It appears from this post that the ban was itself based on a misunderstanding of my final comment. Nowhere in my comment did I say anything resembling “Anyway, let’s talk about how Y is not true.” with Y being “People should have been deferring to Yudkowsky as much as they did.”
What I actually did was acknowledge my misunderstanding and then propose a new, related topic I thought might be interesting: the actual root causes of the deference. This was an invitation to a different conversation, which Tsvi was free to ignore.
There is no plausible interpretation of my comment as a refusal to drop the original point. The idea that I was stuck on a hobby horse that could only be stopped by a ban is directly contradicted by the text of the comment itself:
Ok, it looks like part of my motivation for going down this line of thought was based on a misunderstanding. But to be fair, in this post after you asked “What should we have done instead?” with regard to deferring to Eliezer, you didn’t clearly say “we should have not deferred or deferred less”, but instead wrote “We don’t have to stop deferring, to avoid this correlated failure. We just have to say that we’re deferring.” Given that this is a case where many people could have and should have not deferred, this just seems like a bad example to illustrate “given that to some extent at the end of the day we do have to defer on many things, what can we do to alleviate some of those problems?”, leading to the kind of confusion I had.
Also, another part of my motivation is still valid and I think it would be interesting to try to answer why didn’t you (and others) just not defer? Not in a rhetorical sense, but what actually caused this? Was it age as you hinted earlier? Was it just human nature to want to defer to someone? Was it that you were being paid by an organization that Eliezer founded and had very strong influence over? Etc.? And also why didn’t you (and others) notice Eliezer’s strategic mistakes, if that has a different or additional answer?
I think there are other significant misrepresentations in his “gloss” of the thread, that I won’t go into. This episode has given me quite a large aversion around engaging with Tsvi, which will inform my future participation on LW.
It appears from this post that the ban was itself based on a misunderstanding of my final comment.
No. The original ban was based on the pattern I described. The pattern is that you really wanted to talk about Y, but instead of just saying so, you tried to fabricate a disagreement with me (initially about X) and did not listen to me saying I did not think Y.
Nowhere in my comment did I say anything resembling “Anyway, let’s talk about how Y is not true.” with Y being “People should have been deferring to Yudkowsky as much as they did.”
I mean, you switched the topic from X to the general topic of people deferring too much to Yudkowsky (Y). Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference in the context where I’m describing the X-Y pattern. Do you see this at all? Like, the pattern I’m describing is that you really want to talk about Y, but instead of just talking about it you’re going on about X because that’s what you think you can pick a fight with me about, and ignoring when I’m saying I don’t disagree with Y while still moving the discussion to the topic of Y.
But it really seems like you do have a significant disagreement with Dai about the extent to which deference to Yudkowsky was justified.
I understand and acknowledge that you think deference has large costs, as you’ve previously written about. I also understand and acknowledge that you think defering to Yudkowsky on existential risk strategy in particular was costly, as you explicitly wrote in the post (“one of those founder effects was to overinvest in technical research and underinvest in ‘social victory’ [...] Whose fault was that?”).
At the same time, however, in your discussion in the post of how people could have done better in that particular case, you emphasize being transparent about deference in order to reduce its distortionary effects (“We don’t have to stop deferring, to avoid this correlated failure”), in contrast to how Dai argues in the comment section that not-deferring was a live option (“These seemed like obvious mistakes even at the time”). You even seem to ridicule Dai for this (“And then you’re like ‘Ha. Why not just not defer?’”). This seems like a real and substantive disagreement, not a hallucination on Dai’s part. It can’t simultaneously be the case that Dai is wrong to implicitly ask “Why not just not defer?”, and also wrong to suggest that you disagree with him about when it’s reasonable to defer.
Sorry, I think I can do better with a little more wordcount and effort.
I think that you think that the reason Dai is wrong to implicitly ask “Why not just not defer in this case?” is because you think that’s not relevantly on-topic for a post about how to mitigate harms from deference by an author who has established that he understands why deference is harmful, because you think that the implied question falsely presupposes that the post author is not aware of why deference is harmful.
(Whereas I think, and I think that Dai thinks, that the question is relevantly on-topic, because even if everyone in the conversation agrees on the broad outlines of why deference is harmful, they might disagree on the nitty-gritty details of exactly how harmful and exactly why, and litigating the nitty-gritty details of an example that was brought up in the post might help in evaluating the post’s thesis.)
Thank you. IDK if it’s closer, it’s still quite incorrect, but I greatly appreciate the effort.
[Edit: Just to state this: I think Dai was coming from good intentions, e.g. to think about important and interesting things. On reflection: I stand by something being unhelpful about the behavior pattern that I’m claiming I have engaged in, that you have engaged in, and that I claim Dai has engaged in; but also, I don’t think it’s some egregious transgression; I think I overreacted and I would like figure out how to handle discussion more gracefully and non-antagonistically; I value open thoughtful critical discussion and am grateful when people are interested in discussing things related to my writing. I also sorta meant this OP as being somewhat playful, but also I was annoyed, so it might have been more antagonizing than ideal.]
[Edit 2: I’m going to go through some of the points in more detail, because it seems like I haven’t successfully explained the pattern clearly enough yet, so I want to try to make things clearer to Zack. But, I don’t want this detailed wall of text to imply that the situation is some big deal; the behavior I’m discussing is not that bad even if you completely buy my perspective; I don’t mean to harp on it, I just want to answer Zack’s questions.]
Dai is wrong to implicitly ask “Why not just not defer in this case?”
I do not think Dai is wrong to ask that question. I think it’s a good and important question.
I don’t think the question was super inexplicit. In his first comment, the last sentence was “In other words, if you were going to spend your career on AI x-safety, of course you could have become an expert on these questions first.”. I followed up with a response to that.
I would say that the fact that his first comment quoted my statement about “Yudkowsky = best AGI X-derisk strategist”, and most of the words were arguing against that, confused the topic. I thought that literal statement was what he wanted to argue against, because he quoted it. Subsequently he did not seem to engage in that specific question, instead starting to develop a different question about different aspects of being a strategic thinker (which is also interesting, but even more off-topic, which is fine, but also confusing).
you think that the reason Dai is wrong to implicitly ask “Why not just not defer in this case?” is because you think that’s not relevantly on-topic
I do think it’s off-topic, but again, being off-topic is fine. I think it’s polite to acknowledge this, e.g. sometimes if I’m responding to something other than one of the main threads of a post I will (or think I ought to even if I don’t) say “Nitpick:” or “Off-topic, but:” or “I didn’t read the post carefully, just responding to [quote]:”. But being maybe mildly impolite in this way is not by itself the issue I have with that thread (though it is one element of the pattern I describe in the OP).
because you think that the implied question falsely presupposes that the post author is not aware of why deference is harmful
Let me venture a description of the events from Dai’s perspective. I will write Imaginary!Dai to emphasize that this is not Dai’s perspective, but my attempt to guess a plausible-to-me way his experience might have been. [I should maybe have similarly used Straw!Dai in the dialogue in the OP—though I did try to make that somewhat accurate, albeit abstracted and only a subset of the original thread, so I also don’t want to imply that I’m not asserting it.]
From Imaginary!Dai’s perspective, Imaginary!Dai has a question-blob (perhaps a hobby horse—which is fine/good to have), which is about strategy, and deference, and Yudkowsky being deferred to and over-deferred to, and why did that happen, and what bad effects it had, and how to do strategy well individually and as groups, and so on. So then there’s Tsvi’s post, and Imaginary!Dai starts some lines of discussion, relating to his question-blob. Tsvi is replying in the thread, and Imaginary!Dai is continuing the discussion. Tsvi’s sorta going off on slight-tangents, not quite focusing on the interesting/important things, so Imaginary!Dai is somewhat continuing the interesting lines of discussion, while responding to some of Tsvi’s comments in ways that further the interesting parts. Then Tsvi freaks out and bans him.
Ok. So, that would be among my mainline guesses of experiences that Dai was having. I think this possible perspective is empathizable-with, and is mostly fine. It’s also unfortunately perfectly compatible with my description of a charging hobby horse. I don’t defend and endorse all of my behavior in response, but on the question of whether Dai’s behavior had a significant inappropriate pattern, I continue to think yes.
(Whereas I think, and I think that Dai thinks, that the question is relevantly on-topic, because even if everyone in the conversation agrees on the broad outlines of why deference is harmful, they might disagree on the nitty-gritty details of exactly how harmful and exactly why, and litigating the nitty-gritty details of an example that was brought up in the post might help in evaluating the post’s thesis.)
I definitely agree that we might (and in fact do) disagree about various details like that, and that this is in general an important topic.
I’m not sure I understand how it’s on topic though. The topic of the post is “If you’re going to defer, how can you alleviate the problems with that?”.
I think it would be on topic to say “We should have been using a different procedure to choose who to defer to” or “We should have been deferring on different questions” or “We should have deferred in a different pattern, e.g. to a larger group of people or with different of us deferring to a wider range of single people”. It could also be well on-topic to say “We should have been deferring to someone else”, e.g. because Yudkowsky was visibly not the best strategic AGI X-derisk thinker; and so it could be on-topic to discuss “Was Yudkowsky the best AGI X-derisk strategic thinker?” to discuss whether there was a mistaken choice in deferee.
But note that, on that thread, Dai was not AFAICT arguing “We should have deferred to someone else”. He was arguing that we should have deferred less overall. (Which IMO is technically off-topic, though of course quite adjacent. Which is fine/good to discuss. In my first reply to him, I did engage on that question.) He sort of kept discussing “Was Yudkowsky the best AGI X-derisk strategic thinker?”—except AFAICT he completely ignored my initial response “But it seems strange to be counting down...” on that topic, so it was unclear to me whether he was trying to discuss that topic with me.
Anyway:
You wrote earlier:
But it really seems like you do have a significant disagreement with Dai about the extent to which deference to Yudkowsky was justified.
Plausibly! I think we both think he was over-deferred to, probably by “a lot”. But plausibly we have different “a lot”s.
You even seem to ridicule Dai for this (“And then you’re like ‘Ha. Why not just not defer?’”). This seems like a real and substantive disagreement, not a hallucination on Dai’s part.
On my interpretation, my statements make it pretty clear that I think:
People in general defer a lot, and this is quite bad (and implicitly therefore they should defer less in total).
But, people have to defer a lot due to cognitive costs and the complexity of the world (so the solution can’t just be “don’t defer”, or even “don’t defer in your field”, though it can and IMO should be “strive to un-defer on as many key questions as feasible in your field”).
So, geniune question, what did Dai mean by
By saying that he was the best strategic thinker, it seems like you’re trying to justify deferring to him on strategy (why not do that if he is actually the best), while also trying to figure out how to defer “gracefully”, whereas I’m questioning whether it made sense to defer to him at all,
The two natural interpretations I can think of are:
You, Tsvi, by saying he’s the best strategist, are justifying that people, instead of un-deferring-to Yudkowsky when they can, should continue deferring to him.
Insofar as people were deferring, they should have defered not to him at all (but by implication, someone else instead).
I believe I would have ruled out 2, since at that point it did not seem to me that he was putting forth some other candidate as an alternate deferree, preferable to Yudkowsky.
So I interpreted 1, which is why I flew off the handle (which I’m sorry about), given that I’d repeatedly stated that I was not arguing in favor of deferring more than you have to.
(In fact, my actual intentions in bringing up Yudkowsky, was pretty off-hand; right now I think my original intention in even adding the phrase “being the best...” was just to descriptively explain why he was deferred to so much, though I state here that it was for emphasis, which is also plausible.)
Separately, as I mentioned above the question of “how, and how much, are we actually forced to defer” is important and interesting, and maybe technically off-topic or something but a good thread and something I engaged with in my first response.
FWIW, in case this is helpful, my impression is that:
It is accurate to describe Wei as doing a “charge of the hobby-horse” in his initial comment, and this should be considered a mild norm violation. I’m also surprised and a bit disappointed that it got so many upvotes.
By the time that Tsvi announced the ban, Wei had already acknowledged that his original comments had been partly based on a misunderstanding. In my culture, I would expect more of an apology for doing so than the “ok...but to be fair” follow-up Wei actually gave. However, the phrase “Also, another part of my motivation is still valid and I think it would be interesting to try to answer” is a clear enough acknowledgement of a distinct line of inquiry that I no longer consider that comment to be a continuation of the “charge of the hobby-horse”.
Tsvi banning Wei for “grossly negligent reading comprehension” after Wei had acknowledged that he was mistaken seems like a mild norm violation. It wouldn’t have been a norm violation if Wei’s comment hadn’t made that acknowledgement; however, it would have been a stronger norm violation if Wei’s comment had included an actual apology.
I’m also surprised and a bit disappointed that it got so many upvotes.
I explained what probably caused this here. I think the current “Popular Comments” feature might often cause this kind of decontextualized voting, and there should perhaps be a way to mitigate it, like let the author of the post or of the comment remove a comment from Popular Comments.
We are killing the popular comments section early next week! I was waiting on doing that until we had shipped the new frontpage feed to everyone. The feed gives us much more ability to adjust what kind of context is attached to comments, and how to decide what comments to show.
Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference
Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.
Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone’s words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:
“But if I take your specific word choice and imagine a whole epistemological stance that produced that word choice, I disagree with that epistemological stance because of such-and-such.”
(I want to preface this all with “I don’t think the thing Wei Dai did was particularly bad, I’m getting into the details here because there are nuances that I do think should ultimately part of a good truthseeking culture, although I think given Wei Dai’s previous track record Tsvi should ideally have put more effort into talking things through before banning and ideally found another solution. Right now authors don’t have a tool for issuing like a 1-day-cooloff sorta ban, which I think would have been more appropriate.”)
Object level, I mostly agree with Richard Ngo’s comment. But, where Richard says:
The phrase “Also, another part of my motivation is still valid and I think it would be interesting to try to answer” is a clear enough acknowledgement of a distinct line of inquiry that I no longer consider that comment to be a continuation of the “charge of the hobby-horse”.
I think that line diminishes the hobby-horse-charging-ness, but, doesn’t resolve it (I’m not sure I’d count it as even cutting the hobby-horse-ness by 50%). Like, Wei Dai says:
Ok, it looks like part of my motivation for going down this line of thought was based on a misunderstanding. But to be fair, in this post after you asked...
I think it’s generally a good yellow-flag-to-notice yourself saying “okay, yeah, I was wrong about that, but, to be fair” and then launch into a continued argument, having only briefly acknowledged the misunderstanding. It doesn’t look like you really “took the update”. When I find myself doing this sort of thing, I am usually look back and feel a bit embarrassed, realizing I really hadn’t thought about the implications of being-mistaken-about-the-first-part. The “to be fair” part is not actually as fair as you think.
I think Tsvi was fairly reasonably interpreting your comment as “I am going to continue all the momentum I had from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-disagreement and funnel into into more conversation that won’t really be a separate conversation from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-bit.”
The sort of thing I’d have wanted to see, if I were Tsvi, is… not even an apology like Richard suggested, but more demonstration of explicitly re-looking over the past conversation in light of realizing it was misunderstanding-fueled, and re-evaluate it in light of that, before continuing on to the next thing.
It appears from this post that the ban was itself based on a misunderstanding of my final comment. Nowhere in my comment did I say anything resembling “Anyway, let’s talk about how Y is not true.” with Y being “People should have been deferring to Yudkowsky as much as they did.”
What I actually did was acknowledge my misunderstanding and then propose a new, related topic I thought might be interesting: the actual root causes of the deference. This was an invitation to a different conversation, which Tsvi was free to ignore.
There is no plausible interpretation of my comment as a refusal to drop the original point. The idea that I was stuck on a hobby horse that could only be stopped by a ban is directly contradicted by the text of the comment itself:
I think there are other significant misrepresentations in his “gloss” of the thread, that I won’t go into. This episode has given me quite a large aversion around engaging with Tsvi, which will inform my future participation on LW.
No. The original ban was based on the pattern I described. The pattern is that you really wanted to talk about Y, but instead of just saying so, you tried to fabricate a disagreement with me (initially about X) and did not listen to me saying I did not think Y.
I mean, you switched the topic from X to the general topic of people deferring too much to Yudkowsky (Y). Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference in the context where I’m describing the X-Y pattern. Do you see this at all? Like, the pattern I’m describing is that you really want to talk about Y, but instead of just talking about it you’re going on about X because that’s what you think you can pick a fight with me about, and ignoring when I’m saying I don’t disagree with Y while still moving the discussion to the topic of Y.
But it really seems like you do have a significant disagreement with Dai about the extent to which deference to Yudkowsky was justified.
I understand and acknowledge that you think deference has large costs, as you’ve previously written about. I also understand and acknowledge that you think defering to Yudkowsky on existential risk strategy in particular was costly, as you explicitly wrote in the post (“one of those founder effects was to overinvest in technical research and underinvest in ‘social victory’ [...] Whose fault was that?”).
At the same time, however, in your discussion in the post of how people could have done better in that particular case, you emphasize being transparent about deference in order to reduce its distortionary effects (“We don’t have to stop deferring, to avoid this correlated failure”), in contrast to how Dai argues in the comment section that not-deferring was a live option (“These seemed like obvious mistakes even at the time”). You even seem to ridicule Dai for this (“And then you’re like ‘Ha. Why not just not defer?’”). This seems like a real and substantive disagreement, not a hallucination on Dai’s part. It can’t simultaneously be the case that Dai is wrong to implicitly ask “Why not just not defer?”, and also wrong to suggest that you disagree with him about when it’s reasonable to defer.
Is that what you think I said?
Sorry, I think I can do better with a little more wordcount and effort.
I think that you think that the reason Dai is wrong to implicitly ask “Why not just not defer in this case?” is because you think that’s not relevantly on-topic for a post about how to mitigate harms from deference by an author who has established that he understands why deference is harmful, because you think that the implied question falsely presupposes that the post author is not aware of why deference is harmful.
(Whereas I think, and I think that Dai thinks, that the question is relevantly on-topic, because even if everyone in the conversation agrees on the broad outlines of why deference is harmful, they might disagree on the nitty-gritty details of exactly how harmful and exactly why, and litigating the nitty-gritty details of an example that was brought up in the post might help in evaluating the post’s thesis.)
Is that closer?
Thank you. IDK if it’s closer, it’s still quite incorrect, but I greatly appreciate the effort.
[Edit: Just to state this: I think Dai was coming from good intentions, e.g. to think about important and interesting things. On reflection: I stand by something being unhelpful about the behavior pattern that I’m claiming I have engaged in, that you have engaged in, and that I claim Dai has engaged in; but also, I don’t think it’s some egregious transgression; I think I overreacted and I would like figure out how to handle discussion more gracefully and non-antagonistically; I value open thoughtful critical discussion and am grateful when people are interested in discussing things related to my writing. I also sorta meant this OP as being somewhat playful, but also I was annoyed, so it might have been more antagonizing than ideal.]
[Edit 2: I’m going to go through some of the points in more detail, because it seems like I haven’t successfully explained the pattern clearly enough yet, so I want to try to make things clearer to Zack. But, I don’t want this detailed wall of text to imply that the situation is some big deal; the behavior I’m discussing is not that bad even if you completely buy my perspective; I don’t mean to harp on it, I just want to answer Zack’s questions.]
I do not think Dai is wrong to ask that question. I think it’s a good and important question.
I don’t think the question was super inexplicit. In his first comment, the last sentence was “In other words, if you were going to spend your career on AI x-safety, of course you could have become an expert on these questions first.”. I followed up with a response to that.
I would say that the fact that his first comment quoted my statement about “Yudkowsky = best AGI X-derisk strategist”, and most of the words were arguing against that, confused the topic. I thought that literal statement was what he wanted to argue against, because he quoted it. Subsequently he did not seem to engage in that specific question, instead starting to develop a different question about different aspects of being a strategic thinker (which is also interesting, but even more off-topic, which is fine, but also confusing).
I do think it’s off-topic, but again, being off-topic is fine. I think it’s polite to acknowledge this, e.g. sometimes if I’m responding to something other than one of the main threads of a post I will (or think I ought to even if I don’t) say “Nitpick:” or “Off-topic, but:” or “I didn’t read the post carefully, just responding to [quote]:”. But being maybe mildly impolite in this way is not by itself the issue I have with that thread (though it is one element of the pattern I describe in the OP).
Let me venture a description of the events from Dai’s perspective. I will write Imaginary!Dai to emphasize that this is not Dai’s perspective, but my attempt to guess a plausible-to-me way his experience might have been. [I should maybe have similarly used Straw!Dai in the dialogue in the OP—though I did try to make that somewhat accurate, albeit abstracted and only a subset of the original thread, so I also don’t want to imply that I’m not asserting it.]
Ok. So, that would be among my mainline guesses of experiences that Dai was having. I think this possible perspective is empathizable-with, and is mostly fine. It’s also unfortunately perfectly compatible with my description of a charging hobby horse. I don’t defend and endorse all of my behavior in response, but on the question of whether Dai’s behavior had a significant inappropriate pattern, I continue to think yes.
I definitely agree that we might (and in fact do) disagree about various details like that, and that this is in general an important topic.
I’m not sure I understand how it’s on topic though. The topic of the post is “If you’re going to defer, how can you alleviate the problems with that?”.
I think it would be on topic to say “We should have been using a different procedure to choose who to defer to” or “We should have been deferring on different questions” or “We should have deferred in a different pattern, e.g. to a larger group of people or with different of us deferring to a wider range of single people”. It could also be well on-topic to say “We should have been deferring to someone else”, e.g. because Yudkowsky was visibly not the best strategic AGI X-derisk thinker; and so it could be on-topic to discuss “Was Yudkowsky the best AGI X-derisk strategic thinker?” to discuss whether there was a mistaken choice in deferee.
But note that, on that thread, Dai was not AFAICT arguing “We should have deferred to someone else”. He was arguing that we should have deferred less overall. (Which IMO is technically off-topic, though of course quite adjacent. Which is fine/good to discuss. In my first reply to him, I did engage on that question.) He sort of kept discussing “Was Yudkowsky the best AGI X-derisk strategic thinker?”—except AFAICT he completely ignored my initial response “But it seems strange to be counting down...” on that topic, so it was unclear to me whether he was trying to discuss that topic with me.
Anyway:
You wrote earlier:
Plausibly! I think we both think he was over-deferred to, probably by “a lot”. But plausibly we have different “a lot”s.
On my interpretation, my statements make it pretty clear that I think:
People in general defer a lot, and this is quite bad (and implicitly therefore they should defer less in total).
But, people have to defer a lot due to cognitive costs and the complexity of the world (so the solution can’t just be “don’t defer”, or even “don’t defer in your field”, though it can and IMO should be “strive to un-defer on as many key questions as feasible in your field”).
So, geniune question, what did Dai mean by
The two natural interpretations I can think of are:
You, Tsvi, by saying he’s the best strategist, are justifying that people, instead of un-deferring-to Yudkowsky when they can, should continue deferring to him.
Insofar as people were deferring, they should have defered not to him at all (but by implication, someone else instead).
I believe I would have ruled out 2, since at that point it did not seem to me that he was putting forth some other candidate as an alternate deferree, preferable to Yudkowsky.
So I interpreted 1, which is why I flew off the handle (which I’m sorry about), given that I’d repeatedly stated that I was not arguing in favor of deferring more than you have to.
(In fact, my actual intentions in bringing up Yudkowsky, was pretty off-hand; right now I think my original intention in even adding the phrase “being the best...” was just to descriptively explain why he was deferred to so much, though I state here that it was for emphasis, which is also plausible.)
Separately, as I mentioned above the question of “how, and how much, are we actually forced to defer” is important and interesting, and maybe technically off-topic or something but a good thread and something I engaged with in my first response.
FWIW, in case this is helpful, my impression is that:
It is accurate to describe Wei as doing a “charge of the hobby-horse” in his initial comment, and this should be considered a mild norm violation. I’m also surprised and a bit disappointed that it got so many upvotes.
By the time that Tsvi announced the ban, Wei had already acknowledged that his original comments had been partly based on a misunderstanding. In my culture, I would expect more of an apology for doing so than the “ok...but to be fair” follow-up Wei actually gave. However, the phrase “Also, another part of my motivation is still valid and I think it would be interesting to try to answer” is a clear enough acknowledgement of a distinct line of inquiry that I no longer consider that comment to be a continuation of the “charge of the hobby-horse”.
Tsvi banning Wei for “grossly negligent reading comprehension” after Wei had acknowledged that he was mistaken seems like a mild norm violation. It wouldn’t have been a norm violation if Wei’s comment hadn’t made that acknowledgement; however, it would have been a stronger norm violation if Wei’s comment had included an actual apology.
I explained what probably caused this here. I think the current “Popular Comments” feature might often cause this kind of decontextualized voting, and there should perhaps be a way to mitigate it, like let the author of the post or of the comment remove a comment from Popular Comments.
We are killing the popular comments section early next week! I was waiting on doing that until we had shipped the new frontpage feed to everyone. The feed gives us much more ability to adjust what kind of context is attached to comments, and how to decide what comments to show.
Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.
Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone’s words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:
I’d probably need more proof-of-work of understanding to want to continue engaging
(I want to preface this all with “I don’t think the thing Wei Dai did was particularly bad, I’m getting into the details here because there are nuances that I do think should ultimately part of a good truthseeking culture, although I think given Wei Dai’s previous track record Tsvi should ideally have put more effort into talking things through before banning and ideally found another solution. Right now authors don’t have a tool for issuing like a 1-day-cooloff sorta ban, which I think would have been more appropriate.”)
Object level, I mostly agree with Richard Ngo’s comment. But, where Richard says:
I think that line diminishes the hobby-horse-charging-ness, but, doesn’t resolve it (I’m not sure I’d count it as even cutting the hobby-horse-ness by 50%). Like, Wei Dai says:
I think it’s generally a good yellow-flag-to-notice yourself saying “okay, yeah, I was wrong about that, but, to be fair” and then launch into a continued argument, having only briefly acknowledged the misunderstanding. It doesn’t look like you really “took the update”. When I find myself doing this sort of thing, I am usually look back and feel a bit embarrassed, realizing I really hadn’t thought about the implications of being-mistaken-about-the-first-part. The “to be fair” part is not actually as fair as you think.
I think Tsvi was fairly reasonably interpreting your comment as “I am going to continue all the momentum I had from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-disagreement and funnel into into more conversation that won’t really be a separate conversation from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-bit.”
The sort of thing I’d have wanted to see, if I were Tsvi, is… not even an apology like Richard suggested, but more demonstration of explicitly re-looking over the past conversation in light of realizing it was misunderstanding-fueled, and re-evaluate it in light of that, before continuing on to the next thing.
(I’m not reading this super-duper carefully due to general heartache but I think I basically agree with each and every thing Raemon says here.)