I’d like to engage with you as a critic. As you can see, I gladly do that with many of my other critics, and have spent hours doing it with you specifically for many years.
As far as I can tell, this is just false. I mean, maybe it takes Gordon an hour to write a single comment like this one (and then to exit the discussion immediately thereafter)? I doubt it, though.
Maybe I’m forgetting some huge arguments that took place a long time ago. But I went back through five full years of my LW comment history (through the very beginning of 2020), and it confirms my impression that Gordon and I have barely ever interacted. The idea that he has spent hours “engaging with [me] as a critic” is, to my knowledge, just untrue.
(And we have never interacted at all outside of Less Wrong.)
Said, we interacted many times over the years on posts and comments. That you don’t remember seems fine, but I remember those interactions and they always left me drained and feeling like I spent hours talking to a brick wall. The ones that most stands out to me are our interactions on this post and here after I had implemented a soft ban on us interacting.
I previously had a soft ban on interacting with you in my posts, which meant I would only reply to you once because we had long threads that just exhausted me. I thought maybe that would be enough.
But I decided yesterday I was done and I have the karma to choose not to interact with you on my posts, so I finally decided to ban you from my posts after years of choosing not to (that you didn’t realize this might happen is understandable since it’s been a few years since we had most of our conversations as I’ve been writing a book during that time and posting here less).
I didn’t have to say anything. I could have just banned you. But I’m not a coward and I’ll own my action. I think it’s the right one, even if I pay some reputational cost for it.
I’ll note this is also not your first time having similar run ins with other folks on this site, and I consider those additional evidence that swayed me in my decision, notably your previously blow-up with Duncan. As perhaps @Raemon will recall, I talked in person with him a few times years ago about how interacting with you was stressful. That you and I Said have not interacted in a long time, I had forgotten how much your comments make me not want to use Less Wrong, and seeing one that again was uncharitable and not in good faith (as I judge it) put me over the line.
I want you to know I have no malaice against you as a person. But you consistently create the kind of conversations I don’t want to have on my posts. I would invite your criticism and critique, but you deliver it in a way that is difficult to engage with because of your confrontational style and frequent refusal to engage with others’ ideas in good faith. I’m sure I’ll see you around on other people’s posts, but not on mine.
For what it’s worth, as an outsider to this conversation who nonetheless has experience engaging in very long arguments with Said that ultimately went nowhere, it seems to me that Said was… straightforwardly correct in both of these instances.
The same way he was straightforwardly correct when pointing out the applause lights and anti-epistemology proponents of Circling were engaging in here, when bringing attention to the way Duncan Sabien’s proposed assumption of good faith contradicts LW culture here, when asking for examples so the author can justify why their proposed insight actually reflects something meaningful in the territory as opposed to self-wankery, and in a countless number of other such instances.
And when I say “straightforwardly correct,” I’m not just referring to the object-level, although that is of course the most important part. I’m also referring to the rhetoric he employed (i.e., none) and the way he asked his questions. I think saying, “Do you have any examples to illustrate what you mean by this word?” is the perfect question to ask when you believe an author is writing up applause light after applause light, and this should be bloody damn obvious to anyone who has ever read the Sequences. And the fact this was not the universal reaction of every single LW regular when these events passed reflects very poorly on this community (and especially on some of the actual mods who were involved in those messes).
how interacting with you was stressful
I get that interacting with Said, when you are an author, can be stressful. And just based on priors, the fact that this one commenter has pissed off many (dozens???) of popular LW post authors and even caused a lot of them to leave the site entirely, would make me very likely to think he was wrong and a useless nuisance weighing down the rationality of this site.
But I’m not just operating on priors. I see example after example after example of him asking “What do you mean by this?” or saying “This doesn’t make any sense,” and the authors of posts crumbling in response, unable to muster up at even the most basic level any coherent logical explanation of their own language. It’s a strong prior, the one I wrote up above. But even the strongest of priors can wilt under a mountain of evidence, and I have been convinced by a mountain of evidence that the prior is wrong.
you deliver it in a way that is difficult to engage with because of your confrontational style and frequent refusal to engage with others’ ideas in good faith
It sure would be… nice if every piece of disagreement from the Achmiz side of the aisle[1] was written in the @Zack_M_Davis style of hyperlinking everything and typing up hundreds of thousands of words to cover all the bases and be charitable and approach the issue from a dozen different angles.
But that takes time. It’s a serious inconvenience. And far worse is that it’s a selectively applied inconvenience, for Said almost never puts in less effort in his comments than the authors themselves did in their posts when they failed to elucidate or convincingly argue for their points (as you did when you ran away[2]here).
Said is doing a public service by pointing out when the emperor has no clothes, when respected authors are failing to uphold the most basic of lessons the Sequences instilled in this site’s culture, when obfuscatory language masks the absence of substance, and when the actual basics of rationality are being trampled on. (Which, in my view, serves as an accurate, if harsh, summary of what you were doing in the very post that spawned this whole argument.)
To the extent this upsets authors, that’s their problem, and it’s them who should change. And if complying with the spirit of the Sequences is just too difficult for them, well… good riddance, as sad as it may be to say.
In any case, I doubt any of this will be persuasive to you-in-particular. But I believe it needed to be said, and this is as good a place as any to stake out my position in this long-running sort-of LW culture war.
The current conflict between you and him is just the latest entry in this long-running series, the same recurrent notes played on a different instrument. Is it that surprising it did not end any differently?
Actually, I would really like it if Said left comments that were just critical of things and pointed out where he thought the author was wrong, but to do that requires actually engaging with the content and the author to understand their intent (because clear communication, especially about non-settled topics, is hard). There’s something subtle about Said’s style of commenting that is hard for me to pin down that makes it unhelpfully adversarial in a way that I’m sure some people like but I find incredibly frustrating.
For example, I often feel like Said uses a rhetorical technique of smashing the applause button by referencing something in the Sequences as if that was the end of the argument, when at times the thing being argued is a claim made in the Sequences.
This is frustrating as an author who is trying to explore an idea or try to share advice because it’s not real engagement: it reads like trying to shut down the conversation to score points, and it’s all the more frustrating because he hit the applause button so it gets a lot of upvotes.
It’s also frustrating in that he never crosses a bright line that would make me say “this is totally unacceptable”. It feels to me like someone playing a game of “I’m not touching you” so that it’s never possible to pin down what’s so wrong. But the pattern is clear, especially given that lots of other people tell me I’m wrong and I have no similar reaction to what they have to say.
I don’t know what Said’s motivations are. I’d like to think he’s simply motivated to try to argue for what he believes to be the truth as hard as possible in the best way he knows how. For me, though, that best is not good enough for the kind of conversations I’d like to have on my posts or anywhere on LessWrong, which is why I finally decided to take this drastic action.
(As I hope is clear, this is specifically about Said and not criticism in general. He’s the only person I’ve banned, and I regularly engage with all critics of my posts and comments, even those who seem to be arguing in bad faith, because I’d rather give them the benefit for the doubt to start. I see Less Wrong as about collaborative truth seeking, and Said is, in my estimation, an impediment to that project so long as he continues to engage in the style of commenting that he does.)
Actually, I would really like it if Said left comments that were just critical of things and pointed out where he thought the author was wrong, but to do that requires actually engaging with the content and the author to understand their intent (because clear communication, especially about non-settled topics, is hard)
I’m flagging this as the critical crux that explains the majority (but not the entirety) of the disagreement between us.
If I believed Said was consistently engaging in distortions of clear authorial intent by failing to do due diligence and to engage sufficiently, then I probably would indeed have significantly different views on the propriety of his comments on this site.
There’s something subtle about Said’s style of commenting that is hard for me to pin down that makes it unhelpfully adversarial in a way that I’m sure some people like but I find incredibly frustrating.
“Subtle”! No, it’s actually not subtle at all. It’s a very simple dynamic: you write something that is wrong and/or nonsensical; I point this out; you do not like this being pointed out. Well, who does? It’s embarrassing! Or, in other words:
Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.
Schopenhauer also suggests a sure-fire remedy, to prevent such unpleasant scenarios:
The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment.
Hmm. Yeah, that’s a tough row to hoe.
I don’t know about you, but to me, “frank discussion, out of which correct judgments emerge” seems a lot easier and more reliable than “always be correct, right from the start”. Of course, if you banish from your comment sections anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, then you only have the harder option available to you. I don’t envy you in that case.
There’s little chance we will agree on anything here or convince each other. I’m done with this for now. If I see signs you are arguing in good faith I will unban you, but until then I wish you well.
Wikipedia defines the antonym bad faith as “a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another.” What hidden motive do you think Said is concealing, specifically? (Or if you’re using the term with a nonstandard meaning, what do you mean?)
To me good faith means being curious about why someone said something. You try to understand what they mean and then engage with their words as they intended them. Arguing in bad faith would be arguing when you are not curious or open to being convinced.
My experiences with Said have all been more of a form of him disagreeing with something I said in a way that suggests he’s already made up his mind and there’s no curiosity or interest in figuring out why I might have said what I said, often dismissive of the idea that anyone could possible have a good reason for making the claim I have made, other than perhaps stupidity.
But look I’m also not really that interested in defending my decision too hard here. The simple fact is that Said pushes my buttons in a way basically no one else on this site does, and I think I finally hit a point of saying that it would be better if I just didn’t have to interact with him so much. Everyone else who leaves critical comments does so in a way that does not so consistently feel like an attack, and I often feel like I can engage with them in ways where, even if we don’t end up agreeing, we at least had a productive conversation.
OK, I see the relationship to the standard definition. (It would be bad faith to put appearances of being open to being convinced, when you’re actually not.) The requirement of curiosity seems distinct and much more onerous, though. (If you think I’m talking nonsense and don’t feel curious about why, that doesn’t mean you’re not open to being convinced under any circumstances; it means you’re waiting for me to say something that you find convincing, without you needing to proactively read my mind.)
It seems like this accusation of bad faith could go both ways. I haven’t seen you demonstrate curiosity or openness to being convinced that your religion pushes anti-epistemology, I’ve only seen flat denial followed by casting of aspersions.
Fair. This is, in part, why I feel I had to ban Said. The pattern from past interactions with him kills in me the desire to pursue an avenue of discussion because it’s gone so poorly in the past. It’s hard to be open and respond in good faith in response to assertions that are phrased such that they feel like personal attacks and when there’s a pattern of trying to engage and finding it’s met with refusal to engage in anything other than debate.
If I were a somewhat better person then perhaps I could remain open while responding to comments that feel like attacks rather than explorations or discussions. Maybe I will be one day, but I’m not there yet.
If this were the really your motivation, then you could simply not respond to my comments. (Indeed you wouldn’t even have to read them. “A comment on my post? —oh, it’s Said Achmiz. Surely he has nothing useful to say, and I have nothing to gain by reading this. [dismiss notification]”)
This is as good a time as any to make the following point. In an earlier comment, you wrote:
We’ve gotten into it over many years and at no time have I felt the better for you commenting on my posts.
You seem to believe that this is a relevant, even decisive, consideration. (And you’re not the only one; I’ve seen such sentiments a few times.)
This seems to me to betray a view of Less Wrong discussions that I can only marvel at—but certainly not sympathize with, much less endorse.
If we were having a private, one-on-one conversation—in person, via email, via direct messages or chat or whatever—then of course it would make perfect sense to say “I am gaining nothing from this interaction; I do not expect to gain anything from this interaction; and I have no obligation to continue this interaction—therefore I now terminate it”. Perfectly normal, straightforwardly sensible.
But Less Wrong is a public forum!
Why do you think people post comments under your posts? What do you think is the purpose of doing this, in the minds of the comment authors? What do they get out of it? Do you think that your posts’ comments sections are a series of one-to-one conversations between you and various readers? Do you think that people are commenting on your posts for your benefit?
It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that I never have the authors’ interests in mind when commenting, or that this is of zero importance to me. But as far as I am concerned, insofar as the author of a post might benefit from reading my comments on his post, it is as one of the participants in the discussion. If the post author stands to benefit more, it is because his ideas are the focus of the discussion. (But this doesn’t even always apply.) It’s certainly not because the comments on his posts are being written for him, or to benefit him.
The point of writing a comment (or, for that matter, a post) is to make a contribution to a discussion, out of which some productive outcome (useful knowledge or understanding, etc.) may emerge—for the benefit of all participants, and all readers. That’s why we have a public forum in the first place! The central motivating idea of a public discussion forum is “we all talk to each other, and as a result, we all benefit; and everyone who reads what we write in these public discussions also benefits”.
So when you motivate your banning of my comments from your posts by asking “what do I, personally, gain from Said Achmiz commenting on my posts”, this strikes me as a bizarrely selfish view.
(And I use the word “bizarrely” quite deliberately. An ordinarily selfish view might be, say, the idea that you write your posts in order to promote your ideas, to convince others, etc., and therefore any comment is evaluated only on whether it helps you to do that. But the idea that comments are to be evaluated by whether they make you, personally, “better”—but not by whether any other participant in the discussion (never mind any readers) are benefited—I don’t think such a view would ever have even occurred to me, had I not seen it expressed by you and others.)
In short: why in the world should it matter whether you “feel the better” for me commenting? If you don’t like my comments—fine; just don’t read them and don’t respond to them. Easy.
If instead you ban me from posting them at all, then it seems reasonable to suspect other motives.
I go to the comments not to find consensus but literally to find people criticizing the article. I want to see the idea of that article discussed. I am not of the opinion that most articles I see are very good; and even if they were, they’re not scripture. For me they’re like the sausage casing that contains the actual food, which is the community processing the data. Independent of any other consideration, just at a lower level of magnification, I don’t think we get smarter this way. I don’t think we achieve robustness just rolling around in a bunch of ideologically hermetic spheres.
For what it may be worth, @Richard_Kennaway makes similar critiques to you on some of my posts, and I have felt no desire to ban him or like the threads I have had with him were unproductive.
It’s worth nothing. How does any of that affect anything I wrote? What’s the idea, here—that if I don’t write my comments, then someone else will just say exactly the same thing, but “more nicely” (or something), therefore nothing is lost if you ban me?
Setting aside the fact that this is obviously false as a trivially demonstrable empirical fact… it strikes me as being absurdly arrogant to make this decision on behalf of everyone who might participate in, and read, your posts and the comments sections thereof.
This might possibly be somewhat justified in some more primitive (or deliberately simpler, or otherwise differently designed) forum/blog system, where there’s no way for the commentariat/readership to express their dissatisfaction with one of the discussion’s participants, so the forum owner/administrator/moderators/whoever have to take it upon themselves to ban commenters who degrade the discussion.
But LW has a voting system! And a fairly advanced one, at that—two-axis voting, reacts, not to mention the ability to collapse/hide entire comment threads… whatever criticism we may level at the design of LW’s commenting features, it certainly can’t be said that commenters and readers lack for ways to express their views on content posted here.
The weird thing is that you can’t even coherently claim to only be concerned about your own benefit. The very post that started this discussion was written (or so you claim therein) out of concern for the well-being and benefit of “the … rationalist crowd”, i.e. the readers and commenters on Less Wrong. So you’re concerned enough for the mental and spiritual well-being and benefit of the LW commentariat to write such a post, but not concerned enough to let them discuss the matter in whatever way they see fit?
How does this laser-like focus on how comments on your posts affect you, personally, fit with the motivation for writing a post like that?
We seen to have different ideas about what the norms of Less Wrong are, and maybe norms for truth seeking more generally. I didn’t get into that because it seems I incorrectly assumed we were on the same page there, and so instead focused on my well-being as a decision relevant fact worth highlighting.
I see LW as a place for collaborative truth seeking, emphasis on collaboration. Someone says something wrong, and then we figure out how to say something less wrong, together. I think the best way to do that is with comments that are kind, truthful, useful, and curious, and those are the norms that I, as a high enough karma members of this site, have earned the right to enforce on my posts.
You violate the above norms in my judgment, particularly the kindness and curiosity parts, and so I have chosen to ban you from my posts. That threads with you are stressful is a manifestation of this judgment.
You obviously don’t fully violate the norms of wider Less Wrong, and my actions have no effect on your ability to use every part of the site that is not one of my posts.
As to why I respond to your comments, if someone posted on something you wrote that your ideas are stupid for obvious reasons, would you ignore it? Maybe you would, but ignoring comes off to many readers as tactic acceptance. When people like your comments, it makes them worth responding to if I disagree, especially on my own posts, in order to engage with not just you, but everyone who reads the comments. To fail to do so would be to leave readers with an incomplete picture of my views.
I also genuinely want to figure things out and try to engage with every comment on my posts that I meaningfully can. I’d actually be quite happy if we could some how work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is. I tried to do this with you a couple times years ago. It didn’t go well. And seeing your most recent comments I could see the same pattern again.
It’s probably to a fault that I either want to find agreement or at least agreement on why we disagree. My persistence in this is also why I have a hard time dropping threads like this. Somewhere I believe that just one more comment and maybe we’ll crack it. It’s why I’m writing this reply right now! But the longer our threads go, the litter my probability of us figuring this out gets.
I see LW as a place for collaborative truth seeking, emphasis on collaboration. Someone says something wrong, and then we figure out how to say something less wrong, together.
Agreed, except the “emphasis on collaboration” part (which is deeply misguided).
I think the best way to do that is with comments that are kind, truthful, useful, and curious
The best way to do it is the way that does it best. If a “kind” comment is the best way, then write a “kind” comment. If “kindness” is irrelevant, orthogonal, or even detrimental to efficiency and effectiveness of the process, then omit it.
and those are the norms that I, as a high enough karma members of this site, have earned the right to enforce on my posts.
You have been granted that privilege. That is very different from earning a right.
if someone posted on something you wrote that your ideas are stupid for obvious reasons, would you ignore it?
That obviously depends on whether the criticism is valid or not.
If it’s valid, then naturally I wouldn’t ignore it; I’d acknowledge it as valid.
If it’s not valid, then is it obviously invalid? Is that the consensus of other commenters? Do other LW members reply to it in my stead, and/or use the LW voting system to signal their disagreement?
If they do, then there’s no need for me to reply.
If they do not, then there may be a need for a brief reply.
If the criticism is invalid but not obviously so, then a more substantive reply is warranted.
If the criticism is valid but I ignore it, then readers would think less of me.
They would be right to do so. If my ideas are wrong and stupid, and especially if they are wrong and stupid for obvious reasons, then it is good that comments to that effect may be posted under my posts, and it is good that people should think less of me for ignoring those comments.
When people like your comments, it makes them worth responding to if I disagree, especially on my own posts, in order to engage with not just you, but everyone who reads the comments. To fail to do so would be to leave readers with an incomplete picture of my views.
If your post failed to provide a complete picture of your views, then I am doing you—and, much more importantly, all your other readers—a service by writing my comments, and thus giving you the opportunity to rectify that lacuna.
I also genuinely want to figure things out and try to engage with every comment on my posts that I meaningfully can. I’d actually be quite happy if we could some how work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is. I tried to do this with you a couple times years ago. It didn’t go well. And seeing your most recent comments I could see the same pattern again.
Irrelevant. All of this is irrelevant. However admirable this desire might be, and however understandable might be the failure to fulfill it, it has nothing whatever to do with the question of banning a critic from commenting on your posts, because that is not about you, it is about whether all of your readers, and the LW commentariat, is denied the ability to discuss your ideas without restrictions.
And if you want to “work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is”, great, I’m for it. If you don’t want to do that, that’s also fine; I am a strong believer in people’s rights to talk to whomever they want, or not. None of that has any bearing whatsoever on the matter of banning, because that, once again, is not about you.
It’s probably to a fault that I either want to find agreement or at least agreement on why we disagree. My persistence in this is also why I have a hard time dropping threads like this. Somewhere I believe that just one more comment and maybe we’ll crack it. It’s why I’m writing this reply right now! But the longer our threads go, the litter my probability of us figuring this out gets.
You are still, bizarrely, treating this as a one-on-one conversation. It simply does not matter why we disagree[1], as far as the question of banning is concerned. It’s just beside the point. We don’t need to agree, or figure out why we disagree, or anything like that. If you don’t have anything to say to my comments, then say nothing. If saying nothing is intolerable, then reply with a link to this thread, or some sort of boilerplate “I think your criticisms are bad and wrong but I have no interest in arguing about it” reply (which you could perhaps copy-paste from a saved file somewhere, thus saving you even the trouble of typing it out every time).
But none of this—none of it!—is the slightest bit responsive to my point: comments on your posts are not primarily for you, and the question of whether to ban critics from your posts is not primarily about you.
But none of this—none of it!—is the slightest bit responsive to my point: comments on your posts are not primarily for you, and the question of whether to ban critics from your posts is not primarily about you.
I am not banning you because you are a critic. I am banning you because your comments are frequently unkind and demonstrate a lack of curiosity. This is why I have banned literally no one else, which includes a great many critics. That you are a critic is an unfortunate coincidence that nevertheless taints the specific way in which you violate the norms I am enforcing in the small part of Less Wrong I’m responsible for.
Just gonna chime in that I agree with Said here about this not just a two-way thing but a question of what the audience gets to see as well. I think his comments on your posts are valuable and banning him makes things worse as far as I’m concerned.
Thank heaven for that! But notice that you’re responding to a strawman: I never claimed that you banned me because I am a critic, period. Obviously not; since, as you say, you haven’t banned plenty of other people.
(Although, as I pointed out upthread, you have, in at least one case, threatened to ban another person for their critical comments, after deleting several of their comments. As far as I’m aware, that person—quite unsurprisingly!—hasn’t commented on your posts since. So, no, you don’t get to claim that it’s just me.)
No, my point is much more serious than this trivial imagined-accusation which you are protesting. I am not saying that you banned me because I’m a critic[1], and that this is bad. I am saying that you banned me, and that this is bad because I’m a critic.
Do you see the difference? It’s not that you are unjustly depriving me of the privilege of commenting on your posts. It’s that you are depriving all of your readers[2] of the benefit of the criticism and discussion that is absent because you banned me. (Not to mention all of the comments that are absent due to the chilling effect of the ban on me.)
(Is this because my comments are so incredibly clever and insightful? No, mostly what I write is fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, it is very often the case that no one else is saying those things. That’s not to my credit, but it is to the discredit of this forum.)
As I have already explained, I consider your comments to violate the norms I want on Less Wrong around kindness and curiosity. On balance, I consider the degree of unkindness and incuriousity sufficient that it outweighs any loss to anyone of not seeing your criticisms. I’m willing to make some amount of trade-off between different norms for the benefit of myself and readers, but you cross the line of what I judge to be productive.
Obviously you seem to disagree. And that seems fair, we disagree on what we think the norms should be!
I think this is likely the crux. You seem to prioritize criticism above other things, in particular criticism to show what you believe to be the truth. That’s admirable, but you are extreme in your approach in ways that violates other norms I hold in greater balance and am enforcing. I think your approach is on net worse because rather than convince, it drives away those who disagree with you rather than help them see the truth you want them to, and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you’ve clashed with. That is, I think your comments are antihelpful even if that’s not what you intend, and since they fall into that category, they are now banned on my post until such time as I see evidence that I would believe your comments would be net helpful.
Obviously some readers do find your comments helpful. They’ve said as much. That I disagree that on net users benefit from your comments if why you are banned.
Again, I actually really want your criticisms, but until such time that they can be delivered in a way that results in productive conversations that help people, including myself, move towards finding the truth, I will keep you banned on my posts.
and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you’ve clashed with
The first half of this talks about readers, but the second half gives examples of authors. I think this is a rather important difference. In fact, it’s absolutely critical to the particular issue being discussed.
Of course many authors do not view Said’s comments positively; after all, he constantly points out that what they are writing is nonsense. But the main value Said provides at the meta-level (beyond the object-level of whether he is right or wrong, which I believe he usually but not always is) is in providing needed criticism for the readers of posts to digest.
There was a comment once by a popular LW user (maybe @Wei Dai?) who said that because he wants the time he spends on LW to be limited, his strategy is as follows: read the title and skim an outline of the post, then immediately go to the comment section to see if there are any highly-rated comments that debunk the core argument of the post and which don’t have adequate responses by the author. Only if there are no such comments does he actually go back and read the post closely, since this is a hard-to-fake signal that the post is actually high-quality.
In the spirit of Lonely Dissent, even one user stepping up and saying The Emperor Has No Clothes is sometimes sufficient for previously unstated disagreements with a post to come to light.
In the spirit of Lonely Dissent, even one user stepping up and saying The Emperor Has No Clothes is sometimes sufficient for previously unstated disagreements with a post to come to light.
Then let it be a user who can do so in a way that is sufficiently kind and curious that the comment is not a mere attempt at refutation but an invitation to discussion.
When I see most of Said’s comments (and here I’m necessarily mostly talking about his comments on other people’s posts), I think that they are on net bad. They smash applause lights. They don’t dig into the details. They respond to surface level details that often skip over why the author is trying to explore a topic because, as I read him, he often disagrees that there is any question to be addressed because it already has an answer he agrees with, and rather that try to engage the author in a discussion to convince them, he registers this disagreement in a way designed to shut down rather than start a discussion that might lead to changed minds. Any amount of usefulness from dissent his comments offer is, at least for me, offset by their manner of delivery.
I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for his style of comments, but he clearly does. It’s why I think the crux of Said and my disagreement is that we fundamentally disagree about what appropriate commenting norms are on Less Wrong. Everything else seems to be downstream of this disagreement, including my distress at dealing with Said’s comments on my posts.
Again, I welcome and encourage dissent on my posts. Please, if you think I am wrong, tell me why I am wrong. But do so in a way that invites engagement. I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for ideas to battle, but a place for curious people to work together to better understand the world, and that means not just creating a written record of competing claims and their evaluation, but also an attempt to convince people who we believe hold wrong beliefs to come to hold less wrong beliefs, since otherwise Less Wrong would be nothing but a pretty artifact that had no effect on the world.
(You earlier mentioned trouble dropping threads like this, and also said two days ago that you wanted to be done as you felt it unlikely the conversation would be fruitful; apologies if this is overbearing, but, are you sure you endorse continuing this discussion?)
Everyone else who leaves critical comments does so in a way that does not so consistently feel like an attack, and I often feel like I can engage with them in ways where, even if we don’t end up agreeing, we at least had a productive conversation.
Of course they do, because the people who would criticize you in substantive, serious ways… just don’t bother.
If you see only one person saying a thing, then the correct conclusion isn’t “only that guy thinks that thing”—it’s “out of all those who think that thing, only that guy cares enough / is contrarian enough / has the time and energy / etc. to speak up”.
This is especially true if you actively discourage saying that thing.
You earlier gave the example of this 2018 post. Well, I went back and read through the comments section. None of the top-level comments were mine. The most critical comments were not mine. The comments that referenced the Sequences were not mine. The comments you deleted from that comments section (and whose author you threatened with banning from your posts) were not mine. Much (I think most, though I haven’t counted) of that comments section consists of strongly critical comments, written by people who aren’t me.
That was in 2018. But those other critical commenters either stopped engaging with you or essentially stopped commenting on LW entirely, largely as a result of this sort of “ban the critics” behavior. I’m the one who’s still around. You’ve had to resort to banning me from your posts, not because my comments were somehow unusually “adversarial” or “unproductive” or any such thing—nothing remotely like that is true (and I invite anyone who doubts this to check out the above link)—but simply because I haven’t gotten fed up with Less Wrong and left on my own, and am still pointing out when you write things that are wrong and/or nonsensical. That’s all.
The ones that most stands out to me are our interactions on this post and here after I had implemented a soft ban on us interacting.
The first is a conversation (in 2018!) involving a whole bunch of people, not just me; many of those people’s comments were just as critical, and some more critical, than mine.
The second was a brief back-and-forth, certainly not “hours” of anything.
I think that you severely exaggerate.
I previously had a soft ban on interacting with you in my posts, which meant I would only reply to you once because we had long threads that just exhausted me. I thought maybe that would be enough.
But I decided yesterday I was done and I have the karma to choose not to interact with you on my posts
What prevented you from simply not replying to my comment? Even once, never mind multiple times?
I’m not a coward
Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but now that you’ve denied it explicitly—sorry, no, I have to disagree. Banning critics from your posts is a cowardly act. I think that you know this.
What prevented you from simply not replying to my comment? Even once, never mind multiple times?
For some guesses on why authors might not feel comfortable ignoring your comments, I refer you to this excerpt from an old comment of yours:
There is always an obligation by any author to respond to anyone’s comment along these lines. If no response is provided to (what ought rightly to be) simple requests for clarification (such as requests to, at least roughly, define or explain an ambiguous or questionable term, or requests for examples of some purported phenomenon), the author should be interpreted as ignorant. These are not artifacts of my particular commenting style, nor are they unfortunate-but-erroneous implications—they are normatively correct general principles.
You have historically always insisted on the combination of “everyone is required to answer questions and engage with commenters” and “anyone who does not do so should by default be presumed wrong and ignorant”.
I think this explains why people don’t feel comfortable ignoring you. I don’t think you’ve really left people any out but to ban you, or to spend an inordinate amount of time arguing with you (and I know from experience the latter does not actually help).
(To be clear, I consider the excerpt here absurdly wrong and against the spirit of LessWrong, and authors do not generally have an obligation to respond to all such comments. There exists responsibilities for response, when certain thresholds are met, and relationships of mutual respect are established, but nothing even remotely close to what that excerpt suggests).
You don’t actually link to the comment thread from which you’re quoting, (presumably because you are busy or writing this on your phone or some such). Unfortunately, in this case it is likely to cause readers to come away with a totally mistaken understanding of what I was saying. They might, for instance, miss my reply to your reply to my above-quoted comment, where I write:
I should clarify, first of all, that the obligation by the author to respond to the comment is not legalistically specific. By this I mean that it can be satisfied in any of a number of ways; a literal reply-to-comment is just one of them. Others include:
Mentioning the comment in a subsequent post (“In the comments on yesterday’s post, reader so-and-so asked such-and-such a question. And I now reply thus: …”).
Linking to one’s post or comment elsewhere which constitutes an answer to the question.
Someone else linking to a post or comment elsewhere (by the OP) which constitutes an answer to the question.
Someone else answering the question in the OP’s stead (and the OP giving some indication that this answer is endorsed).
Answering an identical, or very similar, question elsewhere (and someone providing a link or citation).
In short, I’m not saying that there’s a specific obligation for a post author to post a reply comment, using the Less Wrong forum software, directly to any given comment along the lines I describe. What I’m saying is that, in the discussion as a whole, which is constituted by the post itself, plus comments thereon, plus related posts and comments, etc., an author has an obligation to respond to reader inquiries of this sort.
(Emphasis [bold] added.)
So, no, it is simply false that I insist that authors must always reply directly to comments (either mine or anyone else’s).
You also claim that I have “spent years arguing for norms in which authors should by default be presumed to be worthy of dismissal and full of ignorance”. This, too, is false. (Indeed, it’s hard to see what such a norm could even mean.) Obviously, I can’t easily provide links to prove a negative, and you don’t provide any quotes or links to support this one. But I think that you’ll be unable to do so, and any examples you do provide will turn out to be misleading in a similar manner to the above.
You have created the culture that makes it so authors do not feel comfortable ignoring people they expect to have unproductive conversations with.
I haven’t created any such thing.
I’m not a moderator, an administrator, or any kind of “privileged” user. I’m not one of the “protected class” of authors who are so valued that keeping them around is worth making serious sacrifices for. I’m one person, who doesn’t comment all that much, and who comments at all on a small minority of posts.
Every single time I’ve made any comment like the one you quoted, you and/or the other mods have pushed back on it, very explicitly and vehemently stating that the norms of Less Wrong in fact do not include any kind of obligation for any kind of replies to criticism, questions, requests, comments of any sort, etc., and that my views are absolutely not the views of the LW moderation team. This is, of course, entirely your right as the people in charge of the site. But “the culture” is the one you created. My preferences w.r.t. what the culture of LW should be have been consistently, thoroughly, and explicitly rejected. I’ve expressed those preferences, but they have not shaped the forum’s culture. You even extracted from me a promise (which I have kept) of avoiding making any claims or saying anything that might lead a reader to the mistaken impression that my views are shared by the moderation team.
If there’s one thing we can say about the culture of Less Wrong today, it’s that it is not based on my views, it is not my preferred culture, and it is in fact the culture you created, in direct opposition to my views on the matter. This, again, is your right. But to then claim that I’ve created any kind of culture on LW seems to me to be outrageously false.
And so, of course, unsurprisingly, the empirical facts of the matter are that people ignore my comments (and, of course, many other people’s comments) all the time. (Do you want examples? I can provide plenty!) They have a right to do so! Even by my standards, as outlined in the quote above, they have a right to do so! All the time, this happens. Authors “do not feel comfortable ignoring” people? That doesn’t seem to stop most of them! Again, I am not saying that this is necessarily a problem. (It is in some cases; in others, not.) But it surely happens, as an absolutely routine matter, all day, every day. Frankly, it’s ridiculous to claim otherwise.
EDIT: It seems that you’ve substantially edited your comment while I was writing my reply, making it seem as if I’m replying to made-up quotes… I would really prefer it if you at very least made a note when doing things like this.
@Gordon Seidoh Worley recently wrote this comment, where he claimed:
As far as I can tell, this is just false. I mean, maybe it takes Gordon an hour to write a single comment like this one (and then to exit the discussion immediately thereafter)? I doubt it, though.
Maybe I’m forgetting some huge arguments that took place a long time ago. But I went back through five full years of my LW comment history (through the very beginning of 2020), and it confirms my impression that Gordon and I have barely ever interacted. The idea that he has spent hours “engaging with [me] as a critic” is, to my knowledge, just untrue.
(And we have never interacted at all outside of Less Wrong.)
Said, we interacted many times over the years on posts and comments. That you don’t remember seems fine, but I remember those interactions and they always left me drained and feeling like I spent hours talking to a brick wall. The ones that most stands out to me are our interactions on this post and here after I had implemented a soft ban on us interacting.
I previously had a soft ban on interacting with you in my posts, which meant I would only reply to you once because we had long threads that just exhausted me. I thought maybe that would be enough.
But I decided yesterday I was done and I have the karma to choose not to interact with you on my posts, so I finally decided to ban you from my posts after years of choosing not to (that you didn’t realize this might happen is understandable since it’s been a few years since we had most of our conversations as I’ve been writing a book during that time and posting here less).
I didn’t have to say anything. I could have just banned you. But I’m not a coward and I’ll own my action. I think it’s the right one, even if I pay some reputational cost for it.
I’ll note this is also not your first time having similar run ins with other folks on this site, and I consider those additional evidence that swayed me in my decision, notably your previously blow-up with Duncan. As perhaps @Raemon will recall, I talked in person with him a few times years ago about how interacting with you was stressful. That you and I Said have not interacted in a long time, I had forgotten how much your comments make me not want to use Less Wrong, and seeing one that again was uncharitable and not in good faith (as I judge it) put me over the line.
I want you to know I have no malaice against you as a person. But you consistently create the kind of conversations I don’t want to have on my posts. I would invite your criticism and critique, but you deliver it in a way that is difficult to engage with because of your confrontational style and frequent refusal to engage with others’ ideas in good faith. I’m sure I’ll see you around on other people’s posts, but not on mine.
For what it’s worth, as an outsider to this conversation who nonetheless has experience engaging in very long arguments with Said that ultimately went nowhere, it seems to me that Said was… straightforwardly correct in both of these instances.
The same way he was straightforwardly correct when pointing out the applause lights and anti-epistemology proponents of Circling were engaging in here, when bringing attention to the way Duncan Sabien’s proposed assumption of good faith contradicts LW culture here, when asking for examples so the author can justify why their proposed insight actually reflects something meaningful in the territory as opposed to self-wankery, and in a countless number of other such instances.
And when I say “straightforwardly correct,” I’m not just referring to the object-level, although that is of course the most important part. I’m also referring to the rhetoric he employed (i.e., none) and the way he asked his questions. I think saying, “Do you have any examples to illustrate what you mean by this word?” is the perfect question to ask when you believe an author is writing up applause light after applause light, and this should be bloody damn obvious to anyone who has ever read the Sequences. And the fact this was not the universal reaction of every single LW regular when these events passed reflects very poorly on this community (and especially on some of the actual mods who were involved in those messes).
I get that interacting with Said, when you are an author, can be stressful. And just based on priors, the fact that this one commenter has pissed off many (dozens???) of popular LW post authors and even caused a lot of them to leave the site entirely, would make me very likely to think he was wrong and a useless nuisance weighing down the rationality of this site.
But I’m not just operating on priors. I see example after example after example of him asking “What do you mean by this?” or saying “This doesn’t make any sense,” and the authors of posts crumbling in response, unable to muster up at even the most basic level any coherent logical explanation of their own language. It’s a strong prior, the one I wrote up above. But even the strongest of priors can wilt under a mountain of evidence, and I have been convinced by a mountain of evidence that the prior is wrong.
It sure would be… nice if every piece of disagreement from the Achmiz side of the aisle[1] was written in the @Zack_M_Davis style of hyperlinking everything and typing up hundreds of thousands of words to cover all the bases and be charitable and approach the issue from a dozen different angles.
But that takes time. It’s a serious inconvenience. And far worse is that it’s a selectively applied inconvenience, for Said almost never puts in less effort in his comments than the authors themselves did in their posts when they failed to elucidate or convincingly argue for their points (as you did when you ran away[2] here).
Said is doing a public service by pointing out when the emperor has no clothes, when respected authors are failing to uphold the most basic of lessons the Sequences instilled in this site’s culture, when obfuscatory language masks the absence of substance, and when the actual basics of rationality are being trampled on. (Which, in my view, serves as an accurate, if harsh, summary of what you were doing in the very post that spawned this whole argument.)
To the extent this upsets authors, that’s their problem, and it’s them who should change. And if complying with the spirit of the Sequences is just too difficult for them, well… good riddance, as sad as it may be to say.
In any case, I doubt any of this will be persuasive to you-in-particular. But I believe it needed to be said, and this is as good a place as any to stake out my position in this long-running sort-of LW culture war.
The current conflict between you and him is just the latest entry in this long-running series, the same recurrent notes played on a different instrument. Is it that surprising it did not end any differently?
For this has long ago become a political topic on this site, with well-established sides
Uncharitable word choice? I think not, but all can judge the object-level for themselves by reading the linked conversation
Actually, I would really like it if Said left comments that were just critical of things and pointed out where he thought the author was wrong, but to do that requires actually engaging with the content and the author to understand their intent (because clear communication, especially about non-settled topics, is hard). There’s something subtle about Said’s style of commenting that is hard for me to pin down that makes it unhelpfully adversarial in a way that I’m sure some people like but I find incredibly frustrating.
For example, I often feel like Said uses a rhetorical technique of smashing the applause button by referencing something in the Sequences as if that was the end of the argument, when at times the thing being argued is a claim made in the Sequences.
This is frustrating as an author who is trying to explore an idea or try to share advice because it’s not real engagement: it reads like trying to shut down the conversation to score points, and it’s all the more frustrating because he hit the applause button so it gets a lot of upvotes.
It’s also frustrating in that he never crosses a bright line that would make me say “this is totally unacceptable”. It feels to me like someone playing a game of “I’m not touching you” so that it’s never possible to pin down what’s so wrong. But the pattern is clear, especially given that lots of other people tell me I’m wrong and I have no similar reaction to what they have to say.
I don’t know what Said’s motivations are. I’d like to think he’s simply motivated to try to argue for what he believes to be the truth as hard as possible in the best way he knows how. For me, though, that best is not good enough for the kind of conversations I’d like to have on my posts or anywhere on LessWrong, which is why I finally decided to take this drastic action.
(As I hope is clear, this is specifically about Said and not criticism in general. He’s the only person I’ve banned, and I regularly engage with all critics of my posts and comments, even those who seem to be arguing in bad faith, because I’d rather give them the benefit for the doubt to start. I see Less Wrong as about collaborative truth seeking, and Said is, in my estimation, an impediment to that project so long as he continues to engage in the style of commenting that he does.)
I’m flagging this as the critical crux that explains the majority (but not the entirety) of the disagreement between us.
If I believed Said was consistently engaging in distortions of clear authorial intent by failing to do due diligence and to engage sufficiently, then I probably would indeed have significantly different views on the propriety of his comments on this site.
“Subtle”! No, it’s actually not subtle at all. It’s a very simple dynamic: you write something that is wrong and/or nonsensical; I point this out; you do not like this being pointed out. Well, who does? It’s embarrassing! Or, in other words:
Schopenhauer also suggests a sure-fire remedy, to prevent such unpleasant scenarios:
Hmm. Yeah, that’s a tough row to hoe.
I don’t know about you, but to me, “frank discussion, out of which correct judgments emerge” seems a lot easier and more reliable than “always be correct, right from the start”. Of course, if you banish from your comment sections anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, then you only have the harder option available to you. I don’t envy you in that case.
There’s little chance we will agree on anything here or convince each other. I’m done with this for now. If I see signs you are arguing in good faith I will unban you, but until then I wish you well.
Wikipedia defines the antonym bad faith as “a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another.” What hidden motive do you think Said is concealing, specifically? (Or if you’re using the term with a nonstandard meaning, what do you mean?)
To me good faith means being curious about why someone said something. You try to understand what they mean and then engage with their words as they intended them. Arguing in bad faith would be arguing when you are not curious or open to being convinced.
My experiences with Said have all been more of a form of him disagreeing with something I said in a way that suggests he’s already made up his mind and there’s no curiosity or interest in figuring out why I might have said what I said, often dismissive of the idea that anyone could possible have a good reason for making the claim I have made, other than perhaps stupidity.
But look I’m also not really that interested in defending my decision too hard here. The simple fact is that Said pushes my buttons in a way basically no one else on this site does, and I think I finally hit a point of saying that it would be better if I just didn’t have to interact with him so much. Everyone else who leaves critical comments does so in a way that does not so consistently feel like an attack, and I often feel like I can engage with them in ways where, even if we don’t end up agreeing, we at least had a productive conversation.
OK, I see the relationship to the standard definition. (It would be bad faith to put appearances of being open to being convinced, when you’re actually not.) The requirement of curiosity seems distinct and much more onerous, though. (If you think I’m talking nonsense and don’t feel curious about why, that doesn’t mean you’re not open to being convinced under any circumstances; it means you’re waiting for me to say something that you find convincing, without you needing to proactively read my mind.)
Perhaps it is relative to the bar most people set for good faith.
It seems like this accusation of bad faith could go both ways. I haven’t seen you demonstrate curiosity or openness to being convinced that your religion pushes anti-epistemology, I’ve only seen flat denial followed by casting of aspersions.
Fair. This is, in part, why I feel I had to ban Said. The pattern from past interactions with him kills in me the desire to pursue an avenue of discussion because it’s gone so poorly in the past. It’s hard to be open and respond in good faith in response to assertions that are phrased such that they feel like personal attacks and when there’s a pattern of trying to engage and finding it’s met with refusal to engage in anything other than debate.
If I were a somewhat better person then perhaps I could remain open while responding to comments that feel like attacks rather than explorations or discussions. Maybe I will be one day, but I’m not there yet.
If this were the really your motivation, then you could simply not respond to my comments. (Indeed you wouldn’t even have to read them. “A comment on my post? —oh, it’s Said Achmiz. Surely he has nothing useful to say, and I have nothing to gain by reading this. [dismiss notification]”)
This is as good a time as any to make the following point. In an earlier comment, you wrote:
You seem to believe that this is a relevant, even decisive, consideration. (And you’re not the only one; I’ve seen such sentiments a few times.)
This seems to me to betray a view of Less Wrong discussions that I can only marvel at—but certainly not sympathize with, much less endorse.
If we were having a private, one-on-one conversation—in person, via email, via direct messages or chat or whatever—then of course it would make perfect sense to say “I am gaining nothing from this interaction; I do not expect to gain anything from this interaction; and I have no obligation to continue this interaction—therefore I now terminate it”. Perfectly normal, straightforwardly sensible.
But Less Wrong is a public forum!
Why do you think people post comments under your posts? What do you think is the purpose of doing this, in the minds of the comment authors? What do they get out of it? Do you think that your posts’ comments sections are a series of one-to-one conversations between you and various readers? Do you think that people are commenting on your posts for your benefit?
It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that I never have the authors’ interests in mind when commenting, or that this is of zero importance to me. But as far as I am concerned, insofar as the author of a post might benefit from reading my comments on his post, it is as one of the participants in the discussion. If the post author stands to benefit more, it is because his ideas are the focus of the discussion. (But this doesn’t even always apply.) It’s certainly not because the comments on his posts are being written for him, or to benefit him.
The point of writing a comment (or, for that matter, a post) is to make a contribution to a discussion, out of which some productive outcome (useful knowledge or understanding, etc.) may emerge—for the benefit of all participants, and all readers. That’s why we have a public forum in the first place! The central motivating idea of a public discussion forum is “we all talk to each other, and as a result, we all benefit; and everyone who reads what we write in these public discussions also benefits”.
So when you motivate your banning of my comments from your posts by asking “what do I, personally, gain from Said Achmiz commenting on my posts”, this strikes me as a bizarrely selfish view.
(And I use the word “bizarrely” quite deliberately. An ordinarily selfish view might be, say, the idea that you write your posts in order to promote your ideas, to convince others, etc., and therefore any comment is evaluated only on whether it helps you to do that. But the idea that comments are to be evaluated by whether they make you, personally, “better”—but not by whether any other participant in the discussion (never mind any readers) are benefited—I don’t think such a view would ever have even occurred to me, had I not seen it expressed by you and others.)
In short: why in the world should it matter whether you “feel the better” for me commenting? If you don’t like my comments—fine; just don’t read them and don’t respond to them. Easy.
If instead you ban me from posting them at all, then it seems reasonable to suspect other motives.
P.S.: Here’s Tycho of Penny Arcade opining on a similar situation:
For what it may be worth, @Richard_Kennaway makes similar critiques to you on some of my posts, and I have felt no desire to ban him or like the threads I have had with him were unproductive.
It’s worth nothing. How does any of that affect anything I wrote? What’s the idea, here—that if I don’t write my comments, then someone else will just say exactly the same thing, but “more nicely” (or something), therefore nothing is lost if you ban me?
Setting aside the fact that this is obviously false as a trivially demonstrable empirical fact… it strikes me as being absurdly arrogant to make this decision on behalf of everyone who might participate in, and read, your posts and the comments sections thereof.
This might possibly be somewhat justified in some more primitive (or deliberately simpler, or otherwise differently designed) forum/blog system, where there’s no way for the commentariat/readership to express their dissatisfaction with one of the discussion’s participants, so the forum owner/administrator/moderators/whoever have to take it upon themselves to ban commenters who degrade the discussion.
But LW has a voting system! And a fairly advanced one, at that—two-axis voting, reacts, not to mention the ability to collapse/hide entire comment threads… whatever criticism we may level at the design of LW’s commenting features, it certainly can’t be said that commenters and readers lack for ways to express their views on content posted here.
The weird thing is that you can’t even coherently claim to only be concerned about your own benefit. The very post that started this discussion was written (or so you claim therein) out of concern for the well-being and benefit of “the … rationalist crowd”, i.e. the readers and commenters on Less Wrong. So you’re concerned enough for the mental and spiritual well-being and benefit of the LW commentariat to write such a post, but not concerned enough to let them discuss the matter in whatever way they see fit?
How does this laser-like focus on how comments on your posts affect you, personally, fit with the motivation for writing a post like that?
We seen to have different ideas about what the norms of Less Wrong are, and maybe norms for truth seeking more generally. I didn’t get into that because it seems I incorrectly assumed we were on the same page there, and so instead focused on my well-being as a decision relevant fact worth highlighting.
I see LW as a place for collaborative truth seeking, emphasis on collaboration. Someone says something wrong, and then we figure out how to say something less wrong, together. I think the best way to do that is with comments that are kind, truthful, useful, and curious, and those are the norms that I, as a high enough karma members of this site, have earned the right to enforce on my posts.
You violate the above norms in my judgment, particularly the kindness and curiosity parts, and so I have chosen to ban you from my posts. That threads with you are stressful is a manifestation of this judgment.
You obviously don’t fully violate the norms of wider Less Wrong, and my actions have no effect on your ability to use every part of the site that is not one of my posts.
As to why I respond to your comments, if someone posted on something you wrote that your ideas are stupid for obvious reasons, would you ignore it? Maybe you would, but ignoring comes off to many readers as tactic acceptance. When people like your comments, it makes them worth responding to if I disagree, especially on my own posts, in order to engage with not just you, but everyone who reads the comments. To fail to do so would be to leave readers with an incomplete picture of my views.
I also genuinely want to figure things out and try to engage with every comment on my posts that I meaningfully can. I’d actually be quite happy if we could some how work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is. I tried to do this with you a couple times years ago. It didn’t go well. And seeing your most recent comments I could see the same pattern again.
It’s probably to a fault that I either want to find agreement or at least agreement on why we disagree. My persistence in this is also why I have a hard time dropping threads like this. Somewhere I believe that just one more comment and maybe we’ll crack it. It’s why I’m writing this reply right now! But the longer our threads go, the litter my probability of us figuring this out gets.
Agreed, except the “emphasis on collaboration” part (which is deeply misguided).
The best way to do it is the way that does it best. If a “kind” comment is the best way, then write a “kind” comment. If “kindness” is irrelevant, orthogonal, or even detrimental to efficiency and effectiveness of the process, then omit it.
You have been granted that privilege. That is very different from earning a right.
That obviously depends on whether the criticism is valid or not.
If it’s valid, then naturally I wouldn’t ignore it; I’d acknowledge it as valid.
If it’s not valid, then is it obviously invalid? Is that the consensus of other commenters? Do other LW members reply to it in my stead, and/or use the LW voting system to signal their disagreement?
If they do, then there’s no need for me to reply.
If they do not, then there may be a need for a brief reply.
If the criticism is invalid but not obviously so, then a more substantive reply is warranted.
If the criticism is valid but I ignore it, then readers would think less of me.
They would be right to do so. If my ideas are wrong and stupid, and especially if they are wrong and stupid for obvious reasons, then it is good that comments to that effect may be posted under my posts, and it is good that people should think less of me for ignoring those comments.
If your post failed to provide a complete picture of your views, then I am doing you—and, much more importantly, all your other readers—a service by writing my comments, and thus giving you the opportunity to rectify that lacuna.
Irrelevant. All of this is irrelevant. However admirable this desire might be, and however understandable might be the failure to fulfill it, it has nothing whatever to do with the question of banning a critic from commenting on your posts, because that is not about you, it is about whether all of your readers, and the LW commentariat, is denied the ability to discuss your ideas without restrictions.
And if you want to “work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is”, great, I’m for it. If you don’t want to do that, that’s also fine; I am a strong believer in people’s rights to talk to whomever they want, or not. None of that has any bearing whatsoever on the matter of banning, because that, once again, is not about you.
You are still, bizarrely, treating this as a one-on-one conversation. It simply does not matter why we disagree[1], as far as the question of banning is concerned. It’s just beside the point. We don’t need to agree, or figure out why we disagree, or anything like that. If you don’t have anything to say to my comments, then say nothing. If saying nothing is intolerable, then reply with a link to this thread, or some sort of boilerplate “I think your criticisms are bad and wrong but I have no interest in arguing about it” reply (which you could perhaps copy-paste from a saved file somewhere, thus saving you even the trouble of typing it out every time).
But none of this—none of it!—is the slightest bit responsive to my point: comments on your posts are not primarily for you, and the question of whether to ban critics from your posts is not primarily about you.
Not that I think it’s a mystery in any case. Really, the question has already been answered to my satisfaction.
I am not banning you because you are a critic. I am banning you because your comments are frequently unkind and demonstrate a lack of curiosity. This is why I have banned literally no one else, which includes a great many critics. That you are a critic is an unfortunate coincidence that nevertheless taints the specific way in which you violate the norms I am enforcing in the small part of Less Wrong I’m responsible for.
Just gonna chime in that I agree with Said here about this not just a two-way thing but a question of what the audience gets to see as well. I think his comments on your posts are valuable and banning him makes things worse as far as I’m concerned.
Thank heaven for that! But notice that you’re responding to a strawman: I never claimed that you banned me because I am a critic, period. Obviously not; since, as you say, you haven’t banned plenty of other people.
(Although, as I pointed out upthread, you have, in at least one case, threatened to ban another person for their critical comments, after deleting several of their comments. As far as I’m aware, that person—quite unsurprisingly!—hasn’t commented on your posts since. So, no, you don’t get to claim that it’s just me.)
No, my point is much more serious than this trivial imagined-accusation which you are protesting. I am not saying that you banned me because I’m a critic[1], and that this is bad. I am saying that you banned me, and that this is bad because I’m a critic.
Do you see the difference? It’s not that you are unjustly depriving me of the privilege of commenting on your posts. It’s that you are depriving all of your readers[2] of the benefit of the criticism and discussion that is absent because you banned me. (Not to mention all of the comments that are absent due to the chilling effect of the ban on me.)
(Is this because my comments are so incredibly clever and insightful? No, mostly what I write is fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, it is very often the case that no one else is saying those things. That’s not to my credit, but it is to the discredit of this forum.)
Nor, of course, am I making the negation of this claim.
And yourself as well, but that part is strictly your own business.
As I have already explained, I consider your comments to violate the norms I want on Less Wrong around kindness and curiosity. On balance, I consider the degree of unkindness and incuriousity sufficient that it outweighs any loss to anyone of not seeing your criticisms. I’m willing to make some amount of trade-off between different norms for the benefit of myself and readers, but you cross the line of what I judge to be productive.
Obviously you seem to disagree. And that seems fair, we disagree on what we think the norms should be!
I think this is likely the crux. You seem to prioritize criticism above other things, in particular criticism to show what you believe to be the truth. That’s admirable, but you are extreme in your approach in ways that violates other norms I hold in greater balance and am enforcing. I think your approach is on net worse because rather than convince, it drives away those who disagree with you rather than help them see the truth you want them to, and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you’ve clashed with. That is, I think your comments are antihelpful even if that’s not what you intend, and since they fall into that category, they are now banned on my post until such time as I see evidence that I would believe your comments would be net helpful.
Obviously some readers do find your comments helpful. They’ve said as much. That I disagree that on net users benefit from your comments if why you are banned.
Again, I actually really want your criticisms, but until such time that they can be delivered in a way that results in productive conversations that help people, including myself, move towards finding the truth, I will keep you banned on my posts.
The first half of this talks about readers, but the second half gives examples of authors. I think this is a rather important difference. In fact, it’s absolutely critical to the particular issue being discussed.
Of course many authors do not view Said’s comments positively; after all, he constantly points out that what they are writing is nonsense. But the main value Said provides at the meta-level (beyond the object-level of whether he is right or wrong, which I believe he usually but not always is) is in providing needed criticism for the readers of posts to digest.
There was a comment once by a popular LW user (maybe @Wei Dai?) who said that because he wants the time he spends on LW to be limited, his strategy is as follows: read the title and skim an outline of the post, then immediately go to the comment section to see if there are any highly-rated comments that debunk the core argument of the post and which don’t have adequate responses by the author. Only if there are no such comments does he actually go back and read the post closely, since this is a hard-to-fake signal that the post is actually high-quality.
In the spirit of Lonely Dissent, even one user stepping up and saying The Emperor Has No Clothes is sometimes sufficient for previously unstated disagreements with a post to come to light.
Then let it be a user who can do so in a way that is sufficiently kind and curious that the comment is not a mere attempt at refutation but an invitation to discussion.
When I see most of Said’s comments (and here I’m necessarily mostly talking about his comments on other people’s posts), I think that they are on net bad. They smash applause lights. They don’t dig into the details. They respond to surface level details that often skip over why the author is trying to explore a topic because, as I read him, he often disagrees that there is any question to be addressed because it already has an answer he agrees with, and rather that try to engage the author in a discussion to convince them, he registers this disagreement in a way designed to shut down rather than start a discussion that might lead to changed minds. Any amount of usefulness from dissent his comments offer is, at least for me, offset by their manner of delivery.
I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for his style of comments, but he clearly does. It’s why I think the crux of Said and my disagreement is that we fundamentally disagree about what appropriate commenting norms are on Less Wrong. Everything else seems to be downstream of this disagreement, including my distress at dealing with Said’s comments on my posts.
Again, I welcome and encourage dissent on my posts. Please, if you think I am wrong, tell me why I am wrong. But do so in a way that invites engagement. I don’t see Less Wrong as a place for ideas to battle, but a place for curious people to work together to better understand the world, and that means not just creating a written record of competing claims and their evaluation, but also an attempt to convince people who we believe hold wrong beliefs to come to hold less wrong beliefs, since otherwise Less Wrong would be nothing but a pretty artifact that had no effect on the world.
(You earlier mentioned trouble dropping threads like this, and also said two days ago that you wanted to be done as you felt it unlikely the conversation would be fruitful; apologies if this is overbearing, but, are you sure you endorse continuing this discussion?)
Actually, I’m glad I didn’t, because I think maybe Said and I have finally gotten to the crux.
Of course they do, because the people who would criticize you in substantive, serious ways… just don’t bother.
If you see only one person saying a thing, then the correct conclusion isn’t “only that guy thinks that thing”—it’s “out of all those who think that thing, only that guy cares enough / is contrarian enough / has the time and energy / etc. to speak up”.
This is especially true if you actively discourage saying that thing.
You earlier gave the example of this 2018 post. Well, I went back and read through the comments section. None of the top-level comments were mine. The most critical comments were not mine. The comments that referenced the Sequences were not mine. The comments you deleted from that comments section (and whose author you threatened with banning from your posts) were not mine. Much (I think most, though I haven’t counted) of that comments section consists of strongly critical comments, written by people who aren’t me.
That was in 2018. But those other critical commenters either stopped engaging with you or essentially stopped commenting on LW entirely, largely as a result of this sort of “ban the critics” behavior. I’m the one who’s still around. You’ve had to resort to banning me from your posts, not because my comments were somehow unusually “adversarial” or “unproductive” or any such thing—nothing remotely like that is true (and I invite anyone who doubts this to check out the above link)—but simply because I haven’t gotten fed up with Less Wrong and left on my own, and am still pointing out when you write things that are wrong and/or nonsensical. That’s all.
The first is a conversation (in 2018!) involving a whole bunch of people, not just me; many of those people’s comments were just as critical, and some more critical, than mine.
The second was a brief back-and-forth, certainly not “hours” of anything.
I think that you severely exaggerate.
What prevented you from simply not replying to my comment? Even once, never mind multiple times?
Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but now that you’ve denied it explicitly—sorry, no, I have to disagree. Banning critics from your posts is a cowardly act. I think that you know this.
For some guesses on why authors might not feel comfortable ignoring your comments, I refer you to this excerpt from an old comment of yours:
You have historically always insisted on the combination of “everyone is required to answer questions and engage with commenters” and “anyone who does not do so should by default be presumed wrong and ignorant”.
I think this explains why people don’t feel comfortable ignoring you. I don’t think you’ve really left people any out but to ban you, or to spend an inordinate amount of time arguing with you (and I know from experience the latter does not actually help).
(To be clear, I consider the excerpt here absurdly wrong and against the spirit of LessWrong, and authors do not generally have an obligation to respond to all such comments. There exists responsibilities for response, when certain thresholds are met, and relationships of mutual respect are established, but nothing even remotely close to what that excerpt suggests).
No, that doesn’t work at all.
You don’t actually link to the comment thread from which you’re quoting, (presumably because you are busy or writing this on your phone or some such). Unfortunately, in this case it is likely to cause readers to come away with a totally mistaken understanding of what I was saying. They might, for instance, miss my reply to your reply to my above-quoted comment, where I write:
(Emphasis [bold] added.)
So, no, it is simply false that I insist that authors must always reply directly to comments (either mine or anyone else’s).
You also claim that I have “spent years arguing for norms in which authors should by default be presumed to be worthy of dismissal and full of ignorance”. This, too, is false. (Indeed, it’s hard to see what such a norm could even mean.) Obviously, I can’t easily provide links to prove a negative, and you don’t provide any quotes or links to support this one. But I think that you’ll be unable to do so, and any examples you do provide will turn out to be misleading in a similar manner to the above.
I haven’t created any such thing.
I’m not a moderator, an administrator, or any kind of “privileged” user. I’m not one of the “protected class” of authors who are so valued that keeping them around is worth making serious sacrifices for. I’m one person, who doesn’t comment all that much, and who comments at all on a small minority of posts.
Every single time I’ve made any comment like the one you quoted, you and/or the other mods have pushed back on it, very explicitly and vehemently stating that the norms of Less Wrong in fact do not include any kind of obligation for any kind of replies to criticism, questions, requests, comments of any sort, etc., and that my views are absolutely not the views of the LW moderation team. This is, of course, entirely your right as the people in charge of the site. But “the culture” is the one you created. My preferences w.r.t. what the culture of LW should be have been consistently, thoroughly, and explicitly rejected. I’ve expressed those preferences, but they have not shaped the forum’s culture. You even extracted from me a promise (which I have kept) of avoiding making any claims or saying anything that might lead a reader to the mistaken impression that my views are shared by the moderation team.
If there’s one thing we can say about the culture of Less Wrong today, it’s that it is not based on my views, it is not my preferred culture, and it is in fact the culture you created, in direct opposition to my views on the matter. This, again, is your right. But to then claim that I’ve created any kind of culture on LW seems to me to be outrageously false.
And so, of course, unsurprisingly, the empirical facts of the matter are that people ignore my comments (and, of course, many other people’s comments) all the time. (Do you want examples? I can provide plenty!) They have a right to do so! Even by my standards, as outlined in the quote above, they have a right to do so! All the time, this happens. Authors “do not feel comfortable ignoring” people? That doesn’t seem to stop most of them! Again, I am not saying that this is necessarily a problem. (It is in some cases; in others, not.) But it surely happens, as an absolutely routine matter, all day, every day. Frankly, it’s ridiculous to claim otherwise.
EDIT: It seems that you’ve substantially edited your comment while I was writing my reply, making it seem as if I’m replying to made-up quotes… I would really prefer it if you at very least made a note when doing things like this.