epistemology enthusiast
Zack_M_Davis
Karma: 20,187
Charles Goodhart Elementary School
I find some of Richard’s attitudes very distasteful
Examples? What attitudes, specifically? Can you link to something Ngo wrote that expresses the attitude you find distasteful? (Same question to any of the agree-voters.)
I feel like this should be easy. (I think that when I find someone’s attitudes distasteful, I usually don’t have a problem retrieving a link; I need the links to write a convincing critical blog post explaining why the views are bad, as I so often do.)
Taking a wild guess (I don’t know if this is what you had in mind), if the distasteful attitude is that he thinks it’s plausible that there are ancestry-cluster (“racial”) differences in socially-relevant traits like cognitive ability (mentioned in footnote 2 of the OP), I think that’s more of a “hypothesis” than an “attitude”. (It’s a claim about the world that could be true or false, not a claim about how we should behave or feel.)
If the distasteful attitude is that he thinks scholars should be permitted to reason in public about decision-relevant consequences of that hypothesis while also getting paid to do decision theory research, I can see reasons why someone would find that attitude distasteful (see my discussion of “the Schelling point for preventing group conflicts” in a 2020 book review), but to the extent that those reasons aren’t about the truth or falsity of the hypothesis, I think it’s important to notice the rationality implications of silencing discussion of the implications of a hypothesis for reasons other than its truth.
But it also seems like rationalists and EAs do better at this than almost any similarly sized subculture?
What is the relevance of this? It is written of the eighth virtue of humility that “it is useless to be superior [...] There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse.”
Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Summary Judgment Motion Hearing
For the fraction of our conversation that was frustrating due to my grammatical error, and unclear communication in that comment, as well as further frustration caused by me not noticing that what I wrote was unclear earlier in this conversation, I apologize.
Thanks, and I appreciate it, but unfortunately, this does not fully resolve my concerns about the degree to which you are trustworthy. Let me explain—and thanks for your patience. (I thought the present comment would benefit from some focused, cool-headed care and attention, which it took me some days to get around to.)
How I’m Thinking About Discouragement Claims
I agree that in as much you interpreted my statement as “these authors have all stopped posting on the site because of you”, then of course my statement is obviously blatantly wrong. But I don’t understand how that hypothesis would even be available
Indeed, I didn’t interpret it that way; I agree that it’s possible to be discouraged but still use the site.
“Being discouraged” is a much weaker proposition than “has mentioned being annoyed by specifically that user to the head-admin”
Is it? I think “discouraged from using the site in some non-trivial way” and “annoyed by” are different things, because a lot of annoyances are trivial. The question was expressing skepticism (which I share) that finding a commenter annoying would be a legitimately non-trivial barrier to participating; it’s normal and expected that not everyone on a public forum is going to be your best friend. [1]
I’m worried about a potential motte-and-bailey pattern where the reality in the motte is “Habryka has a vague memory that someone either made or agreed to some sort of negative-valence statement about Achmiz, at some time, in some context” and what gets reported in the bailey—without any details of what the person allegedly said—is that that person was discouraged from using the site by Achmiz specifically, such that they get cited as an example of “authors who find [a commenter’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”.
To be clear, I think we do have better examples of “authors who find [Achmiz’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, because we have direct statements from them in their own words (which I of course quoted in §III.2 of my post): for instance, Duncan Sabien (“It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically”), DirectedEvolution (“one of three people who are readily top of mind at having a net negative impact on my LW experience”), and Lucas-Gloor-as-of-2023 [2] (“Said’s way of asking questions, and the uncharitable assumptions he sometimes makes, is one of the most off-putting things I associate with LW”).
(All three of those users have posted comments within the last 70 days, so you can see I’m not using the “stopped posting on the site” criterion.)
I think it really matters that in these cases, we have the specific, first-party statements about discouragement and not just vague hearsay (that you remember the user making some sort of complaint, without telling us what the complaint was). If it’s not already obvious why I’m so distrustful of hearsay, see the next section.
How My Distrust Is Paying Rent in Anticipated Experiences
I continue to strongly disagree that in the world where I did make an unambiguous statement of general inference (that these authors were discouraged from posting on LW) that you finding the kind of comment that Jacob made, or the kind of statement that Scott made, that this would be any substantial evidence against my integrity
The issue is that my distrust of you keeps paying rent in anticipated experiences: I made better predictions because I distrusted you. (I’m writing about “trustworthiness” rather than “integrity” here, but I doubt that’s a crux. If necessary, see the section below on what I mean by “trustworthiness” in this context.)
Consider how your sequence of statements about Alexander would look to observers who don’t have access to your private memories and who believe that memories about what other people said can be unreliable. You were asked about “authors who find [a commenter’s] very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, and responded with a list including Scott Alexander.
Even if there had been no grammatical ambiguity (and the comment had read “have complained along these lines” per your revision in the parent), I would have still been motivated to contact Alexander. I think that someone who trusted you would have predicted that I was wasting my time, that Alexander would corroborate your story by reporting that he had a negative firsthand impression of Achmiz. In fact, I wasn’t wasting my time: Alexander didn’t remember complaining and said he had “no direct opinion” on Achmiz. (He did say that he “deferred” to you about “what [you two] might have talked about in 2019″, but that’s not a corroboration.)
If there had been no grammatical error, I don’t think I would have used the phrase “false claims” (because it would have been clearer that you were only reporting what you remember being told, which isn’t directly contradicted by Alexander not remembering telling you that, because he could have forgotten), but I don’t think that would have changed the subsequent sequence of events very much; I still would have posted a comment in an accusatory register (whereas I wouldn’t have if Alexander had told me that he was discouraged by Achmiz).
In our actual timeline, you then clarified that “It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” but that you “were talking about what makes LW comment sections good or bad, and [Achmiz] was a commenter we discussed in that conversation in 2019 or so.”
I think that someone who trusted you would infer that you meant that Alexander had mentioned Achmiz’s name. Because I didn’t trust you, I noted in §III.2 of my post that “it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name, only that the ‘name came up’ and that Achmiz ‘was a commenter we discussed.’”
As it happened, my suspicion that Alexander did not name Achmiz at all seems to have been well-founded: in your 9 July comment above, you write that to the best of your knowledge, “Scott brought up Said, not by name but indirectly (referring to a specific commenter whose exact name he didn’t remember)” and only then did you “provide[ ] the name, which seemed to match.” (Seemed to match how? What did Alexander actually say, such that you could confidently infer who he meant?)
I notice a pattern in these events: twice I doubted the interpretation of your words that I think would come most naturally to someone who trusted you, and both times my distrust was vindicated (first by Alexander’s “no direct opinion”, then by your admission that you were the one who supplied Achmiz’s name, not Alexander): every time I’ve poked at the claim, it’s become less compelling as a justification for the ban. [3]
And after all that, I still don’t know what you’re alleging that Alexander said (which he has no memory of), only that you recall that there was some sort of “complaint”—and you’re still telling me (with respect to the claim about Alexander) [4] that you “would continue to write that same statement today.”
I hope you can see why this sort of behavior (where details that weaken the claim have to be extracted under adversarial questioning rather than volunteered up front) should (quantitatively) decrease people’s trust in you (such that they assign less credence when you make non-auditable claims on the basis of private evidence), even if every sentence you said permitted a true interpretation. (Because in the absence of someone distrustful and motivated enough to do the audit, the details would never surface, and people would have less accurate beliefs.) I think that a trustworthy speaker in this situation would be telling me that they wished the original 15 June 2025 comment had mentioned the “wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” part and that they were the one who supplied Achmiz’s name (such that Alexander turning out not to remember it would be less surprising to readers who trusted the original comment) and what they remembered Alexander having said more specifically than “complaints along these lines”. [5]
Appendix: What I Mean By “Trustworthiness” in This Context
If a speaker is trustworthy, then the beliefs I adopt when I interpret their words as being motivated by an intent to inform me should be approximately the same as the beliefs I would adopt after sending an auditor to check up on their claims. If someone is trustworthy, the auditor won’t predictably turn up counterevidence that lowers my credence in the beliefs the speaker is trying to get me to adopt (because a trustworthy speaker would have told me the counterevidence up front, without me needing to hire an auditor to get it).
Notably, this sense of “trustworthiness” is stronger than merely trusting the speaker to not tell explicit lies, because it’s possible for a speaker to induce false beliefs in a trusting audience while only using sentences that permit a true interpretation (as I wrote about in the Curated post “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think”): for example, by selectively presenting evidence that supports their preferred conclusion (as I wrote about in the Best of Less Wrong 2019 post “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists”). Furthermore, this sense of trustworthiness isn’t about the speaker’s subjective conscious intent, because I think behavior can be functionally optimized to mislead in the absence of such subjective conscious intent (as I wrote about in “Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle”).
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I would even argue that not finding anyone annoying would be a red flag that the forum is suffering from the kind of failure mode I discuss in “Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information”. As an umeshism: if you don’t have any annoying critics, then you don’t have enough critics. For example, I’ve found some of gjm’s criticisms of my posts to be subjectively annoying, but for that very reason, I think it’s important that I’ve often replied to them (although not always due to time constraints). If I didn’t have strong replies to my most annoying critics (or worse, didn’t have any annoying critics at all), then I couldn’t be so confident that I’m right.
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Gloor updated his comment in May 2024 to say that in the subsequent year and change, he “liked a couple of comments by Said and I don’t remember any particular ones that I thought exhibited the above pattern.”
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If Alexander felt as Sabien did, that would be a big deal in the minds of a lot of stakeholders; if, as is actually the case, Alexander doesn’t remember the complaint he allegedly made about someone whose name he couldn’t remember, that’s barely anything.
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I appreciate the statement that you would link Falkovich’s 2018 comment. I do consider the “some countervailing evidence” characterization a significant understatement (because the comment in Falkovich’s own words evidentially outweighs mere hearsay and is quite explicit in his support for Achmiz “bring[ing] a new flavor to the community” despite the previous impression of “disagreeableness [...] colored negatively in [his] mind”), but this is already a very long comment deep into a very long discussion and it’s not worth spending any more wordcount on this.
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I furthermore maintain that a trustworthy speaker wouldn’t suppress visibility of audits of the evidence for their claims on the grounds that it would incentivize them to spend time replying, “which [they] do not want to do”, as you did when you delisted Sting’s question post in contradiction of your claim in the OP that users can “make a post about how you disagree with some decision we made”, as I discuss in §VI.4.
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Blogging Technology Interlude
Some people posted about how to do cheaper better faster vision and it ended up in fable.
Some people posted about how to do cheaper better faster speculative decoding and it ended up in grok 4.5.
Details? Evidence? This is important and interesting if true, but if you just post the assertion without any substantiation, that’s not very helpful.
The thing you link to that I said was that “these people complained about Said”.
That’s not my understanding of what you were being asked. You were asked a question about “authors who find [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether”, and you answered with a list of names.
On my understanding of the meaning of that question, if someone is correctly named as an example of such an author, and I go ask them, “Did that commenter’s presence discourage you from posting on Less Wrong?”, I anticipate the experience that they’ll say “Yes.” (Here I’m making an assumption, which you seem to disagree with, that the author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them.)
I furthermore do not anticipate the experience of finding a comment by a correctly named example telling the commenter in question that their opinion of them has “flipped entirely to become positive” and encouraging them to “Do your own thing.” Even though the author is reporting that they used to have a negative opinion of the commenter at an earlier point in time (before it “flipped entirely to become positive”), that does not make it correct to say that their opinion was so negative that it was enough to discourage them from posting on the website. (I think it would be really surprising if such an extreme negative opinion could be so easily “flipped entirely to become positive.”)
It is perhaps a crux that I’m interpreting “find[ing] [a commenter]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” as a much stronger claim than “complain[ing] about [a commenter]”, such that correct answers to questions about the latter would be very often incorrect answers to questions about the former.
The reason I think those things are very different is because they’re very different in my own case, and I imagined that other people would be similar. I have some negative opinions (or one could as well use the word “complaints”) about lots of users of this website, but there’s no one I find so unpleasant that it’s enough to discourage me from posting on the website altogether. For example, I’ve complained about, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky (often, actually). If someone said, “Davis complained about Yudkowsky,” that would be a true claim. If someone said, “Davis finds Yudkowsky’s presence so unpleasant that it discourages him from using the website,” that would be a false claim. The claim would still be false even if someone erroneously thought the former implies the latter (and therefore wasn’t lying when they said it). I think it’s epistemically sloppy to collapse those two things (and that epistemically sloppy people are less trustworthy), even if epistemic sloppiness isn’t lying.
Regarding the assumption that an author would remember having been discouraged and who discouraged them, part of the reason that that seems like a reasonable assumption to me is that the central and uncontroversial case of an author finding Achmiz so unpleasant that it discourages them from using the website is Duncan Sabien, who is on the record saying as much. Sabien definitely remembers Achmiz, and has a direct negative opinion of him! I think it would be weird to put someone who says they have “no direct opinion” on Achmiz on the same list of discouraged authors as Sabien.
Which is just not the same as “readers would likely walk away with a wrong belief from Habryka’s comment which is wrong”.
I see. In retrospect, I wish I had gone with “misleading claims” rather than “false claims.” (Or maybe better, asked a clarifying question, as Richard Ngo suggests.) When a typical reader of my words walks away with a wrong belief, then the thing I said was “misleading” (independently of my conscious intent), even if it might not have been unambiguously “false” (because there exists a construal of my words that would make them true: for example, because my understanding of the question I was being asked differed from how typical readers interpreted the question).
I regret my word choice—by which I mean: I think that this experience will make me more likely to think carefully about whether I should say “misleading” rather than “false” in analogous future situations.
Importantly, both “misleading claims” and “false claims” need not entail lying. If I tell people “Munich is in Russia”, then I made a false claim, because actually, Munich is in Germany. It doesn’t matter whether I thought I was telling the truth (for example, because I misremembered something I read). Claims about “false claims” are about the claim, not the speaker’s private intent. People who see me making that mistake should regard me as less trustworthy about geography.
Indeed, the whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which I am trustworthy.
Yes, this whole conversation is centrally about the degree to which you are trustworthy. However—
whether I lied [...] the discussion of whether I am lying [...] evaluate whether I am lying to people
I think there are ways to be (somewhat, quantitatively, in a topic-dependent way) untrustworthy without consciously lying, but simply by being biased: for example, by overestimating the degree to which other people share your dislike of Achmiz and interpreting ambiguous statements from them in the light of that prior without being clear in your reports to others about the interpretive lens that you’re adding. (I’ve been writing about this kind of phenomenon for years.)
I think I’ve been very careful to not sloppily misuse the l-word. That’s why I made sure to explain above (and in my post) that “the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports” because “[w]hat matters is the likelihood ratio”. If it helps, think about a machine learning classifer rather than a human: if a classifer assigns positive labels to data points that are confirmed to be negative, that does make the classifier less trustworthy.
I don’t think I’m holding you to standards that I wouldn’t hold myself. If someone asked me, “Who dislikes Alice?” and I replied, “Bob dislikes Alice,” on the basis of my fuzzy memories of a conversation that I had with Bob seven years ago (in which Bob said something negative about someone whose name he didn’t know, and I supplied Alice’s name, which seemed to match the description Bob gave) and then Dave came to me and said, “You are making false claims; I talked to Bob, and he said he has no direct opinion of Alice”, I think I would be embarrassed! In addition to giving my side of the story about why I said what I did (about what I remembered about that conversation with Bob seven years ago), I think I would apologize for having replied to the literal question “Who dislikes Alice?” with the literal answer “Bob dislikes Alice” when Bob isn’t corroborating that. I think if I stood by my original answer and insisted I had done nothing wrong, people would be right to (quantitatively) distrust me more because of that!
If you find it impossible to think that I had a conversation with Falkovich in which he complained to me about Said, given that comment
No, that’s not what I’m saying. Let me try again.
Your 15 June 2025 comment replied to a question about “authors who find [someone]‘s very presence in a discussion so ‘unpleasant’ that … it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether” with a list that included Falkovich’s name.
I think that readers who read that comment were likely to walk away with the belief that, as of June 2025, Falkovich found Achmiz’s very presence in a discussion so unpleasant that it was enough to discourage Falkovich from posting on Less Wrong altogether. I’m saying that that belief is contradicted by Falkovich’s October 2018 comment. I agree that this is compatible with you having had an earlier conversation with Falkovich in which he made some sort of complaint about Achmiz. If you think the wording in my post is unclear, I’m happy to consider suggested edits.
(This is a rhetorical question, I am not actually interested in engaging in a longer conversation here)
Sure. I’m not asking you to engage in a longer conversation. I’m correcting your public characterization of my position.
To clarify for anyone reading—
Also, what is going on with you taking two statements by authors I talked to, neither of which directly contradicted how I summarized them, with the summary “was not true when I actually checked” and “having made false claims about people”.
The claim I was checking was the list of allegedly discouraged authors in your 15 June 2025 comment:
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others.
I’m saying that I don’t think the additional context in your 12 July 2025 comment rescues the discouragement claims in the 15 June comment.
Jacob literally started his sentence with “his negative affect towards Achmiz”
Specifically, the sentence in question was (bold in original) “But now that you’ve stated that you’re disagreeable on purpose, the negative effect flipped entirely to become positive.”
In §III.2, I discuss in more detail why I don’t think your interpretation in your 12 July comment rescues the claim in your 15 June comment:
In response to being presented with Falkovich’s comment contradicting his claim about Falkovich’s opinion, Habryka replied:
I think you can clearly see how the Jacob Falkovich one is complicated. He basically says “I used to be frustrated by you, but this thing made that a lot better”. I don’t remember the exact time I talked to Jacob about it, but it had come up sometime some context where we discussed LW comment sections. It’s plausible to me it was before he made this comment, though it would be a bit surprising to me, since that’s pretty early into LW’s history.
In fact, I do not see how the Jacob Falkovich one is “clearly” complicated. Indeed, I dispute Habryka’s characterization of what Falkovich “basically says”: it is tendentious to paraphrase “negative [...] flipped entirely to become positive” as “made that a lot better.” The latter is compatible with Habryka’s original claim that Falkovich is discouraged from using the website by Achmiz, but the former directly contradicts it: if something that’s bothering you is “made [...] a lot better”, the implication is that it’s still bothering you a little bit (although not as much as before); if your attitude towards something “become[s] positive”, that implies that it’s not bothering you.
I gave you more context on the Scott conversation which Scott didn’t dispute
I also discuss this in more detail in §III.2:
Notably, [Alexander’s reported lack of memory] is not a corroboration of Habryka’s original claim that Achmiz “in particular” discouraged Alexander from using Less Wrong: if Achmiz’s comments were so noxious as to drive Alexander off the website, one would have expected Alexander to have at least some memory of it. Indeed, it’s conspicuous that Habryka’s elaboration does not claim that Alexander volunteered Achmiz’s name, only that the “name came up” and that Achmiz “was a commenter we discussed.”
Thanks for commenting!
because I’m worried that you believing in Speech to this extent will end up being an unproductive crux for us
I don’t think so: while I concede that my deciding to talk to Metz and my opposition to the Achmiz ban are “correlated” in some sense, I fully expect that many people who would disapprove of the former would agree with my case on the latter. “Whether to talk to a biased journalist” and “whether to ban a Less Wrong user” are actually just pretty different situations, even if they both involve speech. Indeed, Achmiz himself does not share my obsession with transparency maximalism, and has a much dimmer view than me on the merits of talking to journalists, whom he has collectively described as “the scum of the earth”. [1]
It’s something more like “Habryka has a job, and he seems to be doing his job in a reasonable way in this case”.
Great, happy to start there. I think that one particularly legible requirement for doing the job of moderator in a reasonable way—not necessarily the most important requirement, but one that’s easy to check whether it’s being fulfilled—is, “Don’t make false claims to justify moderation decisions, and if you do accidentally make false claims, you should apologize and credibly express intent to not mislead people in that way again.”
As I document in §III.2 of my post, Habryka claimed in June 2025 that Scott Alexander and Jacob Falkovich, among “dozens of others”, were discouraged from using the website by Achmiz’s comments.
However, when I checked with Alexander, he testified that he had “no direct opinion” on Achmiz. I also found an October 2018 comment from Falkovich in which Falkovich wrote that his previous negative affect towards Achmiz had “flipped entirely to become positive” and urged Achmiz to “Do your own thing, and own it.”
When I presented Habryka with Alexander and Falkovich’s statements, rather than apologizing for having made false claims about other people’s stances on Achmiz, Habryka said of Alexander, “My guess is he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t an incredibly intense mention” (apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz?) and claimed that Falkovich’s statement was “complicated.”
Habryka continues to stand by a claim stated in the ban announcement post that “many top authors cit[e] [Achmiz] as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here”, while noting that most complaints about other users are private. The problem here is that when someone claims that some things are examples of a phenomenon, and the things turn out not to be examples when checked, that casts doubt on claimed examples that we can’t check: if the thing Habryka claimed about Alexander and Falkovich was not true when I actually checked, then what should we believe about the “dozens of others” or “many top authors” who weren’t named? As I explain in footnote 17, the doubt is agnostic as to the reason for the false reports. (What matters is the likelihood ratio
To be clear, this is not a particularly important point in itself. (The stated basis for the ban is not “Scott Alexander said so.”) The reason I’m re-explaining it in this comment (separately from the longer discussion in §III.2) is because it’s particularly legible: you don’t have to evaluate a complicated argument to check the linked statements and see for yourself that Habryka’s claims about authors’ opinions about Achmiz were contradicted by those authors’ own statements. My hope is that this small token of evidence injects enough of a shadow of a doubt into your prior belief that Habryka is doing his job in a reasonable way in this case, that you might find it worth your time to reconsider that belief after reading §II, §III.1, and §IV, which I think are important (but less trivial to evaluate).
If you find any of it persuasive (or unpersuasive), I think it would be in the public interest for you to say so in public.
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Specifically, Achmiz wrote to me in a January 2024 email (quoted with permission):
That’s journalist thinking—the idea that as long as you didn’t say the magic words “this is off the record”, you can publish anything anyone says to you in any context. And we all understand quite well by now that this (among other things) is what makes journalists, as a class, the scum of the earth. (“Never talk to a journalist”, one often hears—but why not? Because when you talk to a journalist—unlike when talking to normal people who understand the ideas of private communication and discretion and basic decency—you might well find your words broadcast publicly.)
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Thanks for your continued patience.
Perfectly? Is such exaggeration proper, here?
On reflection, no. Thanks for pointing that out. Swap out “perfectly” for “adequately”, and I stand by the rest of the comment.
re: relevance of the Royal Society
...why do you doubt the details are a crux?
Well, it’s not a double crux. Maybe it’s a crux for you.
The reason it’s not a crux for me is because it just seems so remote from the matter at hand. I already have years of direct personal experience productively collaborating with Achmiz on the kind of intellectual work that I want to do. His value to me is not in doubt. It’s just really hard to see what I could possibly learn about 17th-century England that would make me change my mind about that!
It seems like the argument would have to go through Achmiz’s mere presence on the website discouraging so much contribution—despite the existence of the user-level ban feature!—that somehow I’m better off privately benefitting from Achmiz’s counsel via email while he’s officially disgraced and banned from the website which is the central gathering place for the kind of work I do.
I suppose it’s not logically impossible, but it would be super weird for the empirics to shake out that way, and empirical evidence from 17th century England just seems too distant in time and culture to move the needle. The Royal Society isn’t totally irrelevant, of course: human nature hasn’t changed; they were our honorable ancestors doing the natural philosophy thing, and we’re doing a natural philosophy thing.
But our founding texts (which we agree, per the footnote on your 30 May comment, that the current project is running off the fumes of) are very explicit about aiming to do better than our ancestors. The Sequences are exhorting the reader to follow the timeless ideal of Bayesian reasoning wherever it leads, not imitate how Robert Boyle won friends and influenced people in 17th-century England. (And my discourse-norms posts are likewise trying to appeal to the timeless ideal.)
re: Less Wrong 1.0
Do you have an explanation for the decline of Less Wrong 1.0?
I do think this is at least more relevant than the Royal Society, just because there’s less of a generalization gap to cross between “running a website in 2016” to “running the same website in 2026.”
I think my honest answer here has to be No, I don’t have an explanation—in the sense that I don’t think I can outperform the replacement-level chatbot answer to this question.
What I think I can say (and I think you’d agree with the chatbot on these) is that the decline of the original website was not monocausal, and that the differences with LessWrong 2.0 are multidimensional. Things like LessWrong 2.0 having dedicated staff (instead of charity hours from Tricycle) and a less notoriously cursed codebase (in which to, e.g., implement moderation tools that can deal with the Eugene_Nier problem) are factors in LessWrong 2.0′s success.
As a result, when choosing interventions to make sure LessWrong 2.0 doesn’t die, it’s not a binary choice of “intervene or don’t”; there’s a high dimensional space of potential things to push on. I don’t find Habryka’s claim that “the specific way Said has been commenting on the site had a non-trivial chance of basically just killing the site” to be credible—particularly in light of my investigation of alleged author complaints in §III.2. To the extent that authors being discouraged by criticism was a problem, there were other available levers to pull that would save the website with less damage to the mission, such as encouraging use of the user-ban functionality, as I argue for in §IV.1 and suggested in July 2025. When I see Habryka reaching for the lever of purging someone he clearly personally dislikes when less intrusive measures were available and untried, I think I’m justified in judging this as a betrayal of the mission rather than a sincere disagreement about how to pursue the mission (forced by the need to avoid repeating the fate of the original site). If the claim isn’t that the Achmiz ban was necessary to literally save the site, but merely to optimize levels of user engagement, that’s not really substantively disagreeing with my model: I’m saying that you’ve betrayed the mission for the sake of popularity.
my read of you is something like “well we didn’t try to Correct Plan hard enough”. Like, if Yudkowsky had more personal virtue, then he wouldn’t have stopped posting on LW 1.0 and there wouldn’t have been the decline.
I wouldn’t go to “there wouldn’t have been the decline” (because of the high-dimensional multi-causuality), but yes, I do think that factor would have helped, and that Yudkowsky has more generally relinquished his Art and lost his powers. Granted, it’s not obvious how to intervene on a leader’s personal virtue (as contrasted to followers, who can often be bullied as Vassar did to me in 2008), but I think giving up on the idea of personal virtue is much worse!
re: people also being similar
But I think people are also similar, and there’s some value in us peeling back the layers and comparing how we’re put together
Right. That’s why I agree with 2013-Vaniver that “responding appropriately to criticism” is a trainable skill. I don’t think I’m an “emotionally tall” mutant preaching an impossible standard. I think other people could learn it, too, if the culture weren’t saturated with anti-epistemology claiming that they shouldn’t need to.
conflict vs. mistake theories of the present discussion
I am trying to understand what is going on
Are you? In your 30 May comment, you mocked me for spending too many words explaining why prioritizing hedonic and reputational effects trades off against error-correction and therefore correctness, “as the alert reader might have anticipated immediately”. But if it’s supposed to be so obvious that the mod team isn’t maximizing correctness, why would I believe you when you claim to be trying to understand what is going on, if I think that understanding what is going on would almost certainly have negative hedonic and reputational effects (because it would be a weird coincidence if the story that was true also made all the local power players look good)? Maybe you’re trying to understand in the privacy of your own mind, while carefully avoiding any speech acts that would deal unacceptable reputational damage? But the difference isn’t decision-relevant to me; I don’t get to interact with your private intentions in their purity; all I get to see is your speech acts, which strike me as evasive.
(Sorry, I know that was a super rude thing to say, but given what you told me about not putting correctness above all other concerns, you should have expected that I would entertain the hypothesis that you were telling the truth about that and consider the implications.)
I think Ben Hoffman’s theory about “a policy of unprincipled and unbounded submission to threats by the people (or personas) whose feelings are supposed to matter” seems like a better fit to the behavior I’m seeing from you and Anna Salamon. You report that you didn’t have “a personal problem with Said or his comments”, that you “generally found them easy to read and easy to respond to.” Salamon reports that her “personal experiences of Said on LW were clearly and substantially net-positive.” And yet both of you are arguing in favor of the ban to me—not because either of you are willing to testify in your own voice that you think Said’s comments are so bad that you’re not willing to share the website with him, but because other people—largely other unspecified people, given my investigation in §III.2!—aren’t willing to share the website with him. I think that’s weird! Naïvely, if I personally think something is fine, I should go on the record opposing banning it (for the record, even if I’m not the boss and it’s not my decision).
I need something like Hoffman’s theory in order to explain the behavior I’m seeing in you. Importantly, it’s a conflict theory, not a mistake theory: a story about different agents with conflicting goals, rather than everyone and the God-Empress sharing the same utility function. What you consider reputational and hedonic “costs” (to be minimized by the God-Empress for the good of all), Hoffman and I are construing as “threats” (in which an agent claims that they’ll deal disutility to everyone else if their demands aren’t met).
I think if you were actually trying to understand what was going on rather than trying to rationalize a policy handed to you by upstream social forces, you would show more evidence of having thought about the impacts on the site’s mission if the moderators took the other side of the conflict and stood up to the threats by telling complainants to downvote and move on with their lives.
In previous discussion, you’ve told me that the mod team isn’t going to tell users to “get gud” and that trying to shame you into stopping isn’t going to work. I understand that my complaints aren’t going to work. The ban isn’t going to be reversed; the function of this discussion is to get a shared accounting of what happened, where I’m not currently accepting the disvalue attributed to Achmiz as a legitimate cost on the shared ledger. You’ve told me that you felt more optimistic about communication of the form, “Okay, what is the thing that matters here, and how do we get it?” and not “the mods care about Something that is not Logic.” But the problem with that communication prescription is that it presupposes a mistake theory which you haven’t given me reason to believe in!
Do you seriously think that the mods telling complaintants “downvote on move on with your lives” would kill the site? (To be absolutely clear, I’m asking for a conditional prediction, not a policy change; I understand that the mods aren’t going to do that; I’m asking what you think would happen if you did that.)
I would expect some marginal users to bounce, but I don’t think the effect would be quantitatively large, and I think the resulting culture would be much more aligned to the mission. I think most people would grow, the way Michael Vassar helped me grow in 2008.
I could imagine you disagreeing with me on this as an empirical matter of human psychology, but there’s a missing mood in your behavior given that you’ve already agreed that a pro-criticism, pro-being-questioned emotional orientation is good for individuals and good for Society. If it turns out that I’m empirically wrong to think that it’s possible for people to learn the thing we both agree is prosocial, then my reaction is not, “I guess my approach was impractical, therefore wrong, and the new culture is a better way”, but rather, “oh God, we’re screwed, apparently almost no humans are capable of rationality; we were already dead; we were never going to survive.”
Previously, you’ve told me that you think Less Wrong has changed and that Habryka is the person most trying to surf those changes. I think the difference between you and me is that when civilization has fallen to a zombie apocalypse, I think it’s more dignified to go down fighting rather than joining the zombies because they’re the winning side (because surfing the changes means siding with the winners).
Again, I realize that that’s not a nice thing for me to say about you, but I think you’ve been commendably clear about your position, and I think it makes sense for me to be clear, too.
re: encouraging sportsmanship
I think there are obviously means for encouraging other people to do things besides arguing for it at length. For example, one could reward people for doing it, or one can model it in one’s own behavior.
Thanks. That answers my question of how else is one supposed to do it; now that you point it out, I agree that rewarding and modeling could also work.
Conspicuously, that doesn’t answer my question about what textual evidence supports Achmiz doing more to push people away from the right sort of sportsmanship, such as would justify your “not true on net” judgement. I think that after having conceded, as you have, that the pro-criticism orientation is prosocial, the “obvious” conclusion is that the Achmiz ban was unjustified; in that context, the “not true on net” judgement, stated without evidence, looks suspiciously like an ad hoc goalpost-moving excuse. (It’s an odd notion of sportmanship that demands that players not only exhibit good sportsmanship themselves, but also do so in a way that causes others to as well. Traditionally, it’s “how you play the game”, not “how you influence others to play the game.”) I don’t think “he wasn’t modeling it” is credible. Is your claim then that “he wasn’t rewarding it enough”? What would rewarding it look like?
Yes, of course. I’m not a monster—at least, not according to my moral intuition. But sometimes there’s not an obvious morally right or wrong answer when the interests of multiple parties are at stake. In the case of “my interest in having candid conversations with people and doing cool meta-journalism blogging” versus “the community’s interest in protecting its collective reputation”, the latter just does not seem compelling to my moral intuition. If that makes me a monster with respect to your moral intuition, well, that’s when you need the police.
Right. Telling the bank robber he’s being antisocial doesn’t work, because he already knows that. What you need is a police force to throw the robber in jail. Then people who don’t want to go to jail won’t even try to rob the bank. That was what the meetup ban suggestion was about. If even that fails to deter potential snitches and your internet community can’t escalate any further (because the local non-internet police insist on maintaining their monopoly on violence), then your community might not be able to successfully protect its reputation.
I liked Jiro’s littering analogy. I assume the causal story goes, rats talk to Metz → Metz has an easier time writing articles and a book portraying rats as unreasonable/low-status (which don’t have to rise to the level of overtly hostile hit pieces) → people who trust New York Times reporters have lower opinions of rats → those people e.g. discriminate against us in hiring or support worse AI policies in expectation. I buy that there’s a real effect here; it just seems small enough that I don’t particularly feel like suppressing my natural inclination to talk to everyone and do cool meta-journalism.
So, one hypothesis might be that participation gaps are caused by something else other than sexism?
One might object: that hypothesis is itself sexist, such that voicing it is itself perpetrating the inequality via self-fulfilling prophecy. This is admittedly a tricky methodology problem.
Terrence Tao?
Eh, fair enough, thanks. I have to admit you have a point: to some quantitative extent, I’m a hazard to the community’s reputation. If the community would be destroyed if it had a sufficiently bad reputation, then I’m helping destroy it (to some quantitative extent) by speaking candidly with someone who will predictably use the information they gain to lower the community’s reputation.
(I’m saying “to some quantitative extent” because, as I explained in another comment, I think the effect sizes here are pretty small, but as you correctly point out in another comment, that doesn’t justify rounding down to zero: someone who litters in a park is making the park less nice, even if any single piece of trash doesn’t ruin the park.)
I don’t care! I just don’t care very much about covering for the community’s reputation! I care about telling the truth in public, which includes doing meta-journalism like this post. I think I care about the community’s reputation a little bit, such that I would engage in some strategic concealment if “destruction” were actually at hand—but on the current margin, no, I’m not going to stop “littering”. What are you going to do about it? Lobby the admins of this website and the organizers of local meetup groups to ban me (a 9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author) for insufficient loyalty? Fine! Do your worst! I’m long past the point of being controlled by you people.
Math Academy ($49/mo) is great for training the fundamentals; one of the developers has a manifesto.
I see. Thanks!