Definitely makes sense to put clearer guidance on how to use various mod powers as an author.

There's an issue where people people might treat them differently. 

Part of my model here, which probably wouldn't make sense as part of the mod-guidance, is that Wei Dai has been around awhile and has a good track record of generally thoughtful contribution. Also, he's like one of ~20 people who probably will be able to meaningfully contribute to (some of) the topics I think you want to talk about. So, I think it would have made more sense to put more effort into back-and-forth in that case.

(I want to preface this all with "I don't think the thing Wei Dai did was particularly bad, I'm getting into the details here because there are nuances that I do think should ultimately part of a good truthseeking culture, although I think given Wei Dai's previous track record Tsvi should ideally have put more effort into talking things through before banning and ideally found another solution. Right now authors don't have a tool for issuing like a 1-day-cooloff sorta ban, which I think would have been more appropriate.")

Object level, I mostly agree with Richard Ngo's comment. But, where Richard says:

The phrase "Also, another part of my motivation is still valid and I think it would be interesting to try to answer" is a clear enough acknowledgement of a distinct line of inquiry that I no longer consider that comment to be a continuation of the "charge of the hobby-horse".

I think that line diminishes the hobby-horse-charging-ness, but, doesn't resolve it (I'm not sure I'd count it as even cutting the hobby-horse-ness by 50%). Like, Wei Dai says:

Ok, it looks like part of my motivation for going down this line of thought was based on a misunderstanding. But to be fair, in this post after you asked...

I think it's generally a good yellow-flag-to-notice yourself saying "okay, yeah, I was wrong about that, but, to be fair" and then launch into a continued argument, having only briefly acknowledged the misunderstanding. It doesn't look like you really "took the update". When I find myself doing this sort of thing, I am usually look back and feel a bit embarrassed, realizing I really hadn't thought about the implications of being-mistaken-about-the-first-part. The "to be fair" part is not actually as fair as you think.

I think Tsvi was fairly reasonably interpreting your comment as "I am going to continue all the momentum I had from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-disagreement and funnel into into more conversation that won't really be a separate conversation from the earlier misunderstanding-fueled-bit."

The sort of thing I'd have wanted to see, if I were Tsvi, is... not even an apology like Richard suggested, but more demonstration of explicitly re-looking over the past conversation in light of realizing it was misunderstanding-fueled, and re-evaluate it in light of that, before continuing on to the next thing.

Nod. Fwiw I notice myself also getting downvoted. I think conversations like this have a lot of random downvoting and voting-tug-of-war that's mostly about a few people with strong opinions.

This thread has reminded me that there's IMO something lacking about how our voting system handles arguments (where it's easy for a couple people to make the whole experience feel bad and anxiety inducing which punishes any individual thought). I'm not sure what to do instead but it feels like the status quo isn't great.

Yeah I agree it's much more pro-social to give more warning and opportunity for back-and-forth. 

I also think there are ways of banning that are anti-social. But, I think people's expectations about how costly moderation is and how valuable it is are out-of-whack enough that I generally am focused on advocating the zero-point set to "moderating at all is almost always pro-social, and moderating well is even more pro-social." 

I think it is true that authors should learn to suck up a bit of "okay, moderating well kinda sucks but it is worth taking-one-for-the-team to do it well." But, also, commenters should suck it up a bit about cutting moderators and authors some slack about it. Partly because it's hard in general, and partly because doing it well requires getting practice at it.

As I said earlier, I would see the situation differently if Tsvi hadn't made this followup post and unbanned you, at least long enough to hash out the disagreement more. I agree that the initial bit was more abrupt than I'd want people to emulate as best practice. I think following it up the next day with a detailed post explaining the problem as he saw it, unbanning, and including himself as an example is one of the better-practices one could hope for. 

I would hope, in the future, Tsvi is a bit more chill about it and doesn't do it as knee-jerkily.

This was pretty cool to read (and, I'm doing a bit of mental transfer of "and the point here is that like like everythin else, motorsport has a surprising amount of detail, and, gaining skills has a surprising amount of detail.

Curated. I think it's long been a problem that LessWrong doesn't have great models on how to handle adversarial situations. I've been wanting Habryka to write up their thoughts on this for awhile.

I think this post is more like re-establishing some existing concepts that have already been in the water supply (as opposed to adding something new), but it does a good job introducing them in a way that sets up the problem, with a kind of practical mindset. It does a good job motivating why you'd want a more fleshed out model for thinking about this, and, I think a decent job at conveying some default options people have in today's world, and why those options aren't sufficient.

I was glad to see some comments discussing "how would we build a formal epistemology, that explicitly incorporates adversarial action? What's the current state of the art, and what are the obstacles to moving forward with that?"

I think the penultimate paragraph "Do not be the kind of actor that forces other people to be paranoid" is very important. I maybe wish it got a bit more signposting. I'm guessing/hoping there will be future posts digging more into it. I think for this essay, it'd be nice if that part had a section header that at least made that final takeaway stand out a bit more.

"Having both the motivation and the mental stamina to work 60-hour weeks reliably." Actually this probably would be "hard" rather than "impossible". There are things I can try here that I haven't tried that might work, so I have not yet tried enough things to declare it impossible. It's more like I anticipate the possibility of this being impossible, as opposed to actually considering it impossible. Not a good example

Well since the point of this is that sometimes you can do impossible things, and the point is to notice the anticipation of impossibility and dig more into it, I'm still interested: what goes wrong if you tried to do this? What's impossible and/or hard about it?

For a couple of those (whichever ones you most actually want), what exactly is impossible about it? Say you just were going to set this as your goal and get started, where do you run into the thing that is "impossible" rather than merely "hard."

I guess what I meant was "I think my beliefs about #2 are fairly derivable from what I or Oli or Ben said in the past, and I can't remember whether I, Oli or Ben already answered this specific question, and didn't feel obligated to do all the work of checking myself."

But, I don't know if that was exactly fair either, I went ahead and answered the question for now.

I guess a tl;dr is I don't think Tsvi's approach here was perfect, and sometimes ban-first is bad. (it depends. all else equal it's better for people to put more work into moderating well. But, things are usually not equal and moderating is extremely expensive). 

But, the part where he unbanned you a day later, and wrote up a post that included Tsvi himself as an example of a bad pattern he'd like to address, makes me feel like this particular case is overall reasonable. If he hadn't done that, I'd probably be talking privately with Tsvi about it and trying to find something better.

but in my case I simply have little to no motivation for talking with Tsvi at this point

Note that, in the original case, Tsvi had little-to-no-motivation for talking to you (presumably, since he banned you). I don't think you exactly mean this, but this comes across to me as something like "when I do something that results in an author no longer wanting to talk to me, he should suck it up and keep talking to me. But, when they do something that leads me to no longer wanting to talk to them, that's on them."

Presumably you see the cases as being importantly different. That might be, but, I'm not automatically granting that assumption.