I'm an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.
I was also concerned about this when the idea first came up, and think it good & natural that you brought it up.
My concerns were assuaged after I noticed I would be similarly happy to promote a broad class of things by excellent bloggers around these parts that would include:
Like, one of the reasons I'm really excited about this book is the quality of the writing, because Nate & Eliezer are some of the best historical blogging contributors around these parts. I've read a chunk of the book and I think it's really well-written and explains a lot of things very well, and that's something that would excite me and many readers of LessWrong regardless of topic (e.g. if Eliezer were releasing Inadequate Equilibria or Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 as a book, I would be excited to get the word out about it in this way).
Another relevant factor to consider here is that a key goal with the book is mass-market success in a way that none of the other books I listed are, and so I think it's going to be more likely that they make this ask. I think it would be somewhat unfortunate if this was the only content that got this sort of promotion, but I hope that this helps others promote to attention that we're actually up for this for good bloggers/writer, and means we do more of it in the future.
(Added: I view this as similar to the ads that Scott put on the sidebar of SlateStarCodex, which always felt pretty fun & culturally aligned to me.)
Apologies in advance for extreme slowness of replies; I am currently rate-limited such that I can only post one comment per day, on the whole site
No apology necessary! I am grateful for the slowdown in rate of replies, I am becoming busier again. But thanks for flagging.
Plenty of authors are “willing to engage” with “critics”—as long as the “critics” are the sort that take as an axiom that the author’s work is valuable, important, and interesting, and that the author himself is intelligent, well-intentioned, well-informed, and sane; and as long as their “criticism” is of the sort that says “how very fascinating your ideas are; I would love to learn more about your thinking, but I have not yet grasped your thesis in its fullness, and am confused; might you deign to enlighten me?” (in other words, “here’s a prompt for you to tell us more about your amazing ideas”). (You might call this “intellectual discussion as improv session”—where, as in any improv, the only allowed replies are “yes, and…”.)
It is challenging and unpleasant to be in an interaction with someone who is exuding disgust and contempt for you, and it's not a major weakness in people that they disprefer conversations like that.
A good thing to do in such situations is to do post-level responses rather than comment-level replies. I've seen many post-level back-and-forths where people disrespect the other person's opinions (e.g. Scott Alexander / Robin Hanson on healthcare, Scott Alexander / Current Affairs on whether republicans are literal monsters, Scott Alexander / Tyler Cowen on multiple topics, etc). This gives people more space for slower replies and to take time to put in the effort to consider the points the other person is making with more space to get over immediate emotional responses and digging-in-one's-heels.
It also makes sense to save your limited energies for those critics only if they meet a slightly higher bar of worthiness of engaging with. Not all critics are born equal. Just because someone has shown up to criticize you doesn't make their criticism good or worth engaging with.
I want to push back on any notion that all people should be able to engage with all critics with ease regardless of time/energy and as though disgust/contempt was magically not a factor. I think it's important to be able to engage with quality critics, but it's reasonable to want a certain level of distance from people who act with contempt and disgust toward you (flavors of both I regularly read into your comments).
(To clarify, I am not defending the position you gave in the quote above, about everyone having interesting things to say and conversations requiring "yes-and". I think that is probably a position that, were you to move in the direction of, would push against the contempt/disgust that I suspect many users feel from you, but I am just defending that the contempt/disgust is unpleasant to interface with, not that one is supposed to respect other people's opinions. I regularly have little respect for people's opinions on this site, and say so!)
Well… I hate to criticize when someone’s saying good things about me, but… frankly, I think that you shouldn’t’ve done that (vote on a comment without reading what it’s responding to, that is). I certainly disapprove of it.
Just noting briefly that I've gone back and read the whole post; I stand by the agree-react on your comment, and think I was correct in my assumption that his post did not provide a strong counterargument to the point you made at the top of your comment.
True! What's relevant about the current setup is that banned users can post anywhere else on the site equally well after they're banned from a particular author (e.g. quick takes, posts, open thread) whereas previously there was nowhere for the author to post in a way that would reliably not have the unpleasant-to-them-user able to post in reply.
I note that Janus was a MATS mentor for at least one iteration, whereas I do not believe that nostalgebraist has been.
I think any explanation here must be compared to the null hypothesis that most people do not sustain blogging for 10 years. My guess is that most Twitter accounts that are popular these days were not big 10 years ago, nor most reddit accounts, and a similar thing is true of LessWrong accounts. Longevity in blogging like Cowen or Alexander is not the norm, most people change life circumstances and it no longer is one of their top hobbies.
For the record, I had not read that instance of banning, and it is only just at this late point (e.g. after basically the whole thread has wrapped) did I read that thread and realize that this whole thread was downstream of that. All my comments and points so far were not written with that instance in mind but on general principle.
(And if you're thinking "Surely you would've spoken to Habryka at work about this thread?" my response is "I was not at work! I am currently on vacation." Yes, I have chosen to — and enjoyed! — spending my vacation arguing the basic principles of moderation, criticism, and gardening.)
Initial impressions re: that thread:
This is something I currently want to accommodate but not encourage people to use moderation tools for, but maybe I'm wrong. How can I get a better sense of what's going on with this kind of incompatibility? Why do you think "definitely not due to criticism but to conflict"?
I mean I've mostly gotten a better sense of it by running lots of institutions and events and had tons of complaints bubble up. I know it's not just because of criticism because (a) I know from first-principles that conflicts exist for reasons other than criticism of someone's blogposts, and (b) I've seen a bunch of these incompatibilities. Things like "bad romantic breakup" or "was dishonorable in a business setting" or "severe communication style mismatch", amongst other things.
You say you're not interested in using "moderation tools" for this. What do you have in mind for how to deal with this, other than tools for minimizing interaction between two people?
Like maybe allow people to vote on commenters instead of just comments, and then their comments get a default karma based on their commenter karma (or rather the direct commenter-level karma would contribute to the default karma, in addition to their total karma which currently determines the default karma).
It's a good idea, and maybe we should do it, but I think doesn't really address the thing of unique / idiosyncratic incompatibilities. Also it would be quite socially punishing for someone to know that they're publicly labelled net negative as a commenter, rather than simply that their individual comments so-far have been considered poor contributions, and making a system this individually harsh is a cost to be weighed, and it might make it overall push away high-quality contributors more than it helps.
I'm worried about less "substantial" criticisms that are unlikely to get their own posts, like just pointing out a relatively obvious mistake in the OP, or lack of clarity, or failure to address some important counterargument.
This seems then that making it so that a short list of users are not welcome to comment on a single person's post is much less likely to cause these things to be missed. The more basic mistakes can be noticed by a lot of people. If it's a mistake that only one person can notice due to their rare expertise or unique perspective, I think they can get a lot of karma by making it a whole quick take or post.
Like, just to check, are we discussing a potential bad future world if this feature gets massively more use? Like, right now there are a ton of very disagreeable and harsh critics on LessWrong and there's very few absolute bans. I'd guess absolute bans being on the order of 30-100 author-commenter pairs over the ~7 years we've had this, and weekly logged-in users being ~4,000 these days. The effect size so far has been really quite tiny. My guess is that it could probably increase like 10x and still not be a very noticeable friction for criticism on LessWrong for basically all good commenters.
FWIW I do aspire to things discussed in Sarah Constantin's Neutrality essay. For instance, I want it to be true that regardless of whether your position is popular or unpopular, your arguments will be evaluated on their merits on LessWrong. (This can never be perfectly true but I do think it is the case that in comments people primarily respond to arguments with counterarguments rather than with comments about popularity or status and so on, which is not the case in almost any other part of the public internet.)