Zack_M_Davis

• Zack_M_Davis 25 Jun 2026 22:19 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Dis­patch from An­thropic v. Depart­ment of War Pre­limi­nary In­junc­tion Mo­tion Hearing

  The official transcript is now available.

  Claude Opus 4.8′s point-by-point comparison to the transcript reinforces my perception that I mostly did a good job, although there were a few places where I could have been more precise. For example, my dispatch quotes Hamilton as saying “For non-DoW work, that is not the Department’s concern” in response to Judge Lin’s hypothetical about a toilet paper supplier, but the transcript (p. 13) shows that Hamilton’s response to that question was, “For non-DoW work, that is my understanding”; the words “For non-DoW work, that is not the Department’s concern at this point” were actually a response to a followup question about an IT services provider. Later, I quote Judge Lin saying “With every software vendor, it is a trust relation on some level,” while the transcript renders it as “it is really a trust relationship on some level.” I also accidentally wrote “plaintiff” instead of “defendant” in one place (now fixed).

• Zack_M_Davis 23 Jun 2026 5:00 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  Thanks for your patience through the disruption of festival season.

  I think one of the arguments for Said being fine is that it is the user’s job to have an emotional orientation where they like Said’s style of criticism, and that’s because that emotional orientation is both good for them personally and also good for society. I buy the argument that the emotional orientation has benefits for society—for example, I think it’s better if the professor has it—

  Great to hear!!

  I think this is the layer where you need to make your case—that Said was pushing people towards the right sort of sportsmanship—

  Sure. As an example of Achmiz pushing people towards the right sort of sportsmanship, I nominate an April 2023 comment in which Achmiz explains why it’s good sportmanship ^[1] to not complain about being asked for examples.

  —and I think this was not true on net.

  But why? I just pointed you to what I claim is a very clear example of Achmiz pushing people towards the right sort of sportsmanship, by means of arguing for it at length. How else is one supposed to do it? Reply!

  If you concede that the April 2023 comment is an instance of Achmiz pushing people towards the right sort of sportsmanship, what textual evidence do you have of Achmiz doing more to push people away from the right sort of sportsmanship to justify your “not true on net” judgement? What else could Achmiz possibly have done that would have had a different outcome, but explain at length why he thinks his commenting style is correct when the style became a topic of meta conversation? Reply!

  but I think the question is “which environment causes there to be more of that orientation?” and I think your plan is “require it and let them sort out how it’s produced” in a way that I think is trying to simplify the world so that you neither need to figure out whether your plan is efficacious

  I think “require it and let them sort out how it’s produced” is a perfectly effacious plan. Do you think it wouldn’t work? Why not? Reply!

  The basic reason I think it would work is that people respond to incentives and learn the behaviors that their culture considers high-status, and that the behavior in question is learnable, like showering regularly. ^[2]

  In theory, I concede that my plan could fail if the subculture didn’t have “enough status rewards to hand out” to “pay for” the cost of learning (relative to other subcultures that people could spend their lives in): a perfect rationality textbook that no one wants to read wouldn’t raise the sanity waterline of our Earth. ^[3]

  In practice, I think the subculture did and does have enough rewards to hand out. Not only did middle Yudkowsky’s ^[4] philosophical insight point to a precious timeless ideal, but his generational writing talent planted a flag or beacon for people receptive to the ideal to congregate. People want to be near the beacon! If those entrusted with stewarding the beacon say they had no choice but to alter the message or be destroyed, I mostly just don’t believe them. (But maybe you think the decline of Less Wrong 1.0 is definitive evidence that I can’t successfully explain away.) I think the stewards had (and have) a choice to either maintain standards in order to be faithful to the timeless ideal or betray them in order to be a slightly cooler Bay Area party scene, and they chose (and are choosing) to betray them.

  My belief that “require it and let them sort out how it’s produced” works is grounded in personal experience. An illustrative anecdote: I had a painful formative experience in a June 2008 thread on Overcoming Bias. I was offended by another commenter’s anecdote which I construed as misogynistic, to which I replied, “are you aware that this is exactly the sort of psychology that leads to rape?”

  That’s not the sort of thing I would ever write today—it was an ad hominem appeal to consequences that didn’t address the commenter’s point—but at the time, I felt righteous: I had spent enough time being socialized by the feminist blogosphere (Feministe, Pandagon, &c.) and only seven months being socialized by Overcoming Bias, such that “punish misogyny” was salient to me as a moral priority and “don’t try to suppress information with ad hominem appeals to consequences” was not.

  It would be years before I fully understood why that was a bad comment on my part, but the first step along that road—and the reason it was a painful formative experience—is that Michael Vassar slapped me down hard for it:

  Z.M. Davis:
  You know, what you just did was, judged by someone who sees this as a forum for truth seeking, REALLY CREEPY. My first impulse is to say that you should be permanently banned for trying to tamper with evidence at the scene of scientific inquiry through moral intimidation aimed at making people reluctant to volunteer or even think about and learn from surprising information. My second thought on the matter is that you just don’t know better and have not done anything similar before, but just to be clear, that is the only post in the history of this blog for which I would even suggest a ban based on a single post on the grounds that the penalty for censorship must be censorship if we are to maintain an open exchange.

  That hurt to read! It hurt a lot. But I needed to hear it. To borrow a deep learning metaphor, a high-status group member ^[5] telling me off was applying a gradient update to me in the direction of, “don’t try to suppress information with ad hominem appeals to consequences”, and, as in deep learning, “require it and let the network/​brain sort out how it’s produced” was in fact sufficient.

  If a moderator of the new school had been there at the time, perhaps they could have made a case that Vassar’s slapdown and ban threat might have caused me to leave instead, which would be purportedly bad because it would cause the community to lose a valuable future contributor.

  In reality, that wasn’t actually a risk. Yudkowsky’s writing was so good that Amanda Marcotte couldn’t compete for my loyalty. I wanted to be near the beacon. I wanted to be near the beacon so badly that I was not only willing to learn things, but willing to learn things even if the process of learning was emotionally uncomfortable.

  If your new culture isn’t even trying to teach emotionally uncomfortable things, then you can’t have an art of rationality in the tradition that advised people to try to think the thought that hurt the most.

  Where is that tradition today? It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Michael Vassar has been purged, too. ^[6] Upthread, you write that the new culture is trying to fix the problem that our kind can’t cooperate. Well, sure. That’s been a source of tension between us since at least 2019. The problem is that rather than inventing new and untried coordination mechanisms as if out of dath ilan, you seem to be using the same playbook that all groups on Earth use to consolidate their power: purge the most principled group members (who are willing to, e.g., enforce norms against appeals to consequences against ingroup members) precisely because they’re principled, and principled people aren’t team players.

  I’m sticking my neck out here on the Royal Society analogy, and doing it primarily on the strength of one historian. If it turns out that my understanding of that historian’s work is confused, or the work is discredited, so too my point

  I mean, it’s not as if Shapin doesn’t have critics, but I doubt the details are a crux.

  Another thing that confuses me about the Royal Society example is that it seems to argue more for banning me rather than Achmiz. The Royal Society (Shapin is telling me via you) wanted people to politely compare their results and not slap people with a glove saying, “You lie, sir.” Okay, but I’m the one who writes exhaustive 80,000-word memoirs slapping my enemies with a glove and calling them liars—and survives, somehow, while Achmiz is the one who asks “Examples?”—and gets purged for “weaponized obtuseness.” I’m actually a little confused about what’s going on here and you might be in a better position to explain it than me. Is it just that my high-effort style makes it look bad to purge me after I put so much work in, whereas Achmiz’s questions put the interpretive labor burden on the author?

  1. ↩︎

     He doesn’t use the literal word sportsmanship that you just introduced into the conversation, but he’s appealing to the same ethos when he writes that being asked for examples is “not destructive, but unambiguously constructive and beneficial”—analogously to how you shouldn’t resent your opponent in a sport trying their best rather than letting you win without having to try yourself.

  2. ↩︎

     I think “behavior” is a better term than “emotional orientation” for the desired quality here. I’m not necessarily expecting people to enjoy Achmiz-class criticism; I’m expecting people to either address it on the merits or ignore it and let the karma voters decide, and to never, ever complain to the moderators about it. (Although where behavior goes, emotional orientation may follow.)

  3. ↩︎

     But what I’m not conceding is important: if humans aren’t interested in the philosophical ideal, then from the standpoint of the philosophy, that’s a matter of human nature being bad rather than the ideal being wrong.

  4. ↩︎

     Let’s say that the period of middle Yudkowsky (as contrasted to early or late Yudkowsky) begins with 2005′s “Technical Explanation” and ends with 2012′s “Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners”. At the time of the latter, you complained that it was “troublesome” and “embarrassing” that Yudkowsky sullied an otherwise good technical introduction to Bayesian networks with a pummeling of one of his pet strawmen. In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the tragic decline that would continue through Yudkowsky’s late period to today.

  5. ↩︎

     Vassar would soon become President of what was then the Singularity Institute.

  6. ↩︎

     Notice “Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)” being voted up to 120 karma while the top comment at 105 karma and 85 agreement says “this post basically doesn’t make any sense.” This seems diagnostic of a culture that doesn’t care about whether accusations make any sense as long as they’re pointed at acceptable targets whom “everyone knows” are Bad.

• Zack_M_Davis 21 Jun 2026 19:14 UTC

  19 points

  7

  in reply to: Nicholas Kross’s comment on: Ni­cholasKross’s Shortform

  This makes no sense. Per Wikipedia, the Samson option is a “‘last resort’ against any country whose military has invaded and/​or destroyed much of Israel” (emphasis mine). It’s about deterring enemies (if you murder us, we’ll take you down with us), not nihilistically hurting third parties—especially not the U.S. (Israel’s patron) and diaspora Jews (however “notably culturally different”). “Consider evacuating from Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, or Cairo” would at least make sense.

• Zack_M_Davis 18 Jun 2026 23:10 UTC

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: Caleb Biddulph’s comment on: Con­tra Pace on When to Apologize

  In general I’m pretty skeptical of ideas to adopt “new and improved” social norms that are substantially different from what society has already landed on, especially for a norm as ancient and culturally universal as “apologizing.” If you think we should be doing something very different, I think you’re probably overlooking something!

  I don’t think I’m proposing “new and improved” social norms! I think I’m defending the commonsensical idea that I don’t want to apologize for costs imposed on others when I’m “not actually sorry” (i.e., when I stand by my actions despite the costs), because then people would (I think rightly) feel betrayed when I take similar actions again in the future. This is something I’ve believed for a long time (see November 2014 and December 2020 prior work linked in the post, or a February 2023 Less Wrong comment), not something I just made up in order to write a reply post.

• Zack_M_Davis 18 Jun 2026 16:50 UTC

  12 points

  0

  on: The Fi­nan­cial Ledger The­ory of Apologies

  Reply: “Contra Pace on When to Apologize”

• Zack_M_Davis 16 Jun 2026 16:04 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes, June ’26

  I think you should count this as a failure of your week’s goal. I understand that it is a 502-word blog post and therefore wouldn’t get you kicked out of Inkhaven, but the previous day’s installment said “challenge to publish a daily essay”, and a quote collection is not an essay.

• Zack_M_Davis 15 Jun 2026 0:38 UTC

  6 points

  2

  on: Im­pres­sions at the Ex­trem­ity of Civilization

  This piece is at its best when providing concrete detail about the nonobvious labor required to put on a conference: the shrub-tree breaking under the groundkeeper’s weight, the negotiations with the furniture and badge suppliers. At its worst, it devolves into empty ingroup loyalty-signaling that’s hard to excuse as an artifact of being written in a day: it’s easy to credit that rough prose would have been polished given more time to work on it, but a deficit of self-awareness seems unlikely to be remedied by mere time.

  The attribution of the alleged “dirty, poor, graffitied, smelly, closed-down, and ramshackle” quality of the area in south Berkeley to “Moloch” betrays a marked indifference to both the allusion’s source material and the facts.

  Regarding the former, “Meditations on Moloch” isn’t about everything bad in the world being the fault of “Moloch”. It’s specifically about coordination failures: things being contrary to the preferences of the relevant actors due to a lack of coordination away from a bad Nash equilibrium. I don’t doubt that the problems of urban decay could be analyzed in terms of coordination failures, but there’s nothing in the text that hints at any such analysis. As far as the reader can tell, the content of the allusion amounts to, “Moloch = bad stuff, Lightcone/​Lighthaven = good for resisting bad stuff.” Indeed, the distinguishing feature of coordination problems is that they can’t be solved by a lone actor being unusually good! The Moloch allusion would make sense if Lightcone Infrastructure had been active in local government to find collective solutions to urban decay that couldn’t be pursued unilaterally, but no such effort is mentioned in the text or exists to my knowledge.

  Regarding the latter, the evidence for urban decay in this south Berkeley neighborhood is questionable. I guess I can buy “graffitied” insofar as I do remember seeing a graffito on the wall of the building on the corner of Stuart and Telegraph. But “poor”? That neighborhood is more expensive than 97.2% of the U.S.! “Closed-down” would initially seem to be supported by, e.g., the former home of the Pacific Center for Human Growth near Telegraph and Derby appearing to be abandoned—but that’s because developers are planning to put a 50-unit appartment building there.

  The post descends into self-parody in the entry about conference attendees working for frontier AI companies despite having read ingroup authors. If you understand concepts like “adversarial debate” or “being well-read”, it should not be surprising that someone might have read your group’s literature and yet disagree with you about the ethics of working in one of the most productive sectors of the economy! This is sadly consistent with my read from previous experience that the author and his employer don’t really believe in debate and don’t really believe in being well-read. Robust, informed disagreement is defection against the ingroup.

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Jun 2026 17:33 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: or­thonor­mal’s Shortform

  How internally coordinated is the Trump administration? The fight with DoW leadership didn’t even stop the NSA (which sits under DoW) from using Mythos, and the new export control is coming from Commerce, not War. I assume Pete Hegseth can’t just call up Howard Lutinik and say, “Hey, can you slap an export restriction on Anthropic?” Maybe it doesn’t matter that much. (A shared narrative within the administration that Anthropic is Bad might be all the coordination needed for this action, but that theory could make different predictions about future actions.)

• Zack_M_Davis 12 Jun 2026 23:53 UTC

  LW: 10 AF: 3

  0

  AF

  on: Sym­pa­thy for both sides of the egre­gious mis­al­ign­ment debate

  I think “transformative AI could be slightly nice” arguments aren’t logically dependent on LLMs-as-AGI per se, even if belief in the two are correlated: ^[1] Christiano’s formulation (very roughly, that it’s not obvious why the evolutionary quirks leading to humans not being maximally ruthless couldn’t have ML analogues) doesn’t seem to depend on levels higher than “(D) systems centrally involving deep learning” in your plateau-ism taxonomy.

  1. ↩︎

     Where delusional optimism would be an obvious candidate for the source of the correlation.

• Zack_M_Davis 10 Jun 2026 5:53 UTC

  9 points

  0

  in reply to: Tim Hua’s comment on: Tim Hua’s Shortform

  It’s really impressive! I’m pretraining-famous enough that models as early as Opus 3 already had the basic idea of me (with hallucinated details), but I’m blown away by how much detail Fable 5 has correctly memorized. It names twenty-four of my posts by exact title, and correctly notes the year for most of them! It has a (correct) “hazy memory” of my Rust compiler contributions. It knows about my criticism of dath ilan’s secrecy obsession—I didn’t even publish that post yet! (I had merely mentioned it on Twitter.) It’s just wild.

• Zack_M_Davis 6 Jun 2026 6:58 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  re: credibility of claims to believe in local social norms about telling the truth about something

  I believe in such a norm, and am trying to practice it here.

  I don’t believe you. I think you have a self-deceptive belief in believing-in such a norm, but your behavior is not consistent with sincere belief in the stated norm.

  I’ve been acting in this conversation as though there’s a cost in person X’s attention to saying loudly “person X did bad thing Y,” and also as though there’s a cost to making it such that moderators expect huge amounts of such attention-costs if they take any moderator action. [...] It seems worth-it to me to cause those costs sometimes [...] I do less of it than I would if it were cost-less.

  I think you would see the problem here if we were talking about any other subject. Forget about awkward local social matters. Think about a sequence of random experiments with two possible outcomes—coinflips.

  What would it mean for someone to believe in a norm about telling the truth about the sequence of coinflips?

  I think it would mean: carefully recording the results of any coinflips they see, no matter whether they were Heads or Tails, and socially punishing people who lie about coinflip results or who selectively report conflip results without being clear about the selection criteria.

  The social punishment is necessary because if there are no consequences for breaking a norm, then there is no norm, so people who aren’t willing to punish norm violations don’t believe in the norm. The clause about selective reporting is necessary because we don’t want people to be able to disproportionately ignore Tails outcomes in order to make the coins look Heads-biased and claim that they weren’t “lying” because all of the flips they reported actually happened.

  Suppose the coin room supervisor Olivia says, “I would appreciate some courtesy to keep reporting of coinflips focused on Heads outcomes, because recording Tails outcomes increases the costs of coin room supervision.” Ian thinks this is a reasonable request and says he was already trying to follow it, without remembering Olivia had made it explicitly: it seems worth-it to him to incur the costs of reporting Tails outcomes sometimes, but he does less of it than he would if it were costless.

  In this scenario, I think it’s clear that Ian does not believe in a strong local norm about telling the truth about the sequence of coinflips. He just doesn’t! Someone who wanted to know the truth about the sequence of coinflips would want to know about the Tails results, and they won’t get that by taking Ian’s reports at face value. If Ian claims to believe in a norm about telling the truth about the sequence of coinflips, he is lying or self-deceiving and it makes sense to tell him, “You can’t possibly expect me to be that gullible.” Right?

  re: scope of purported mandates

  Many tasks work better when a single person or team is in charge of them for a decent chunk of time, and isn’t “micromanaged,” and acts on their all things considered best guess about what’s good (rather than being tasked with doing what their manager would want, say). I believe “make lesswrong.com good” is such a task.

  I buy the anti-micromanagement argument for tasks like “what database schema should the website use” or “how should the hotel be decorated.” You don’t want arbitrary other people in the vicinity of the organization to be able to second-guess the subject-matter expert making the decision when there’s no particular reason why the subject-matter expert might be serving their own goals contrary to those of the organization, and there’s no particular reason to think that the arbitrary other people would make a better decision.

  I don’t buy the anti-micromanagement argument for deciding to purge a long-standing community member from a space that’s ostensibly being managed for the community’s benefit, especially a public forum. (Hotels are supposed to be a coherent service and it makes sense for them to have a CEO who hires and fires employees to make the hotel good. The clash of ideas in public isn’t supposed to be coherent and there isn’t supposed to be a CEO.)

  Unlike the case of the hotel decor (where we expect the interior designer’s taste to be naturally aligned with what’s good for the hotel), it’s easy to imagine how the power to purge anyone who questions you might be misused. (I have some relevant illustrative evidence that I don’t think fits in this public comment; I’ll send you an email.)

  c) the website continuing, with Habryka and co still technically in this role, but with the user-base mostly thinking of them as random forces rather than as [stewards of a cool project that it’s worth them lending some believing-in to].

  Why isn’t this just the obvious common-sense default? I care about the practice of human rationality, but it’s not a religion with authority figures!

  It makes sense to have a website for students of human rationality to talk to each other. It makes sense for the people who take donations to run the website to use their best judgement on what database schema to use, and to take care of censoring the slushpile of LLM slop that no credible rationalist would miss.

  But when the people who run the website start deciding to use their ownership of the infrastructure to prevent my friends and collaborators from commenting on my blog posts in the same place where everyone else does, of course I’m going to regard that as random forces getting in the way of my interests, rather than something I should defer to! If I can’t find a better forum, I’m still willing to chip in to pay the server costs for the service that I use (much as I pay for Twitter), but no, of course I’m not going to lend any more believing-in than that to these people!

  re: object-level suggestions for how a reasonable person allegedly might find user-level bans insufficient

  I think the question “could a reasonable person find user-level bans insufficient for non-evil reasons?” is fairly central to our dispute [...] Does that seem right to you, Zack?

  Yes.

  I suspect a sizeable chunk of users have a goal like “don’t incur needless reputational damage for via failing to respond to confusing-to-others claims that I made errors I didn’t make (especially if the claim is loud, reads as confident and Sequences-fluent, calls me out by name, etc)”

  As an author, I deny that that’s a legitimate goal. I write things on the internet. Sometimes other people criticize my writing. I can’t prevent third parties from making Bayesian updates about me based on my response or lack of response to the criticism. An example of such a Bayesian update is, if I don’t reply, maybe some the third parties think, “Gee, Zack is probably really busy.” Another possible example of such an update might be, if I don’t reply, maybe some of the third parties think, “Gee, Zack probably doesn’t have an answer to this one.” Which one pertains depends on many details to be resolved in each of the third parties’ individual judgements.

  You seem to be telling me a “reasonable person” thinks I should be able to censor my critics in order to prevent third parties from thinking, “Zack probably doesn’t have an answer to this one.” As an author, I categorically deny that this is reasonable. I think that if reality puts me in a situation where someone is inclined to think “Gee, Zack probably doesn’t have an answer to this one”, the honorable and sane responses available to me are (a) let them think that about me, or (b) answer it.

  It’s true that (a) is a “cost” to my social goal of having everyone think well of me, but as a citizen in a free Society, I understand that the rest of Society does not have to reorganize itself to maximize my personal social goals. To think otherwise would be totalitarian and childish.

  re: comments on “Zetetic Explanation” and mechanisms for downvoting and user-bans not being sufficient

  I’d like to note that it would appear hypocritical for Hoffman to object to Achmiz’s infamous “Hmm” comment on “Zetetic Explanation” because, as I point out in footnote 10, Hoffman has used substantively the same rhetorical device in correspondence with me.

  One of the things Hoffman seemed particularly annoyed by was Achmiz’s failure to provide feedback on Ben Pace’s Ideological Turing Test attempt. Seems fine as grounds for a user ban, I guess: if you want a cultivated space where people know how to play the “ITT” and “interpretive labor” games, then I suppose it follows that you’d want to exclude people like Achmiz who are skeptical of the value of interpretive labor.

  I’m curious for your guess at the mechanism why “downvote and ignore” is insufficient

  Seems straightforward: downvote and ignore requires someone to do the downvoting, and it might generate discussion that the author doesn’t want on the page at all.

  and I’m curious whether the same mechanism indicates that user-level bans are also plausibly insufficient.

  The issue is property rights. Authors with their own websites have control over what appears on their sites, so it makes sense that LessWrong 2.0 wouldn’t want to offer much less control, so as not to disincentivize people from cross-posting to LessWrong 2.0.

  But control over your own posts is all you’d ever get on your own site. You don’t get to censor other people’s website, and there’s no reason you should get to censor other people’s Less Wrong posts.

• Zack_M_Davis 6 Jun 2026 6:47 UTC

  8 points

  −1

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Said Ach­miz’s Shortform

  It’s an unreasonable ask because it differentially advantages phonies over people who care about whether what they say is true or not. People who can support their claims, do so. They don’t need to whine that their interlocutors aren’t being curious enough.

  Goofusia says, “If is complex-differentiable at a point , then is complex-differentiable in an open neighborhood of .”

  Gallantina says, “False! Consider , which is differentiable only at the origin. Reply!”

  Goofusia says, “No, I won’t reply, because 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 refusal to be actively curious about the predictions, intuitions, life experiences, &c. that are motivating my statements. That is not an unreasonable or extremely costly ask or anything.”

  As Gallantina, what do you say here?

• Zack_M_Davis 4 Jun 2026 2:31 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  I think your “go down this rabbit hole where you’re not actually trying to talk about” story could potentially fit the improv game framework, actually? (Briefly: improv performers and people who don’t like adversarial debate try to “Yes, and” each other’s bids to steer the scene, rather than “blocking”, denying the other’s bid.)

  Say: I write about my research program which you think is fundamentally flawed. I’m interested in hearing about in-paradigm improvements on my ideas, but not interested in hearing that the whole research program is shot. You ask questions that you think I should be able to answer if my research program were good. I have trouble answering the questions, and get frustrated that you weren’t talking about what I wanted you to talk about. (I wanted you to build on my ideas, not try to destroy them! Whether the research program is good is a separate topic, not what I wanted to talk about!)

  Maybe there’s a case that you should have more clearly flagged that you were commenting in an “adversarial” role rather than a “cooperative” one with respect to my research program, so that I could have made the decision to ignore you earlier. But maybe I should stop trying to be so controlling of how other people interact with my ideas? (Maybe you could have been won over on the merits of the program if I had successfully answered your questions, and you couldn’t know until you asked.)

• Zack_M_Davis 4 Jun 2026 1:09 UTC

  3 points

  −3

  in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  talk of “hurt feelings” in this whole context is confused about some of the cases, because the feelings aren’t “you said mean things about me” but more like “I turned out to be frustrated with this thread, and even if I can’t explain exactly what’s happening I still think it was kinda adversarial and a regretted use of my time, which is an annoying situation and I just want to avoid this.”

  I think it’s pretty gullible to treat those different self-reports as representing relevantly different things in the territory. My theory is that the “kinda adversarial” thing that’s happening that the person “can’t explain exactly” is: disagreement unadulterated by social improv games—disagreement with someone who refuses to soften, hedge, or obfuscate their vision of reality in order to maintain a cooperative vibe of mutual respect. It’s annoying and people want to avoid it because it’s less socially rewarding than the improv game.

• Zack_M_Davis 3 Jun 2026 5:53 UTC

  −1 points

  −11

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  re: alleged local norms of telling the truth even on awkward social matters

  I predict that the mod team, if asked, would say they endorse this norm [for telling the truth even on awkward social matters]. That is, I predict that the mod team, if asked, would say something like “yes, Anna (or Bob or whoever), we do not have a request that you avoid public speech that might undermine our narratives about it being good to have banned Said or whatever; we rather have a view that it is prosocial for you to attempt to promote truth and clarity as you see it, including here.” We can check this by asking the mod team if you want.

  You can’t possibly expect me to be that gullible. You wouldn’t accept claims about what “strong local norms” hold at OpenAI by asking Sam Altman.

  Sure, if I accepted that as the adjudication criterion for the claim and we then asked the mods whether they affirm that we have a strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters, there’s a pretty good chance they’d say Yes.

  But if so, they would be wrong. As I pointed out in §VI.3, Oliver Habryka is already on the record saying that he “would appreciate some courtesy to keep discussion to the principles and decision-level instead of critiques of my personal behavior, as indeed much of the cost of moderation is measured in having any moderation-adjacent action be torn apart and be requested to be justified or defended.”

  Asking people to withhold “critiques of [a moderator’s] personal behavior” in their capacity as a moderator is not compatible with a “strong local norm for telling the truth even on awkward social matters”! It just isn’t! You can’t wiggle out of this one by claiming that it’s covered by “LW does not fully hit this aspirational norm.” The request is a denial of the aspiration!

  (For completeness, I should note that a footnote disclaims, “though of course in as much as something seems egregious, you and others should feel free to call it out”. I don’t think this changes anything. The only reason to make the request but provide an escape hatch for “egregious” bad behavior is to give a free pass for less-than-”egregious” bad behavior.)

  re: separating object-level from authority claims

  I don’t think a manager telling an employee “My opinion is X, but I want to emphasize that it’s your call” is analogous to the present situation.

  Suppose someone wrote an 18,000 word post with careful quotes and citations accusing CfAR employee Emily of abusing her pizza-purchase responsibilities for personal gain against the organization’s mission: Emily deliberately purchased too much of her own favorite kind of pizza, knowing that the workshop attendees wouldn’t eat that much, so that Emily could keep the leftovers. Would you begin your response with “I believe Emily has, and deserves, the mandate of heaven and I support her authority to decide what pizzas to buy”?

  I still think that would be weird! If I were President of CfAR in that scenario, I would not say that, even if I liked and trusted Emily and had no intention of firing or punishing her under any circumstances. (Quietly overriding her on the pizza-ordering task need not be a punishment, if Emily’s pay and status were to remain the same.) I would say something more like, “I trust Emily, and that doesn’t sound like something she would do.” I would then say either, “I expect this to be false upon investigation,” or “This is so implausible that I’m not even going to bother to investigate it.” I would not affirm Emily’s authority independently of the accusation being true!

  If my support for Emily were unconditional, it would be dishonest to claim that norms questions about the use of CfAR’s food budget are important. Yes requires the possibility of No: if there are no consequences for breaking norms, then there are no norms. The honest thing to say in that situation would be, “Why are you even telling me this? I don’t care what would be good for the workshop attendees or the organization’s mission; what matters is that Emily gets the pizza she wants.”

  re: causes of “unsustainable costs” from demon threads and mod team facilitation time

  I think a-c is hard to dispute. Do you dispute it?

  If I’m supposed to accept “reasons, born of experience, why they didn’t think this was sufficient for goals they had”, then it’s vacuous! I’m not going to deny the the tautology, “If the mods are always right, then the mods are always right.”

  If I’m allowed to doubt such reasons, I deny (b). As I suggested in July 2025, I think an obvious thing to try, that was not tried, would be to actively raise awareness and encourage use of the per-author user ban functionality. We have evidence that there was low-hanging awareness fruit in the form of, e.g., Romeostevensit’s comment on this post that he “didn’t know that was a feature”, and the Surprise react on my pointing out the existence of the feature in the first paragraph of §IV.1 by abstractapplic (who “voice[d] strong approval of the meta-level approaches on display” in the original ban annoucement).

  He is changing (“interfering with”) the LW user-base’s notions of which [posts, and claims in posts] are “in good standing” [...] a reasonable-person mod might disprefer this.

  By means of arguing about them! Changing the userbase’s notions of which posts are in good standing by means of arguing with them is what intellectual discourse is all about! Your “reasonable person” who disprefers this is not a “mod”; they’re a wannabe religious authority.

  Users might feel some (need/​desire/​obligation) to respond to top-level posts about their posts, and wish not to have to engage with top-level posts about their posts by Said, and so be discouraged from posting to LW

  So it’s not enough to let people censor criticism from the comment sections on own posts (which I’m supporting as a pragmatic solution to help people share the website), it’s not allowed to appear anywhere else on the website, either? Again, this amounts to a religious authority declaring Achmiz a heretic whom the faithful should ostracize. This is intellectually indefensible.

  I would guess that for Ben a user-level ban would have been sufficient

  So you concede that this is not relevant to my case that a site-wide ban was unjustified given the existence of user bans as a sufficient and less intrusive remedy as articulated in §IV.1.

• Zack_M_Davis 2 Jun 2026 21:16 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  doesn’t argue in good faith or seem to know what that means

  As I’ve pointed out before, your definition of “good faith” is nonstandard (albeit not entirely unmotivated).

  virtue of asking questions to get you to say exactly what you mean, I see as the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage with the author to try to understand them

  As an author, I expect to be able to answer questions aimed to get me to say exactly what I mean! Don’t you?

  I don’t always get around to answering questions, but I would never, ever disparage someone asking real questions about my work as engaging in an “the vice of refusing to meaningfully engage” with me. That just seems ungrateful: in a world of abundant information, the fact that someone is paying attention to my work at all is a precious gift; I’m not in a position to demand that they do it on my terms.

• Zack_M_Davis 2 Jun 2026 18:55 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Inactive)’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  Thanks for commenting! You raise some important points here that I should address.

  And also Zack and Said rail against this

  I think “rail against” is arguably true of Achmiz but not true of me. (I consider him a friend and I’ve put a lot of effort into defending his interest in using this website, but we’re different people who disagree on many things.)

  To clarify my views: while I agree with Achmiz’s argument that the ban feature enables authors to impose a tax on criticism, which is epistemically distortionary, I support the existence of the feature because it facilitates people with different preferred discussion norms being able to share the website. I sincerely believe it should have been possible to share the website. (See footnote 5 and §IV.1 in the post.)

  this is strong evidence that the person using it is wrong and fears them/​their arguments/​isn’t adequate to the task. Other hypotheses (such as “engaging with you is powerfully net negative and often produces no value at high cost”) seem not to be considered at all.

  I wouldn’t call it strong evidence, but it’s reasonable for third parties to be suspicious. The problem is that “This commenter is net-negative” is something someone could easily say if they were wrong and inadequate to the task, so an individual author saying it doesn’t produce a large likelihood ratio without additional evidence for why they in particular should be trusted. (I think we’d probably disagree about what would constitute such additional evidence.)

  It’s rather disingenuous of Zack to [...] blink innocently and say “well you can just [costlessly] ban people one-on-one? [Please ignore how we will try very hard to make this very costly.]”

  It would be bad for me to be disingenuous, so let me try to clarify. I think there’s an inherent conflict over setting the zero point when it comes to assessing social “costs.”

  As I said above, I’m in favor of the ban feature existing, because that helps different people share the website, and I strongly believe in sharing the website. It seems to me that the natural “zero point” is that everyone is free to use the ban feature to control their own posts, and everyone is free to criticize use of the ban feature on their own posts. That’s how it works on most websites. (You can block someone on Twitter, but you can’t stop someone from Tweeting that you shouldn’t have blocked them.)

  But the zero point that seems natural to me isn’t the only possible one. You could imagine trying to enforce that banning is “zero social cost”: not only does the ban feature exist, but banned users also aren’t allowed to talk on their own shortforms &c. about being banned. (Or possibly even on other websites? If someone Tweets about being banned, the Less Wrong mods could theoretically consider that actionable.)

  I’m not in favor of the zero-social-cost version (especially not the off-site version), because the epistemic distortion of that seems much worse than the mere existence of the ban feature: you’d be preventing criticism from appearing on the website (or the world, in the off-site version) at all, rather than just on some pages.

  Are you advocating for zero-social-cost version? (I don’t want to put words in your mouth.) If so, that’s our disagreement. If not, I’m not really sure what to make of your claim that I’m being disingenuous. Maybe you thought I was being deceptive by implicitly claiming that the ban feature is or should be socially costless (that no one should think less of you for using it), and it suffices that I’m clarifying here that I don’t think that?

• Zack_M_Davis 2 Jun 2026 17:57 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: frontier64’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  also mostly pointless

  I believe in seeking death with dignity.

• Zack_M_Davis 1 Jun 2026 7:14 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  Honoring the spirit of Said, what evidence do you have for this claim?

  Um, subjectively he just seems socially sharper in private emails than public comments. (Honoring the spirit of Said, I should note that my subjective perception of private correspondence is worthless as public evidence, but that’s my answer.) This is the part where his persecutors say, “A-ha, so you admit we were right about the weaponized obtuseness!” And that’s the part where I say, “Okay, but ‘weaponized obtuseness’ is just your pathologization of ordinary politeness, and you people obviously don’t want to hear the rude version.”

• Zack_M_Davis 1 Jun 2026 6:32 UTC

  5 points

  −1

  in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Com­ment on “Ban­ning Said Ach­miz”

  Thanks! I like the thing ChatGPT says about, “Zack has already accepted some censorship for SNR, so the live question is threshold-setting.” I tend to want to argue about principles, but maybe saying something about empirical threshold-setting would make some progress. We agree that, in principle, there is such a thing as bad or marginal criticism. (You could totally prompt an LLM to come up with the most trivial and unimportant nitpicks to post en masse, and that would definitely merit a ban.)

  But in this case, look, as I mentioned in §II.3, Said has been compiling a collection of his best comments. I think that if you read it, it’s just very obviously good stuff by the usual standards that rationalists use to evaluate our stuff. I think as a 9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author, my judgement of that means something, and former MIRI employee Jessica Taylor agrees (“Said is far above average at” “specific criticisms, including philosophical criticisms”). And you’re telling me with a straight face that this guy is a broken stair, below the empirical threshold? On the intellectual merits? I just—really have trouble taking that seriously. As I argue in §IV.3, I think this is actually about covering for ingroup members’ feelings and reputations and not about the intellectual merits.