What would be your honest probability assessment that a religious person reads this and actually goes that route

Sorry, phrasing it in terms of "someone focused on harm"/"a potential convert being warned" might have been bad writing on my part, because what matters is the logical structure of the claim, not whether some particular target audience will be persuaded.

Suppose I were to say, "Drug addiction is bad because it destroys the addict's physical health and ability to function in Society." I like that sentence and think it is true. But the reason it's a good sentence isn't because I'm a consequentialist agent whose only goal is to minimize drug addiction, and I've computed that that's the optimal sentence to persuade people to not take drugs. I'm not, and it isn't. (An addict isn't going to magically summon the will to quit as a result of reading that sentence, and someone considering taking drugs has already heard it and might feel offended.) Rather, it's a good sentence because it clearly explains why I think drug addiction is bad, and it would be dishonest to try to persuade some particular target audience with a line of reasoning other than the one that persuades me.

Deliberately inserting unhelpful vibes into your comment is like uploading a post with formatting that you know will break the editor and then being like "well the editor only breaks because this part here is poorly programmed, if it were programmed better then it would do fine". In any other context this would-pattern match to obviously foolish behavior. ("I don't look before crossing the sidewalk because cars should stop.")

I don't think those are good metaphors, because the function of a markup language or traffic laws is very different from the function of blog comments. We want documents to conform to the spec of the markup language so that our browsers know how to render them. We want cars and pedestrians to follow the traffic law in order to avoid dangerous accidents. In these cases, coordination is paramount: we want everyone to follow the same right-of-way convention, rather than just going into the road whenever they individually feel like it.

In contrast, if everyone writes the blog comment they individually feel like writing, that seems good, because then everyone gets to read what everyone else individually felt like writing, rather than having to read something else, which would probably be less informative. We don't need to coordinate the vibes. (We probably do want to coordinate the language; it would be confusing if you wrote your comments in English, but I wrote all my replies in French.)

the thing that was actually causally upstream of the details in Said's message [...] was that he thinks religion is dumb and bad, which influenced a parameter sent to the language-generation module that output the message, which made it choose language that sounded more harsh. [...] The vibe isn't an accidental by-product

Right, exactly. He thinks religion is dumb and bad, and he wrote a comment that expresses what he thinks, which ends up having harsh vibes. If the comment were edited to make the vibes less harsh, then it would be less clear exactly how dumb and bad the author thinks religion is. But it would be bad to make comments less clearly express the author's thoughts, because the function of a comment is to express the author's thoughts.

whatever you want to improve, more awareness of what's actually going going to be good

Absolutely. For example, if everyone around me is obfuscating their actual thoughts because they're trying to coordinate vibes, that distortion is definitely something I want to be tracking.

to just give a sense of my actual views on this, the whole thing just seems ridiculously backwards

The feeling is mutual?!

Thanks, that was better than most language-softening attempts I see, but ...

These two messages convey exactly the same information

Similar information, but not "exactly" the same information. Deleting the "very harmful false things" parenthetical omits the claim that the falsehoods promulgated by organized religion are very harmful. (That's significant because someone focused on harm rather than epistemics might be okay with picking up harmless false beliefs, but not very harmful false beliefs.) Changing "very quickly you descend" to "you can descend" alters the speed and certainty with which religious converts are claimed to descend into nebulous and vague anti-epistemology. (That's significant, because a potential convert being warned that they could descend into anti-epistemology might think, "Well, I'll be extra careful not to do that, then," whereas a warning that one very quickly will descend is less casually brushed off.)

That's what I meant by "obfuscation" in the grandparent: the softer vibes of no-assertion-of-harmfulness versus "very harmful false things", and of "can descend" versus "very quickly descend", stem from the altered meanings, not just from adjusting the vibes while keeping the meanings constant.

And I know you know this difference because you navigate it in your own writing, which is why I'm somewhat irritated that you're talking as if Said's comments were just innocently minimalistic/direct.

It's not that I don't know the difference; it's that I think the difference is semantically significant. If I more often use softer vibes in my comments than Said, I think that's probably because I'm a less judgemental person than him, as an enduring personality trait. That is, we write differently because we think differently. I don't think website moderators should require commenters to convincingly pretend to have different personalities than they actually have. That seems like it could be really bad.

Could one have written a comment that achieves the same things but has better vibes? In my opinion, [absolutely]! I could easily write such a comment! (If that's a crux, I'm happy to do it.)

I don't think you can. The reason why the comment in question has aggressive vibes is because it's clearly stating things that Worley predictably won't want to hear. The way you write something that includes the same denotative claims with softer vibes is by means of obfuscation: adding a lot of puffy hedging veribage that makes it easier for a distracted or conflict-averse reader to skim over the comment's literal words without noticing what a rebuke is intended. The obfuscated version only achieves the same things in the minds of sufficiently savvy readers who can reverse the vibe-softening distortion and infer the original intent.

I don't quite see how any of this relates to the topic at hand,

It relates to the topic because it's one piece of anecdotal evidence about the empirical results of your messaging strategy (much as the post mentions a number of other pieces of anecdotal evidence): negative polarization is a possible outcome, not just support or lack-of-support.

perhaps my tendency to talk with a tone of confidence was misinterpreted as a status game

Um, yes, confidence and status are related. You're familiar with emotive conjugation, right? "I talk with a tone of confidence; he sounds dogmatic; you play status games."

Thanks for this interesting comment!—and for your patience. I really appreciate it.

one point I want to make is that being nice/considerate/coddling does not actually require you to lie, at all

I absolutely agree with that statement; the problem is that I think not-lying turns out to be a surprisingly low standard in practice. Politicians and used car salesmen are very skilled at achieving their desired changes on people's beliefs and behavior without lying, by listing a bunch of true positive-vibe facts about the car and directing attention away from the algorithm they're using to decide what not to say—or what evidence not to look for, prior to even saying anything.

The most valuable part of the Sequences was the articulation of a higher standard than merely not-lying—not just that the words you say are true, but that they're the output of a search process that would have returned a different answer if reality were different. That's why a key thing I aspire to do with my writing is to reveal (a cleaned-up refinement of) my thought process, not just the conclusion I ended up at. On the occasions when I'm trying to sell my readers a car, I want them to know that, so that they know that they need to read other authors to learn about reasons to not buy the car (which I haven't bothered to come up with). The question to be asking is not, "Is this lying?—if not, it's permissible", but, "Is this maximally clear?—if not, maybe I can do better."

All this to say that I'm averse to overtly optimizing the vibes to be more persuasive, because I don't want to persuade people by means of the vibes. That doesn't count! The goal is to articulate reasoning that gets the right answer for the right reasons, not to compute actions to cause people to agree with what I currently think is the right answer.

But you know all that already. I think you're trying to advocate not so much for making the vibes persuasive, but for making sure the vibes aren't themselves anti-persuasive in a way that prevents people from looking at the reasoning. I think I'm in favor of this! That's why I'm so obsessed with telling abstract parables with "timeless" vibes—talk about bleggs and rubes, talk about the Blue and Green teams, talk about Python programs that accept each other's outputs as inputs—talk about anything but real-world object-level disputes that motivate seeking recourse in philosophy, which would be distracting. (I should mention that this technique has the potential failure mode of obfuscating object-level details that are genuinely relevant, but I'm much less worried about that mattering in practice than some of my critics.)

But that kind of "avoid unnecessarily anti-persuasive vibes" just doesn't seem to be what's at issue in these repeated moderation blow-ups?

Commenters pointed out errors in my most recent post. They weren't overtly insulting; they just said that my claim was wrong because this-and-such. I tried to fix it, but still didn't get it right. (Embarrassing!) I didn't take it personally. (The commenters are right and my post as written is wrong.) I think there's something pathological about a standard that would have blamed the commenters for not being nice enough if I had taken it personally, because if I were the type to take it personally, them being nicer wouldn't have helped.

Crucially, I don't think this is this a result of me having genetically rare superhuman rationality powers. I think my behavior was pretty normal for the subject matter: you see, it happened to be a post about mathematics, and the culture of mathematics is good at training people to not take it personally when someone says "Your example doesn't work because this-and-such." If I'm unusually skilled at this among users of this website, I think that speaks more to this website being a garbage dump rather than me being great. (I think I want to write a top-level post about this aspect of math culture.)

Using derogatory language for my position ("coddling")

Sneaky! (I'm embarrassed that I didn't pick up on this being a deliberate conciliatory tactic until you flagged it.)

Now I have. (Sorry, apparently I got confused while trying to make parallel updates to the original and this mirrorpost; they're not using the same source file due to differences between platform markup engines.)

Thanks for commenting—and for your patience. I've corrected the k/N slip-up, deleted the misleading clause about "a function not having any 'jumps' impl[ying] that it can't have an 'infinitely steep' slope", and thanked you at the bottom.

Thanks for commenting—and for your patience. I've changed the domain to be an arbitrary closed interval and credited you at the bottom.

The cognitive tactics go both ways.

Team Said has an incentive to play dumb about the fact that comments from our team captain often feature judgemental and derisive subtext. It makes sense for Habryka to point that out. (And I'm not going to deny it after it's been pointed out, gross.)

But at the same time, Team Hugbox Censorship Cult has an incentive to misrepresent the specifics of the judgement and derision: "called people stupid and evil" is a more compelling pretext for censorship (if you can trick stakeholders into believing it) than "used a contemptuous tone while criticizing people for evading criticism."

And the additional words and superlatives do exactly one thing, they communicate that derision.

Yes—the words communicate what Achmiz actually means: not just the fact that people often have a sensitive relationship to criticism, but that he judges them negatively for it.

Is that a banned opinion? Is "I think less of people who have a sensitive relationship to criticism" not something that Less Wrong commenters are allowed to think?