I started posting to Less Wrong in 2011, under the name Fezziwig. I lost the password, so I made this account for LW2.0. I quit reading after the dustup in 2022, because I didn’t like how the mods treated Said. I started up again this summer; I guess I came back at the wrong time.
Object-level I think Said was right most of the time, and doing an important job that almost no one else around here is willing to do. A few times I thought of trying to do the same thing more kindly; I’m a more graceful writer than he is, so I thought I had a good shot. But I never did it, because I don’t believe Said’s tone was ever really the issue: what upset people, what tended to produce those long ugly subthreads, was when he made a good point that couldn’t be persuasively answered, and didn’t get distracted by evasions. There isn’t, actually, a kind way to ask for examples from someone who doesn’t have any.
That’s not to say all his comments were like that; some really were just bad. But the bad ones didn’t tend to spawn demon threads. People didn’t have to reply, because they knew that he was wrong, instead of just wishing it.
Also, I think that if ”...voting ends up dominated by a small interest[10] group without broader site buy-in, and with no one being able to tell that is what’s going on...distorting people’s perception about the site consensus in particularly high-stakes contexts”, then the right approach is to weaken or eliminate remove the misfeature that’s distorting the signal, rather than giving up on using votes to signal site norms or guide ban decisions. But then, I also wouldn’t throw out a claim like that without checking the voting data, if I had access to it.
Anyway, it’s not my problem. I’ve deleted everything I posted here and I’m not going to visit again. The admins could undo it but, Jim, I’d like to ask that you not. I don’t want anything I’ve made to be part of what lesswrong.com is now.
I started posting to Less Wrong in 2011, under the name Fezziwig. I lost the password, so I made this account for LW2.0. I quit reading after the dustup in 2022, because I didn’t like how the mods treated Said. I started up again this summer; I guess I came back at the wrong time.
Object-level I think Said was right most of the time, and doing an important job that almost no one else around here is willing to do. A few times I thought of trying to do the same thing more kindly; I’m a more graceful writer than he is, so I thought I had a good shot. But I never did it, because I don’t believe Said’s tone was ever really the issue: what upset people, what tended to produce those long ugly subthreads, was when he made a good point that couldn’t be persuasively answered, and didn’t get distracted by evasions. There isn’t, actually, a kind way to ask for examples from someone who doesn’t have any.
That’s not to say all his comments were like that; some really were just bad. But the bad ones didn’t tend to spawn demon threads. People didn’t have to reply, because they knew that he was wrong, instead of just wishing it.
Also, I think that if ”...voting ends up dominated by a small interest[10] group without broader site buy-in, and with no one being able to tell that is what’s going on...distorting people’s perception about the site consensus in particularly high-stakes contexts”, then the right approach is to weaken or eliminate remove the misfeature that’s distorting the signal, rather than giving up on using votes to signal site norms or guide ban decisions. But then, I also wouldn’t throw out a claim like that without checking the voting data, if I had access to it.
Anyway, it’s not my problem. I’ve deleted everything I posted here and I’m not going to visit again. The admins could undo it but, Jim, I’d like to ask that you not. I don’t want anything I’ve made to be part of what lesswrong.com is now.