenting on their frontpage posts? or, duncan has banned them from commenting on his frontpage posts? I guess you’re implying the latter.
Makes sense.
shrug. people can make posts in reply. Zack has done so. no great loss, I think—if anything, it created slightly more discussion.
Agreed w.r.t. “basic questions” we could ask new users. The subreddit /r/ControlProblem now makes people take a quiz before they can post, to filter for people who e.g. know and care about the orthogonality thesis. (The quiz is pretty easy to pass if you’re familiar with the basic ideas of AI safety/alignment/DontKillEveryoneism.)