Alicorn

Karma: 31,024

Alicorn 24 Aug 2025 2:43 UTC
21 points
4
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
Funnily enough I think I kind of feel about Duncan the same way Oli feels about Said. I detect a sinister and disquieting pattern in his writing that I cannot prove in a court of law or anything that is slightly larping as one. But I’m not trying to moderate any space he’s in.

Alicorn 24 Aug 2025 2:41 UTC
13 points
3
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I think your model of me as represented in this comment is pretty good and not worth further refining in detail.
I read something into those comments—I might even possibly call it “disdain”, but—“disdain (neutral)”, not “disdain (derogatory)”. It just… doesn’t bother me, that he writes in a way that communicates that feeling. It certainly bothers me less than when (for example) Eliezer Yudkowsky communicates disdain, purely as a stylistic matter. If I thought Said would want to be on my Discord server I would invite him and expect this to be fine. (Eliezer is on my Discord server, which is also usually fine.)
It bothers you. I’m not trying to argue you out of being bothered. I’m not trying to argue the complainants out of being bothered. It bothering you would, under the Modularity regime, be sufficient.
But you’re not doing that. You’re trying to make the case that you are objectively right to feel that way, that you have succeeded at a Sense Motive check to detect a pattern of emotions and intentions that are really there. I don’t agree with you, about that.
But I don’t have to. I don’t have your job. (I wouldn’t want it.)

Alicorn 23 Aug 2025 4:18 UTC
3 points
−4
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I mean, I really tried to explain a lot of my models for what I think the underlying generators of this are. That’s why the post is 15,000 words long.
You spend a lot of words trying very hard to explain a thing that is not the same thing that I wanted to know. Perhaps lots of other people wanted to know it? I can only speak for myself.
To be clear, LessWrong is not a democracy
Yeah, I know. I provided an example of a way you could have chosen to openly run it as an oligarchy (“anyone the entire mod team is sick of for any reason is banned because we have no one to moderate them”) and that I would have respected. Let us call this proposed oligarchical model something fun like “Modularity”—once no mod(ule)s are compatible with somebody, that somebody can’t be on the site. You are doing a thing other than that with more moving parts.
what I think is going wrong in conversations with Said
These moving parts in particular. If you were implementing Modularity, it wouldn’t matter what was going wrong. Your bare word is more than sufficient to convince me that something is going wrong, and “something is going wrong” would be enough for you to refuse responsibility for further dealing with Said where Things Go Wrong All The Time for whatever reason. No troubleshooting burden would exist, no explanatory burden would be called for. You could just not like his face, and get the same result. But you’re not doing Modularity. You’re doing something where you write thousands of words about why you think his face is objectively bad.
Thank you for the numbers!
I did really try to explain
I know! I can tell you tried. You did not communicate all the things I wanted to know, though you have here ameliorated that somewhat; I am agnostic about whether this is because you were originally trying to communicate some other thing (perhaps to some other audience) or because communication is just hard and even trying to communicate the correct thing sometimes does not work.
Maybe that’s where we disagree and you think I am doing something that is actively bad by trying to elaborate on my models here, instead of just owning up to this being something closer to a personal preference.
No, not particularly. You’re not implementing Modularity, you’re doing this complicated model-backed thing and you want to explain your complicated model-backed thing. I think that if you were doing Modularity that would be a) respectable and b) require very little digital ink-spilling, but you are not in fact doing either the policy I made up nor any policy closely related to it, so you might as well explain what you are doing.
Your OP comment to me reads as clearly upset and implying that I’ve done something worthy of harsh social judgement
Yeah, you reading additional content into text as though it were clear is a theme here. I said in words that I was disappointed and dismayed. If you are ascribing more emotions to me than those ones, kindly cut it out. I wouldn’t have bothered commenting at all if you hadn’t expressly announced you wanted to hear from the peanut gallery on this one, I’m not making any claims about what social judgment you deserve.
It doesn’t sound to me like you are actually saying that I don’t have to answer these questions.
You literally do not have to; the power of Alicorn might completely fail to compel you and then the consequences of this would be nil. Is there some passphrase which communicates a question and also acknowledges that nothing bad happens to you if you don’t answer them or are we operating under a guess culture so extreme that this is impossible? I mean, if you ignored me I might be sorta irked. Maybe I would make sarcastic remarks about it with my pals. I’m not gonna try to get you fired or anything.
maybe … you think the bad thing that happened is me making bad arguments for banning Said, which is much worse than no arguments for banning Said
No; given that you are doing an argument-driven decisionmaking process, providing the arguments is the right call. I just brought up a process that would be respectable yet not argument-driven.
Let me know if so, if not, I don’t think your top-level comment feels compatible with your assertion here that I don’t actually have a burden of proof here
I’m not sure what you mean by this but perhaps some other thing I said will happen to clarify something usefully.

Alicorn 23 Aug 2025 2:53 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
(I am aware of that one comment you left a while ago, and disagreed with it)
You disagreed with it? What about it? I just read it over again and it doesn’t make a lot of claims I could imagine you disagreeing with—for one thing I talk about my personal experience of Said, not his objective properties.
I think the narrative above pretty accurately describes the experiences of a bunch of authors
Okay, but… why. Why do you think that. Is there a reason you think that, which other people could inspect your reasoning on, which is more viewable than unenumerated “complaints”? Again, I believe the complaints exist. How many, order of magnitude? Were they all from unique complainants? I believe you that you have spent many many hours on this matter: what did you spend them doing?
I understand you like Said as a contributor on the site, though I really don’t have much detail on your opinion. I understand you dislike something about the explanation of my background models for this decision, maybe something to do with how I speak with too much authority or bias about reader and author-experience on the site, but I don’t think I have enough context to respond.
Like I said in the comment linked in the grandparent, Said is on a very short list of people who I have a persistent impression of at all—without my ever having met him in person or talked to him on another website, even—and has left a consistently positive impression. Maybe I missed all his egregious comments, but I clicked some of the handpicked examples in your post and they just don’t seem that bad? Perhaps he is equipped with a whistle that emits vibes at a frequency I cannot hear. I can’t rule that out. It just has not been demonstrated to me by any metric other than you not liking moderating him.
To be clear: I think it would in fact be valid to run your moderation decisions on you not liking moderating him. If you have a mod team, and everybody on the mod team is like “I am sick and tired of being called in to deal with Said-related things”, and you announce, “we don’t seem to employ anyone who is willing to deal with Said-related things and we don’t have the budget to hire a new moderator who’ll have that as an explicit part of their job description, so bye Said”, that would be in my view perfectly licit. If you want to appeal solely to it being time-consuming and unpleasant to moderate a guy, you can, and I wouldn’t object much to that no matter how much I like the guy, I’d just be puzzled about how polarizing he manages to be. That’s kinda how one of my favorite Discord servers runs—if everybody on the mod team one by one becomes weary of the prospect of yet another local norms conversation with some server member, bye server member.
Instead you are trying to appeal to some less subjective principles, so—why do you think these principles obtain, and why do you believe they’ve been violated here? Just-so stories about what you imagine it might be like for one of your anonymous complainants to write on LW till they sadly plod away, ears ringing with the mysterious vibe-whistle, do not answer these questions for me. You don’t have to answer the questions but you’ve chosen to stake out a position that prompts them.

Alicorn 23 Aug 2025 1:25 UTC
40 points
−4
on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I am disappointed and dismayed.
This post contains what feels to me like an awful lot of psychoanalysis of the LW readership, assertions like “it is clear to most authors and readers”, and a second-person narrative about what it is like to post here:
After all of this you are left questioning your own sanity, try a bit to respond more on the object-level, and ultimately give up feeling dejected and like a lot of people on LessWrong hate you. You probably don’t post again.
And like, man, is that true? Did you conduct a poll? I didn’t get a survey. You pay some attention to Zack’s perspective on Said, maybe because it’d be kind of laughable to pretend you hadn’t heard about it; but I’m one of the less-strident people Zack commiserates with about Said’s travails, and you had access to my opinion on the matter if you were willing to listen to a wheel that only squeaked a little bit. My comment is toplevel and has lots of votes and netted positive on both karma and agreement and most of the nested remarks are about whether it was polite of me to compare a non-Said person to a weird bug.
This post spends so much time talking about the complaints you’ve gotten, the experiences you imagine complainants having, the clear communication you envision occurring between “most” of a population and your target here. I believe that you’ve received complaints. I understand why you might not choose to publish their privately-submitted text. It does leave me with not that much to go on besides public comment wars, and it seems like I don’t interpret them the same way you do.
Am I going to loudly quit the site? Well, uh. Despite your protestations to the contrary I don’t actually think you will care if I do or not. I don’t write here that much any more. There was a time when I read every post on LessWrong and treated writing stuff here like it was my job, but no longer. I made a bug report the other day and I just checked and the bug still reproduces. You had access to my opinion on Said and the “you” in this post is clearly not about me. I don’t think it will really affect you if I stay or go. But if I do absentmindedly navigate here out of sixteen year habit I’m going to have a bad taste in my mouth about it.
What links here?
- Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away? by Sting (2 Sep 2025 0:08 UTC; 48 points)

Alicorn 13 Jul 2025 21:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: sam’s comment on: Fix My Head
I think my headaches are multicausal, but drinking less water*, taking acetaminophen as soon as I feel a twinge, and maybe any of the other many things I have done in the last 14 years, have attenuated it substantially, and now I get most of them only at specific points in my menstrual cycle. (Which is convenient because you’re not supposed to hit the painkillers too hard when pregnant.)
*yes, less water; some of my headaches are migraine-y and you want vasoconstriction for that

Alicorn 2 Jul 2025 4:49 UTC
2 points
0
on: “What’s my goal?”
Note: if you don’t feel like doing all of these,
Missing some kind of then-statement here.

Alicorn 24 Jun 2025 1:58 UTC
11 points
3
on: Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism
I (white) have cosmetic preferences which happen to select (weakly) against white people and in favor of everyone else, so I can relatively safely talk about it. (I love brown eyes and dislike blond hair.)
I don’t know where my cosmetic preferences came from, but it seems likely that some people have less speakable ones from that same source, and mistake it or have it mistaken for something about race-per-se. I don’t think this can explain the magnitude of the effect, but I feel like it’s missing as a hypothesis whenever people manage to talk about racial disparity in dating at all.

Alicorn 10 Dec 2024 16:47 UTC
28 points
0
on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
When I started making double batches of pancake batter, they came out fluffier.
I checked and re-checked all the math on the doubling so many times to make sure I wasn’t adding too much or too little of something, but the ratios were all right.
Eventually I realized I was going through baking powder faster and so the baking powder was fresher.

Alicorn 2 Dec 2024 0:00 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
Stripe is even less welcome to my phone number than you are! But I’ll retry without the info saving thing.
ETA: Yeah that worked.

Alicorn 1 Dec 2024 22:30 UTC
10 points
0
on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
I just went to try to give you $40 (because there’s an event that I expect to be hosted at Lighthaven, and I want to go to it, and would be happy to pay for a ticket at something in that ballpark of a price, but kind of expect to be offered free entry, so I might as well “pay for my ticket” now to make sure the place is there to have the event in).
But the form requires a phone number and will not accept all zeroes or all nines and you can have forty dollars but you cannot have a real phone number.

Alicorn 20 Nov 2024 18:52 UTC
25 points
5
on: What are the good rationality films?
Smallfoot. It’s a children’s animated musical about yetis who don’t believe in humans, and about fraud and honesty and curiosity and how other motives, even sympathetic ones, contaminate truthseeking. Hat tip to Elizabeth of Aceso Under Glass who recommended it to my family.

Alicorn 7 Oct 2024 23:11 UTC
3 points
0
on: 2025 Color Trends
In the SS25 collections, we see it, unsurprisingly, in skin-baring clubwear:
but also in more classically graceful gowns and tailoring:
in slightly kooky and unhinged references to early-60s femininity:
and in more eclectic, playful styles:
Were there supposed to be images or links here?

Alicorn 10 Sep 2024 7:02 UTC
29 points
17
on: Physical Therapy Sucks (but have you tried hiding it in some peanut butter?)
I was so excited about this post until I realized the metaphorical peanut butter was also exercise.

Alicorn 9 Jan 2024 4:32 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Lack of Spider-Man is evidence against the simulation hypothesis
I mean, sure, it looks like that when people who sound credible to you are checking.

Alicorn 6 Jan 2024 19:32 UTC
53 points
32
on: Lack of Spider-Man is evidence against the simulation hypothesis
Our world would seem mundane to us no matter what was in it. Maybe it’s actually wildly unrealistic that many people keep cats as pets. Maybe dandelions are some kind of Easter egg. Maybe our so-called natural languages are ludicrously simple and regular compared to the monstrosities real people with real history speak.

Alicorn 14 Jul 2023 0:25 UTC
25 points
0
on: The Goddess of Everything Else—The Animation
I like this enough that I’m considering picking a screenshot of the Goddess of Everything Else and replacing my twelve year old standard avatar with it.

Alicorn 3 Jun 2023 6:25 UTC
29 points
23
on: Things I Learned by Spending Five Thousand Hours In Non-EA Charities
“what is your fantasy partner/complement organization?”
I love this question and would never have thought of it on my own.

Alicorn 11 May 2023 3:33 UTC
9 points
0
on: Class-Based Addressing
Our younger kiddo went through a period of calling his big sister “gago” because he couldn’t pronounce her name. Her opinion of this was a long-suffering sigh and “I’ll be whatever he can say.”

Alicorn 30 Apr 2023 20:54 UTC
38 points
8
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Inactive)’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.
- I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into. Even if you make out like it’s a “get out the vote” campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don’t require avowing that you’re a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you’re the sort who’ll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates. This social power with your clique of admirers in combination with your contagious lens on the world that they pick up from you is what unnerves me.
- I experience a lot of your word choices (e.g. “gossiping behind [your] back”) as squirrelly^[1] , manipulative, and more rhetoric than content. I would not have had this experience in this particular case if, for example, you’d said “criticizing [me] to an unsympathetic audience”. Gossip behind one’s back is a social move for a social relationship. One doesn’t clutch one’s pearls about random people gossiping about Kim Kardashian behind her back. We have never met. I’d stand a better chance of recognizing Ms. Kardashian in the grocery store than you. I have met some people who know some people who you hang out with, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that I had any affordances to instead gossip to your face, or that it’s mean to dislike your public blog posts and then talk about disliking them with my friends^[2].
- Further, it’s rhetorically interesting that you said “Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”″ You didn’t try a lot of different dynamics! I said I was favorably impressed when you didn’t respond. If someone is nervous about you, holding very still and not making any hostile moves is a great way to help them feel safe, and when you tried that (or… looked like you were trying it) it worked. The only other thing you tried was, uh, this, which, as I’m explaining here, I do not find impressive. However, scientists have discovered that there are often more than two possible approaches to social conflict. You could have tried something else! Maybe you could have dug up a mutual friend who’d mediate, or asked a neutral curious question about whether there was something I could point to that would help you understand why you were coming off badly, instead of unloading a dump truck of sneaky nasty connotations on my lap. Maybe you believe every one of those connotations in your heart of hearts. This does not imbue your words with magic soothing power, any more than my intentions successfully accompanied my analogy about weird bugs. You still seem sneaky and nasty to me.
1. ^
  I maintain that I sincerely like squirrels; I am using a colloquial definition which, of definitions I found on the internet, most closely matches the Urban Dictionary cluster.
2. ^
  The “I talk about things with my friends, you brigade” conjugation is not lost on me but I wish to point out in my defense that, as I said in my original comment, I did not intend to touch this situation where it could possibly affect you until it seemed like it was also affecting Said, of whom I am fond.