On the other hand, suppose you said to me: “Said, you can of course continue posting here, we’re not banning you, but you must not ever mention World of Warcraft again; and if you do, then we will ban you.”
Or: “Said, post as much as you like, but none of your posts must contain em-dashes—on pain of banning.”
… or something else along these lines. Well, that’s not a ban. It’s not even a temporary ban! It’s nothing at all. Right?
Would you be surprised if I stopped participating, after an injunction like that? Surely, you would not be.
Would you call what had happened a ‘ban’, then?
Now, to be clear, I do not consider Less Wrong a lost cause; as you see, I continue to participate, both on the object and the meta levels. (I understand namespace’s sentiment, of course, even if I disagree.)
That said, while the distinction between literal administrative actions, and the threat thereof, is not entirely unimportant… it is not, perhaps, the most important question, when it comes to discussions of the site’s health, and what participants we may expect to retain or lose, etc.
I think that in this context it might be helpful for me to mention that I’ve recently seriously considered giving up on LessWrong, not because of overt bans or censorship, but because of my impression that the nudges I do see reflect some badly misplaced priorities.
These kinds of nudges both reflect the sort of judgment that might be tested later in higher-stakes situations (say, something actually controversial enough for the right call to require a lot of social courage on the mods’ part), and serve as a coordination mechanism by which people illegibly negotiate norms for later use.
I ended up deciding to contact the mods privately to see if we could double-crux on this, since “try at all” is an important thing to do before “give up” for a forum with as much talent and potential as this one. I’m only mentioning this in here because I think these kinds of things tend to be handled illegibly in ways that make them easy to miss when modeling things like chilling effects.
I agree. Though I would also be surprised if the people that namespace finds most interesting are worried about being banned based on that threat. If they do, then I think I would really like to change that (obviously depending on what the exact behavior is that they feel worried about being punished for, but my model is that we mostly agree on what would be ban-worthy).
I am interested in hearing from people who are worried about being banned for doing X (for almost any X), and will try my best to give clear answers of whether I think something like X would result in a ban, since I think being clear about rules like that is quite valuable.
This is of course admirable, but also not quite the point; the question isn’t whether the policies are clear (although that’s a question, and certainly an important one also); the question is, whether the policies—whatever they are—are good.
Or, to put it another way… you said:
… I would also be surprised if the people that namespace finds most interesting are worried about being banned based on that threat. If they do, then I think I would really like to change that (obviously depending on what the exact behavior is that they feel worried about being punished for, but my model is that we mostly agree on what would be ban-worthy).
[emphasis mine]
The problem with is, essentially, the same as the problem with CEV: it’s all very well and good if everyone does, indeed, agree on what is ban-worthy (and in this case clarity of policy just is the solution to all problems)… but what if, actually, people—including “interesting” people!—disagree on this?
Consider this scenario:
Alice, a commenter: Gosh, I’m really hesitant to post on Less Wrong. I’m worried that they might ban me!
Bob, a moderator: Oh? Why do you think that, Alice? What would we ban you for, do you think? I’d like you to be totally clear on what our policies are!
Alice: Well… I kinda think you might ban me for using em-dashes in my comments??
Bob: Ah! I understand. Please allow me to shed some light on that: yes, we will definitely ban you if you use em-dashes in your comments.
Alice: … oh. Ok.
Bob: I hope that cleared up any concerns you had?
Alice: … um. Well. I … am not worried anymore. So there’s that.
Bob: Great!
… not exactly “problem solved and all’s well”, yes?
Anyway, I think I’ve beaten this horse to death sufficiently for now.
1. I do not expect people namespace considers interesting to be afraid of making their interesting contributions due to fear of being banned, and if they are would like to fix that (I am only about 75% confident in this, but do expect this to be the case).
2. I separately want to ensure that our rules are clear, to ensure that people are only afraid of consequences that are actually likely to take place and am happy to invest resources into making that the case.
Agree that leaving this discussion as is seems fine for now.
I do not expect people namespace considers interesting to be afraid of making their interesting contributions due to fear of being banned
It’s important to think on the margin—not only do actions short of banning (e.g., “mere” threats of banning) have an impact on users’ behavior (as Said pointed out), they can also have different effects on users with different opportunity costs. I expect the people Namespace is thinking of face different opportunity costs than me: their voice/exit trade-off between writing for Less Wrong and their second-best choice of forum looks different from mine.
A 34-comments-and-counting meta trainwreck that started because a Less Wrong moderator found my use of a rhetorical question, exclamation marks, and reference hyperlinks to be insufficiently “collaborative.”
Neither of these discussions left me with a fear of being banned—insofar as both conversations had an unfortunately inextricable political component, I count them both as decisive “victories” for me (judging by the karma scores and what was said)—but they did suck up an enormous amount of my time and emotional energy that I could have spent doing other things. Someone otherwise like me but with lower opportunity costs would probably be smarter to just leave and try to have intellectual discussions in some other venue where it wasn’t necessary to decisively win a political slapfight on whether philosophers should consider each other’s feelings while discussing philosophy. Arguably I would be smarter to leave, too, but I’m stuck, because I joined a cult ten years ago when I was twenty-one years old, and now the cult owns my soul and I don’t have anywhere else to go.
I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup in Millbrae in February 2008. I did the visual design for the 2009 and 2010 Singularity Summit program booklets. The first time I was paid money for programming work was when I wrote some Python scripts to help organize the Singularity Institute’s donor database in 2011. In 2012, I designed PowerPoint slides for the preliminary “kata” (about the sunk cost fallacy) for what would soon be dubbed the Center for Applied Rationality, to which I would later donate $16,500 between 2013 and 2016 after I got a real programming job. Today, I live in Berkeley and all of my friends are “rationalists.”
I mention all this (mostly, hopefully) not to try to pull rank—you really shouldn’t be making moderation decisions based on seniority!—but to illustrate exactly how serious a threat “removal from our communal places of discussion” is to me. My entire adult life only makes sense in the context of this website. If the forces of blandness want me gone because I use too many exclamation points (or perhaps some other reason), I in particular have an unusally strong incentive to either stand my ground or die trying.
(Um, as long as you’re initiating an interaction, maybe I should mention that I have been planning to very belatedly address your concern aboutpremature abstraction potentially functioning as a covert meta-attack by putting up a non-Frontpagable “Motivation and Political Context for My Philosophy of Language Agenda” post in conjunction with my next philosophy-of-language post? I’m hoping that will make things better rather than worse from your perspective? But if not, um, sorry.)
I guess that putting up such a post would make things much more fair, at least. But, I’m not sure I will be willing to comment on it publicly, given the risk of another drain of time and energy.
So, I’m against the forces of blandness too, but, is “I’m trapped in this cult” really an argument for not banning you rather than an argument for banning you? (I mean, banning you for saying that would create bad incentives, of course, but still)
Cults take weak people and make them weaker. Maybe try taking a break and getting some perspective? I doubt you’re so stuck you can’t leave. (There’s lots of standard advice for leaving cults)
Sorry if I’m being mean here, I’m trying to make sense of the actual considerations at play.
I thought it made sense to use the word “cult” pejoratively in the specific context of what the grandparent was trying to say, but it was a pretty noncentral usage (as the hyperlink to “Every Cause Wants To Be …” was meant to indicate); I don’t think the standard advice is going to directly apply well to the case of my disappointment with what the rationalist community is in 2019—although the standard advice might be a fertile source of ideas for how to diversify my “portfolio” of social ties, which is definitely worth doing independently of the Sorites problem about where to draw the category boundary around “cults”. (I was wondering if anyone was going to notice the irony of the grandparent mentioning the sunk cost fallacy!)
I have at least two more posts to finish about the cognitive function of categories (working titles: “Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests” and “Instrumental Categories, and War”) that need to go on this website because they’re part of a Sequence and don’t make sense anywhere else. After that, I might reallocate attention back to my other avocations.
Quick note that I roughly endorse the set of frames here. (I have a post brewing about how people tend to see banning someone from a community as a “light” sentence, when actually it’s one of the worst things you can do to a person, at least in some cases)
(This may be another case where it would make sense to detach this derailed thread into its own post in order to avoid polluting the comments on “Causal Reality vs. Social Reality”, if that’s cheap to do.)
Very quick note that I’m not sure whether I endorse habryka’s phrasing here (don’t have time to fully articulate the disagreement, just wanted to flag it)
So, on the one hand, that is entirely true.
On the other hand, suppose you said to me: “Said, you can of course continue posting here, we’re not banning you, but you must not ever mention World of Warcraft again; and if you do, then we will ban you.”
Or: “Said, post as much as you like, but none of your posts must contain em-dashes—on pain of banning.”
… or something else along these lines. Well, that’s not a ban. It’s not even a temporary ban! It’s nothing at all. Right?
Would you be surprised if I stopped participating, after an injunction like that? Surely, you would not be.
Would you call what had happened a ‘ban’, then?
Now, to be clear, I do not consider Less Wrong a lost cause; as you see, I continue to participate, both on the object and the meta levels. (I understand namespace’s sentiment, of course, even if I disagree.)
That said, while the distinction between literal administrative actions, and the threat thereof, is not entirely unimportant… it is not, perhaps, the most important question, when it comes to discussions of the site’s health, and what participants we may expect to retain or lose, etc.
I think that in this context it might be helpful for me to mention that I’ve recently seriously considered giving up on LessWrong, not because of overt bans or censorship, but because of my impression that the nudges I do see reflect some badly misplaced priorities.
These kinds of nudges both reflect the sort of judgment that might be tested later in higher-stakes situations (say, something actually controversial enough for the right call to require a lot of social courage on the mods’ part), and serve as a coordination mechanism by which people illegibly negotiate norms for later use.
I ended up deciding to contact the mods privately to see if we could double-crux on this, since “try at all” is an important thing to do before “give up” for a forum with as much talent and potential as this one. I’m only mentioning this in here because I think these kinds of things tend to be handled illegibly in ways that make them easy to miss when modeling things like chilling effects.
I agree. Though I would also be surprised if the people that namespace finds most interesting are worried about being banned based on that threat. If they do, then I think I would really like to change that (obviously depending on what the exact behavior is that they feel worried about being punished for, but my model is that we mostly agree on what would be ban-worthy).
I am interested in hearing from people who are worried about being banned for doing X (for almost any X), and will try my best to give clear answers of whether I think something like X would result in a ban, since I think being clear about rules like that is quite valuable.
This is of course admirable, but also not quite the point; the question isn’t whether the policies are clear (although that’s a question, and certainly an important one also); the question is, whether the policies—whatever they are—are good.
Or, to put it another way… you said:
[emphasis mine]
The problem with is, essentially, the same as the problem with CEV: it’s all very well and good if everyone does, indeed, agree on what is ban-worthy (and in this case clarity of policy just is the solution to all problems)… but what if, actually, people—including “interesting” people!—disagree on this?
Consider this scenario:
Alice, a commenter: Gosh, I’m really hesitant to post on Less Wrong. I’m worried that they might ban me!
Bob, a moderator: Oh? Why do you think that, Alice? What would we ban you for, do you think? I’d like you to be totally clear on what our policies are!
Alice: Well… I kinda think you might ban me for using em-dashes in my comments??
Bob: Ah! I understand. Please allow me to shed some light on that: yes, we will definitely ban you if you use em-dashes in your comments.
Alice: … oh. Ok.
Bob: I hope that cleared up any concerns you had?
Alice: … um. Well. I … am not worried anymore. So there’s that.
Bob: Great!
… not exactly “problem solved and all’s well”, yes?
Anyway, I think I’ve beaten this horse to death sufficiently for now.
Yes, to be clear. My comment had two points:
1. I do not expect people namespace considers interesting to be afraid of making their interesting contributions due to fear of being banned, and if they are would like to fix that (I am only about 75% confident in this, but do expect this to be the case).
2. I separately want to ensure that our rules are clear, to ensure that people are only afraid of consequences that are actually likely to take place and am happy to invest resources into making that the case.
Agree that leaving this discussion as is seems fine for now.
It’s important to think on the margin—not only do actions short of banning (e.g., “mere” threats of banning) have an impact on users’ behavior (as Said pointed out), they can also have different effects on users with different opportunity costs. I expect the people Namespace is thinking of face different opportunity costs than me: their voice/exit trade-off between writing for Less Wrong and their second-best choice of forum looks different from mine.
In the past month-and-a-half, we’ve had:
A 135-comment meta trainwreck that started because a MIRI Research Associate found a discussion-relevant reference to my work on the philosophy of language “unpleasant” (because my interest in that area of philosophy was motivated by my need to think about something else); and,
A 34-comments-and-counting meta trainwreck that started because a Less Wrong moderator found my use of a rhetorical question, exclamation marks, and reference hyperlinks to be insufficiently “collaborative.”
Neither of these discussions left me with a fear of being banned—insofar as both conversations had an unfortunately inextricable political component, I count them both as decisive “victories” for me (judging by the karma scores and what was said)—but they did suck up an enormous amount of my time and emotional energy that I could have spent doing other things. Someone otherwise like me but with lower opportunity costs would probably be smarter to just leave and try to have intellectual discussions in some other venue where it wasn’t necessary to decisively win a political slapfight on whether philosophers should consider each other’s feelings while discussing philosophy. Arguably I would be smarter to leave, too, but I’m stuck, because I joined a cult ten years ago when I was twenty-one years old, and now the cult owns my soul and I don’t have anywhere else to go.
I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup in Millbrae in February 2008. I did the visual design for the 2009 and 2010 Singularity Summit program booklets. The first time I was paid money for programming work was when I wrote some Python scripts to help organize the Singularity Institute’s donor database in 2011. In 2012, I designed PowerPoint slides for the preliminary “kata” (about the sunk cost fallacy) for what would soon be dubbed the Center for Applied Rationality, to which I would later donate $16,500 between 2013 and 2016 after I got a real programming job. Today, I live in Berkeley and all of my friends are “rationalists.”
I mention all this (mostly, hopefully) not to try to pull rank—you really shouldn’t be making moderation decisions based on seniority!—but to illustrate exactly how serious a threat “removal from our communal places of discussion” is to me. My entire adult life only makes sense in the context of this website. If the forces of blandness want me gone because I use too many exclamation points (or perhaps some other reason), I in particular have an unusally strong incentive to either stand my ground or die trying.
Ugh. I’m sorry about that. It was exactly the same for me (re time and emotional energy).
No problem. Hope your research is going well!
(Um, as long as you’re initiating an interaction, maybe I should mention that I have been planning to very belatedly address your concern about premature abstraction potentially functioning as a covert meta-attack by putting up a non-Frontpagable “Motivation and Political Context for My Philosophy of Language Agenda” post in conjunction with my next philosophy-of-language post? I’m hoping that will make things better rather than worse from your perspective? But if not, um, sorry.)
My research is going very well, thank you :)
I guess that putting up such a post would make things much more fair, at least. But, I’m not sure I will be willing to comment on it publicly, given the risk of another drain of time and energy.
So, I’m against the forces of blandness too, but, is “I’m trapped in this cult” really an argument for not banning you rather than an argument for banning you? (I mean, banning you for saying that would create bad incentives, of course, but still)
Cults take weak people and make them weaker. Maybe try taking a break and getting some perspective? I doubt you’re so stuck you can’t leave. (There’s lots of standard advice for leaving cults)
Sorry if I’m being mean here, I’m trying to make sense of the actual considerations at play.
I thought it made sense to use the word “cult” pejoratively in the specific context of what the grandparent was trying to say, but it was a pretty noncentral usage (as the hyperlink to “Every Cause Wants To Be …” was meant to indicate); I don’t think the standard advice is going to directly apply well to the case of my disappointment with what the rationalist community is in 2019—although the standard advice might be a fertile source of ideas for how to diversify my “portfolio” of social ties, which is definitely worth doing independently of the Sorites problem about where to draw the category boundary around “cults”. (I was wondering if anyone was going to notice the irony of the grandparent mentioning the sunk cost fallacy!)
I have at least two more posts to finish about the cognitive function of categories (working titles: “Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests” and “Instrumental Categories, and War”) that need to go on this website because they’re part of a Sequence and don’t make sense anywhere else. After that, I might reallocate attention back to my other avocations.
Quick note that I roughly endorse the set of frames here. (I have a post brewing about how people tend to see banning someone from a community as a “light” sentence, when actually it’s one of the worst things you can do to a person, at least in some cases)
(This may be another case where it would make sense to detach this derailed thread into its own post in order to avoid polluting the comments on “Causal Reality vs. Social Reality”, if that’s cheap to do.)
I agree. Was planning to request this.
Very quick note that I’m not sure whether I endorse habryka’s phrasing here (don’t have time to fully articulate the disagreement, just wanted to flag it)