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Raemon
*Moderator Comment395
Pinned by Raemon

Preliminary Verdict (but not "operationalization" of verdict)

tl;dr – @Duncan_Sabien and @Said Achmiz each can write up to two more comments on this post discussing what they think of this verdict, but are otherwise on a temporary ban from the site until they have negotiated with the mod team and settled on either:

  • credibly commit to changing their behavior in a fairly significant way,
  • or, accept some kind of tech solution that limits their engagement in some reliable way that doesn't depend on their continued behavior.
  • or, be banned from commenting on other people’s posts (but still allowed to make new top level posts and shortforms)

(After the two comments they can continue to PM the LW team, although we'll have some limit on how much time we're going to spend negotiating)

Some background:

Said and Duncan are both among the two single-most complained about users since LW2.0 started (probably both in top 5, possibly literally top 2). They also both have many good qualities I'd be sad to see go. 

The LessWrong team has spent hundreds of person hours thinking about how to moderate them over the years, and while I think a lot of that was worthwhile (from a perspective of "we learned new useful things about site governance") there's a limit to how much it's worth moderating or mediating conflict re: two particular users.

So, something pretty significant needs to change.

A thing that sticks out in both the case of Said and Duncan is that they a) are both fairly law abiding (i.e. when the mods have asked them for concrete things, they adhere to our rules, and clearly suppor rule-of-law and the general principle of Well Kept Gardens), but b) both have a very strong principled sense of what a “good” LessWrong would look like and are optimizing pretty hard for that within whatever constraints we give them. 

I think our default rules are chosen to be something that someone might trip accidentally, if you’re trying to mostly be good stereotypical citizen but occasionally end up having a bad day. Said and Duncan are both trying pretty hard to be good citizen in another country that the LessWrong team is consciously not trying to be. It’s hard to build good rules/guidelines that actually robustly deal with that kind of optimization.

I still don’t really know what to do, but I want to flag that the the goal I'll be aiming for here is "make it such that Said and Duncan either have actively (credibly) agreed to stop optimizing in a fairly deep way, or, are somehow limited by site tech such that they can't do the cluster of things they want to do that feels damaging to me." 

If neither of those strategies turn out to be tractable, banning is on the table (even though I think both of them contribute a lot in various ways and I'd be pretty sad to resort to that option). I have some hope tech-based solutions can work

(This is not a claim about which of them is more valuable overall, or better/worse/right-or-wrong-in-this-particular-conflict. There's enough history with both of them being above-a-threshold-of-worrisome that it seems like the LW team should just actually resolve the deep underlying issues, regardless of who's more legitimately aggrieved this particular week)

Re: Said:

One of the most common complaints I've gotten about LessWrong, from both new users as well as established, generally highly regarded users, is "too many nitpicky comments that feel like they're missing the point". I think LessWrong is less fragile than it was in 2018 when I last argued extensively with Said about this, but I think it's still an important/valid complaint.

Said seems to actively prefer a world where the people who are annoyed by him go away, and thinks it’d be fine if this meant LessWrong had radically fewer posts. I think he’s misunderstanding something about how intellectual progress actually works, and about how valuable his comments actually are. (As I said previously, I tend to think Said’s first couple comments are worthwhile. The thing that feels actually bad is getting into a protracted discussion, on a particular (albeit fuzzy) cluster of topics)

We've had extensive conversations with Said about changing his approach here. He seems pretty committed to not changing his approach. So, if he's sticking around, I think we'd need some kind of tech solution. The outcome I want here is that in practice Said doesn't bother people who don't want to be bothered. This could involve solutions somewhat specific-to-Said, or (maybe) be a sitewide rule that works out to stop a broader class of annoying behavior. (I'm skeptical the latter will turn out to work without being net-negative, capturing too many false positives, but seems worth thinking about)

Here are a couple ideas:

  1. Easily-triggered-rate-limiting. I could imagine an admin feature that literally just lets Said comment a few times on a post, but if he gets significantly downvoted, gives him a wordcount-based rate-limit that forces him to wrap up his current points quickly and then call it a day. I expect fine-tuning this to actually work the way I imagine in my head is a fair amount of work but not that much. 
  2. Proactive warning. If a post author has downvoted Said comments on their post multiple times, they get some kind of UI alert saying "Yo, FYI, admins have flagged this user as somewhat with a pattern of commenting that a lot of authors have found net-negative. You may want to take that into account when deciding how much to engage".

There's some cluster of ideas surrounding how authors are informed/encouraged to use the banning options. It sounds like the entire topic of "authors can ban users" is worth revisiting so my first impulse is to avoid investing in it further until we've had some more top-level discussion about the feature.

Why is it worth this effort?

You might ask "Ray, if you think Said is such a problem user, why bother investing this effort instead of just banning him?". Here are some areas I think Said contributes in a way that seem important:

  • Various ops/dev work maintaining sites like readthesequences.com, greaterwrong.com, and gwern.com. (edit: as Ben Pace notes, this is pretty significant, and I agree with his note that "Said is the person independent of MIRI (including Vaniver) and Lightcone who contributes the most counterfactual bits to the sequences and LW still being alive in the world")
  • Most of his comments are in fact just pretty reasonable and good in a straightforward way.
  • While I don't get much value out of protracted conversations about it, I do think there's something valuable about Said being very resistant to getting swept up in fad ideas. Sometimes the emperor in fact really does have no clothes. Sometimes the emperor has clothes, but you really haven't spelled out your assumptions very well and are confused about how to operationalize your idea. I do think this is pretty important and would prefer Said to somehow "only do the good version of this", but seems fine to accept it as a package-deal.

Re: Duncan

I've spent years trying to hash out "what exactly is the subtle but deep/huge difference between Duncan's moderation preferences and the LW teams." I have found each round of that exchange valuable, but typically it didn't turn out that whatever-we-thought-was-the-crux was a particularly Big Crux.

I think I care about each of the things Duncan is worried about (i.e. such as things listed in Basics of Rationalist Discourse). But I tend to think the way Duncan goes about trying to enforce such things extremely costly.

Here's this month/year's stab at it: Duncan cares particularly about things strawmans/mischaracterizations/outright-lies getting corrected quickly (i.e. within ~24 hours). See Concentration of Force for his writeup on at least one-set-of-reasons this matters). I think there is value in correcting them or telling people to "knock it off" quickly. But, 

a) moderation time is limited
b) even in the world where we massively invest in moderation... the thing Duncan cares most about moderating quickly just doesn't seem like it should necessarily be at the top of the priority queue to me? 

I was surprised and updated on You Don't Exist, Duncan getting as heavily upvoted as it did, so I think it's plausible that this is all a bigger deal than I currently think it is. (that post goes into one set of reasons that getting mischaracterized hurts). And there are some other reasons this might be important (that have to do with mischaracterizations taking off and becoming the de-facto accepted narrative). 

I do expect most of our best authors to agree with Duncan that these things matter, and generally want the site to be moderated more heavily somehow. But I haven't actually seen anyone but Duncan argue they should be prioritized nearly as heavily as he wants. (i.e. rather than something you just mostly take-in-stride, downvote and then try to ignore, focusing on other things)

I think most high-contributing users agree the site should be moderated more (see the significant upvotes on LW Team is adjusting moderation policy), but don't necessarily agree on how. It'd be cruxy for me if more high-contributing-users actively supported the sort of moderation regime Duncan-in-particular seems to want.

I don't know that really captured the main thing here. I feel less resolved on what should change on LessWrong re: Duncan. But I (and other LW site moderators), want to be clear that while strawmanning is bad and you shouldn’t do it, we don’t expect to intervene on most individual cases. I recommend strong downvoting, and leaving one comment stating the thing seems false. 

I continue to think it's fine for Duncan to moderate his own posts however he wants (although as noted previously I think an exception should be made for posts that are actively pushing sitewide moderation norms)

Some goals I'd have are:

  • people on LessWrong feel safe that they aren't likely to get into sudden, protracted conflict with Duncan that persists outside his own posts. 
  • the LessWrong team and Duncan are on-the-same-page about LW team not being willing to allocate dozens of hours of attention at a moments notice in the specific ways Duncan wants. I don't think it's accurate to say "there's no lifeguard on duty", but I think it's quite accurate to say that the lifeguard on duty isn't planning to prioritize the things Duncan wants, so, Duncan should basically participate on LessWrong as if there is, in effect "no lifeguard" from his perspective. I'm spending ~40 hours this week processing this situation with a goal of basically not having to do that again.
  • In the past Duncan took down all his LW posts when LW seemed to be actively hurting him. I've asked him about this in the past year, and (I think?) he said he was confident that he wouldn't. One thing I'd want going forward is a more public comment that, if he's going to keep posting on LessWrong, he's not going to do that again. (I don't mind him taking down 1-2 problem posts that led to really frustrating commenting experiences for him, but if he were likely to take all the posts down that undercuts much of the value of having him here contributing)

FWIW I do think it's moderately likely that the LW team writes a post taking many concepts from Basics of Rationalist Discourse and integrating it into our overall moderation policy. (It's maybe doable for Duncan to rewrite the parts that some people object to, and to enable commenting on those posts by everyone. but I think it's kinda reasonable for people to feel uncomfortable with Duncan setting the framing, and it's worth the LW team having a dedicated "our frame on what the site norms are" anyway)

In general I think Duncan has written a lot of great posts – many of his posts have been highly ranked in the LessWrong review. I expect him to continue to provide a lot of value to the LessWrong ecosystem one way or another.

I'll note that while I have talked to Duncan for dozens(?) of hours trying to hash out various deep issues and not met much success, I haven't really tried negotiating with him specifically about how he relates to LessWrong. I am fairly hopeful we can work something out here. 

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8jimmy
Yes, and that's why I described the attitude as "dysfunctionally dissonant" (emphasis in original). It's not a good way of challenging the instructors, and not the way I recommend behaving. What I'm talking about is how a healthy gym environment is robust to this sort of dysfunctional dissonance, and how to productively relate to unskilled dissonance by practicing skillfully enough yourself that the system's combined dysfunction never becomes supercritical and instead decays towards productive cooperation. That's certainly one possibility. But isn't it also conceivable though that I simply see underlying dynamics (and lack thereof) which you don't see, and which justify the confidence level I display? It certainly makes sense to track the hypothesis that I am overconfident here, but ironically it strikes me as overconfident to be asserting that I am being overconfident without first checking things like "Can I pass his ITT"/"Can I point to a flaw in his argument that makes him stutter if not change his mind"/etc. To be clear, my view here is based on years of thinking about this kind of problem and practicing my proposed solutions with success, including in a literal martial arts gym for the last eight years. Perhaps I should have written more about these things on LW so my confidence doesn't appear to come out of nowhere, but I do believe I am able to justify what I'm saying very well and won't hesitate to do so if anyone wants further explanation or sees something which doesn't seem to fit. And hey, if it turns out I'm wrong about how well supported my perspective is, I promise not to be a poor sport about it. In absence of an object level counterargument, this is textbook ad hominem. I won't argue that there isn't a place for that (or that it's impossible that my reasoning is flawed), but I think it's hard to argue that it isn't premature here. As a general rule, anyone that disagrees with anyone can come up with a million accusations of this sort, and it is
8philh
I think my feeling here is: * Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great. * But it's not clear how important that mistake is to his comment. I expect people were mostly reacting to paragraphs 2 and 3, and you could cut paragraph 1 out and they'd stand by themselves. * Do the more-interesting parts of the comment implicitly rely on the projection/unjustified-claim? Also not clear to me. I do think the comment is overstated. ("The way to jam"?) But e.g. "the problem isn’t so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty" seems... well, I'd say this is overstated too, but I do think it's pointing at something that seems valuable to keep in mind even if we accept that the gym is functional. * So I don't think it's unreasonable that the parent got significantly upvoted, though I didn't upvote it myself; and I don't think it's unreasonable that your correction didn't, since it looks correct to me but like it's not responding to the main point. * Maybe you think paragraphs 2 and 3 were relying more on the projection than it currently seems to me? In that case you actually are responding to what-I-see-as the main point. But if so I'd need it spelled out in more detail.
jimmy
-1-7
  • Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great.

FWIW, that is a claim I'm fully willing and able to justify. It's hard to disclaim all the possible misinterpretations in a brief comment (e.g. "deeply" != "very"), but I do stand by a pretty strong interpretation of what I said as being true, justifiable, important, and relevant.
 

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See in context
by Raemon
2 min read
560

50

Update: Ruby and I have posted moderator notices for Duncan and Said in this thread. This was a set of fairly difficult moderation calls on established users and it seems good for the LessWrong userbase to have the opportunity to evaluate it and respond. I'm stickying this post for a day-or-so.

 

Recently there's been a series of posts and comment back-and-forth between Said Achmiz and Duncan Sabien, which escalated enough that it seemed like site moderators should weigh in.

For context, a quick recap of recent relevant events as I'm aware of them are. (I'm glossing over many details that are relevant but getting everything exactly right is tricky)

  1. Duncan posts Basics of Rationalist Discourse. Said writes some comments in response. 
  2. Zack posts "Rationalist Discourse" Is Like "Physicist Motors", which Duncan and Said argue some more and Duncan eventually says "goodbye" which I assume coincides with banning Said from commenting further on Duncan's posts. 
  3. I publish LW Team is adjusting moderation policy. Lionhearted suggests "Basics of Rationalist Discourse" as a standard the site should uphold. Paraphrasing here, Said objects to a post being set as the site standards if not all non-banned users can discuss it. More discussion ensues.
  4. Duncan publishes Killing Socrates, a post about a general pattern of LW commenting that alludes to Said but doesn't reference him by name. Commenters other than Duncan do bring up Said by name, and the discussion gets into "is Said net positive/negative for LessWrong?" in a discussion section where Said can't comment.
  5. @gjm publishes On "aiming for convergence on truth", which further discusses/argues a principle from Basics of Rationalist Discourse that Said objected to. Duncan and Said argue further in the comments. I think it's a fair gloss to say "Said makes some comments about what Duncan did, which Duncan says are false enough that he'd describe Said as intentionally lying about them. Said objects to this characterization" (although exactly how to characterize this exchange is maybe a crux of discussion)

LessWrong moderators got together for ~2 hours to discuss this overall situation, and how to think about it both as an object-level dispute and in terms of some high level "how do the culture/rules/moderation of LessWrong work?". 

I think we ended up with fairly similar takes, but, getting to the point that we all agree 100% on what happened and what to do next seemed like a longer project, and we each had subtly different frames about the situation. So, some of us (at least Vaniver and I, maybe others) are going to start by posting some top level comments here. People can weigh in the discussion. I'm not 100% sure what happens after that, but we'll reflect on the discussion and decide on whether to take any high-level mod actions.

If you want to weigh in, I encourage you to take your time even if there's a lot of discussion going on. If you notice yourself in a rapid back and forth that feels like it's escalating, take at least a 10 minute break and ask yourself what you're actually trying to accomplish. 

I do note: the moderation team will be making an ultimate call on whether to take any mod actions based on our judgment. (I'll be the primary owner of the decision, although I expect if there's significant disagreement among the mod team we'll talk through it a lot). We'll take into account arguments various people post, but we aren't trying to reflect the wisdom of crowds. 

So if you may want to focus on engaging with our cruxes rather than what other random people in the comments think.

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Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
39Raemon
26Raemon
75Vaniver
10Said Achmiz
4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
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8DirectedEvolution
11Said Achmiz
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[-]Raemon
*Moderator Comment395
Pinned by Raemon

Preliminary Verdict (but not "operationalization" of verdict)

tl;dr – @Duncan_Sabien and @Said Achmiz each can write up to two more comments on this post discussing what they think of this verdict, but are otherwise on a temporary ban from the site until they have negotiated with the mod team and settled on either:

  • credibly commit to changing their behavior in a fairly significant way,
  • or, accept some kind of tech solution that limits their engagement in some reliable way that doesn't depend on their continued behavior.
  • or, be banned from commenting on other people’s posts (but still allowed to make new top level posts and shortforms)

(After the two comments they can continue to PM the LW team, although we'll have some limit on how much time we're going to spend negotiating)

Some background:

Said and Duncan are both among the two single-most complained about users since LW2.0 started (probably both in top 5, possibly literally top 2). They also both have many good qualities I'd be sad to see go. 

The LessWrong team has spent hundreds of person hours thinking about how to moderate them over the years, and while I think a lot of that was worthwhile (from a perspective of "we learned new... (read more)

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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
297

I generally agree with the above and expect to be fine with most of the specific versions of any of the three bulleted solutions that I can actually imagine being implemented.

I note re:

It'd be cruxy for me if more high-contributing-users actively supported the sort of moderation regime Duncan-in-particular seems to want.

... that (in line with the thesis of my most recent post) I strongly predict that a decent chunk of the high-contributing users who LW has already lost would've been less likely to leave and would be more likely to return with marginal movement in that direction.

I don't know how best to operationalize this, but if anyone on the mod team feels like reaching out to e.g. ~ten past heavy-hitters that LW actively misses, to ask them something like "how would you have felt if we had moved 25% in this direction," I suspect that the trend would be clear. But the LW of today seems to me to be one in which the evaporative cooling has already gone through a couple of rounds, and thus I expect the LW of today to be more "what? No, we're well-adapted to the current environment; we're the ones who've been filtered for."

(If someone on the team does this, and e.g. 5 out of 8 people the LW team misses respond in the other direction, I will in fact take that seriously, and update.)

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5Raemon
Nod. I want to clarify, the diff I'm asking about and being skeptical about is "assuming, holding constant, that LessWrong generally tightens moderation standards along many dimensions, but doesn't especially prioritize the cluster of areas around 'strawmanning being considered especially bad' and 'making unfounded statements about a person's inner state'" i.e. the LessWrong team is gearing up to invest a lot more in moderation one way or another. I expect you to be glad that happened, but still frequently feel in pain on the site and feel a need to take some kind of action regarding it. So, the poll I'd want is something like "given overall more mod investment, are people still especially concerned about the issues I associate with Duncan-in-particular". I agree some manner of poll in this space would be good, if we could implement it.
6DaystarEld
FWIW, I don't avoid posting because of worries of criticism or nitpicking at all. I can't recall a moment that's ever happened. But I do avoid posting once in a while, and avoid commenting, because I don't always have enough confidence that, if things start to move in an unproductive way, there will be any *resolution* to that. If I'd been on Lesswrong a lot 10 years ago, this wouldn't stop me much. I used to be very... well, not happy exactly, but willing, to spend hours fighting the good fight and highlighting all the ways people are being bullies or engaging in bad argument norms or polluting the epistemic commons or using performative Dark Arts and so on. But moderators of various sites (not LW) have often failed to be able to adjudicate such situations to my satisfaction, and over time I just felt like it wasn't worth the effort in most cases. From what I've observed, LW mod team is far better than most sites at this. But when I imagine a nearer-to-perfect-world, it does include a lot more "heavy handed" moderation in the form of someone outside of an argument being willing and able to judge and highlight whether someone is failing in some essential way to be a productive conversation partner. I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be, mechanically, given realistic time and energy constraints. Maybe a special "Flag a moderator" button that has a limited amount of uses per month (increased by account karma?) that calls in a mod to read over the thread and adjudicate? Maybe even that would be too onerous, but *shrugs* There's probably a scale at which it is valuable for most people while still being insufficient for someone like Duncan. Maybe the amount decreases each time you're ruled against. Overall I don't want to overpromise something like "if LW has a stronger concentration of force expectation for good conversation norms I'd participate 100x more instead of just reading." But 10x more to begin with, certainly, and maybe more than that over t
4Vaniver
This is similar to the idea for the Sunshine Regiment from the early days of LW 2.0, where the hope was that if we have a wide team of people who were sometimes called on to do mod-ish actions (like explaining what's bad about a comment, or how it could have been worded, or linking to the relevant part of The Sequences, or so on), we could get much more of it. (It both would be a counterspell to bystander effect (when someone specific gets assigned a comment to respond to), a license to respond at all (because otherwise who are you to complain about this comment?), a counterfactual matching incentive to do it (if you do the work you're assigned, you also fractionally encourage everyone else in your role to do the work they're assigned), and a scheme to lighten the load (as there might be more mods than things to moderate).) It ended up running into the problem that, actually there weren't all that many people suited to and interested in doing moderator work, and so there was the small team of people who would do it (which wasn't large enough to reliably feel on top of things instead of needing to prioritize to avoid scarcity). I also don't think there's enough uniformity of opinion among moderators or high-karma-users or w/e that having a single judge evaluate whole situations will actually resolve them. (My guess is that if I got assigned to this case Duncan would have wanted to appeal, and if RobertM got assigned to this case Said would have wanted to appeal, as you can see from the comments they wrote in response. This is even tho I think RobertM and I agree on the object-level points and only disagree on interpretations and overall judgments of relevance!) I feel more optimistic about something like "a poll" of a jury drawn from some limited pool, where some situations go 10-0, others 7-3, some 5-5; this of course 10xs the costs compared to a single judge. (And open-access polls both have the benefit and drawback of volunteer labor.)
3DaystarEld
All good points, and yeah I did consider the issue of "appeals" but considered "accept the judgement you get" part of the implicit (or even explicit if necessary) agreeement made when raising that flag in the first place. Maybe it would require both people to mutually accept it. But I'm glad the "pool of people" variation was tried, even if it wasn’t sustainable as volunteer work.
2Ruby
  I'm not sure that's true? I was asked at the time to be Sunshine mod, I said yes, and then no one ever followed up to assign me any work. At some point later I was given an explanation, but I don't remember it.
4Vladimir_Nesov
You mean it's considered a reasonable thing to aspire to, and just hasn't reached the top of the list of priorities? This would be hair-raisingly alarming if true.
2Raemon
I'm not sure I parse this. I'd say yes, it's a reasonable thing to aspire to and hasn't reached the top of (the moderator/admins) priorities. You say "that would be alarming", and infer... something? I think you might be missing some background context on how much I think Duncan cares about this, and what I mean by not prioritizing it to the degree he does? (I'm about to make some guesses about Duncan. I expect to re-enable his commenting within a day or so and he can correct me if I'm wrong) I think Duncan thinks "Rationalist Discourse" Is Like "Physicist Motors" strawmans his position, and still gets mostly upvoted and if he wasn't going out of his way to make this obvious, people wouldn't notice. And when he does argue that this is happening, his comment doesn't get upvoted much-at-all. You might just say "well, Duncan is wrong about whether this is strawmanning". I think it is [edit for clarity: somehow] strawmanning, but Zack's post still has some useful frames and it's reasonable for it to be fairly upvoted. I think if I were to try say "knock it off, here's a warning" the way I think Duncan wants me to, this would a) just be more time consuming than mods have the bandwidth for (we don't do that sort of move in general, not just for this class of post), b) disincentivize literal-Zack and new marginal Zack-like people from posting, and, I think the amount of strawmanning here is just not bad enough to be worth that. (see this comment)
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
1817

It's a bad thing to institute policies when missing good proxies. Doesn't matter if the intended objective is good, a policy that isn't feasible to sanely execute makes things worse.

Whether statements about someone's inner state are "unfounded" or whether something is a "strawman" is hopelessly muddled in practice, only open-ended discussion has a hope of resolving that. Not a policy that damages that potential discussion. And when a particular case is genuinely controversial, only open-ended discussion establishes common knowledge of that fact.

But even if moderators did have oracular powers of knowing that something is unfounded or a strawman, why should they get involved in consideration of factual questions? Should we litigate p(doom) next? This is just obviously out of scope, I don't see a principled difference. People should be allowed to be wrong, that's the only way to notice being right based on observation of arguments (as opposed to by thinking on your own).

(So I think it's not just good proxies needed to execute a policy that are missing in this case, but the objective is also bad. It's bad on both levels, hence "hair-raisingly alarming".)

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2Raemon
I'm actually still kind of confused about what you're saying here (and in particular whether you think the current moderator policy of "don't get involved most of the time" is correct)
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
*2218

You implied and then confirmed that you consider a policy for a certain objective an aspiration, I argued that policies I can imagine that target that objective would be impossible to execute, making things worse in collateral damage. And that separately the objective seems bad (moderating factual claims).

(In the above two comments, I'm not saying anything about current moderator policy. I ignored the aside in your comment on current moderator policy, since it didn't seem relevant to what I was saying. I like keeping my asides firmly decoupled/decontextualized, even as I'm not averse to re-injecting the context into their discussion. But I won't necessarily find that interesting or have things to say on.)

So this is not meant as subtle code for something about the current issues. Turning to those, note that both Zack and Said are gesturing at some of the moderators' arguments getting precariously close to appeals to moderate factual claims. Or that escalation in moderation is being called for in response to unwillingness to agree with moderators on mostly factual questions (a matter of integrity) or to implicitly take into account some piece of alleged knowledge. This seems related ... (read more)

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9Raemon
Okay, gotcha, I had not understood that. (Vaniver's comment elsethread had also cleared this up for me I just hadn't gotten around to replying to it yet) One thing about "not close to the top of our list of priorities" means is that I haven't actually thought that much about the issue in general. On the issue of "do LessWrong moderators think they should respond to strawmanning?" (or various other fallacies), my guess (thinking about it for like 5 minutes recently), I'd say something like: I don't think it makes sense for moderators to have a "policy against strawmanning", in the sense that we take some kind of moderator action against it. But, a thing I think we might want to do is "when we notice someone strawmanning, make a comment saying 'hey, this seems like strawmanning to me?'" (which we aren't treating as special mod comment with special authority, more like just proactively being a good conversation participant). And, if we had a lot more resources, we might try to do something like "proactively noticing and responding to various fallacious arguments at scale."
3Raemon
(FYI @Vladimir_Nesov I'm curious if this sort of thing still feels 'hair raisingly alarming' to you)
2Raemon
(Note that I see this issue as fairly different from the issue with Said, where the problem is not any one given comment or behavior, but an aggregate pattern)
8Zack_M_Davis
Why do you think it's strawmanning, though? What, specifically, do you think I got wrong? This seems like a question you should be able to answer! As I've explained, I think that strawmanning accusations should be accompanied by an explanation of how the text that the critic published materially misrepresents the text that the original author published. In a later comment, I gave two examples illustrating what I thought the relevant evidentiary standard looks like. If I had a more Said-like commenting style, I would stop there, but as a faithful adherent of the church of arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor, I'm willing to do your work for you. When I imagine being a lawyer hired to argue that "'Rationalist Discourse' Is Like 'Physicist Motors'" engages in strawmanning, and trying to point to which specific parts of the post constitute a misrepresentation, the two best candidates I come up with are (a) the part where the author claims that "if someone did [speak of 'physicist motors'], you might quietly begin to doubt how much they really knew about physics", and (b) the part where the author characterizes Bensinger's "defeasible default" of "role-playing being on the same side as the people who disagree with you" as being what members of other intellectual communities would call "concern trolling." However, I argue that both examples (a) and (b) fail to meet the relevant standard, of the text that the critic published materially misrepresenting the text that the original author published. In the case of (a), while the most obvious reading of the text might be characterized as rude or insulting insofar as it suggests that readers should quietly begin to doubt Bensinger's knowledge of rationality, insulting an author is not the same thing as materially misrepresenting the text that the author published. In the case of (b), "concern-trolling" is pejorative term; it's certainly true that Bensinger would not self-identify as engaging in concern-trolling.
6Raemon
I meant the primary point of my previous comment to be "Duncan's accusation in that thread is below the threshold of 'deserves moderator response' (i.e. Duncan wishes the LessWrong moderators would intervene on things like that on his behalf [edit: reliably and promptly], and I don't plan to do that, because I don't think it's that big a deal. (I edited the previous comment to say "kinda" strawmanning, to clarify the emphasis more) My point here was just explaining to Vladimir why I don't find it alarming that the LW team doesn't prioritize strawmanning the way Duncan wants (I'm still somewhat confused about what Vlad meant with his question though and am honestly not sure what this conversation thread is about)
3Vaniver
I see Vlad as saying "that it's even on your priority list, given that it seems impossible to actually enforce, is worrying" not "it is worrying that it is low instead of high on your priority list."
2Ruby
I think it plausibly is a big deal and mechanisms that identify and point out when people are doing this (and really, I think a lot of the time it might just be misunderstanding) would be very valuable. I don't think moderators showing up and making and judgment and proclamation is the right answer. I'm more interested in making it so people reading the thread can provide the feedback, e.g. via Reacts. 
4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Just noting that "What specifically did it get wrong?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and is one I would have (in most cases) been willing to answer, patiently and at length. That I was unwilling in that specific case is an artifact of the history of Zack being quick to aggressively misunderstand that specific essay, in ways that I considered excessively rude (and which Zack has also publicly retracted). Given that public retraction, I'm considering going back and in fact answering the "what specifically" question, as I normally would have at the time. If I end up not doing so, it will be more because of opportunity costs than anything else. (I do have an answer; it's just a question of whether it's worth taking the time to write it out months later.)
3ambigram
I'm very confused, how do you tell if someone is genuinely misunderstanding or deliberately misunderstanding a post? The author can say that a reader's post is an inaccurate representation of the author's ideas, but how can the author possibly read the reader's mind and conclude that the reader is doing it on purpose? Isn't that a claim that requires exceptional evidence? Accusing someone of strawmanning is hurtful if false, and it shuts down conversations because it pre-emptively casts the reader in an adverserial role. Judging people based on their intent is also dangerous, because it is near-unknowable, which means that judgments are more likely to be influenced by factors other than truth. It won't matter how well-meaning you are because that is difficult to prove; what matters is how well-meaning other people believe you to be, which is more susceptible to biases (e.g. people who are richer, more powerful, more attractive get more leeway). I personally would very much rather people being judged by their concrete actions or impact of those actions (e.g. saying someone consistently rephrases arguments in ways that do not match the author's intent or the majority of readers' understanding), rather than their intent (e.g. saying someone is strawmanning). To be against both strawmanning (with weak evidence) and 'making unfounded statements about a person's inner state' seems to me like a self-contradictory and inconsistent stance.
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
2622

I think Said and Duncan are clearly channeling this conflict, but the confict is not about them, and doesn't originate with them. So by having them go away or stop channeling the conflict, you leave it unresolved and without its most accomplished voices, shattering the possibility of resolving it in the foreseeable future. The hush-hush strategy of dealing with troubling observations, fixing symptoms instead of researching the underlying issues, however onerous that is proving to be.

(This announcement is also rather hush-hush, it's not a post and so I've only just discovered it, 5 days later. This leaves it with less scrutiny that I think transparency of such an important step requires.)

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2Raemon
It's an update to me that you hadn't seen it (I figured since you had replied to a bunch of other comments you were tracking the thread, and more generally figured that since there's 360 comments on this thing it wasn't suffering from lack-fo-scrutiny). But, plausible that we should pin it for a day when we make our next set of announcement comments (which are probably coming sometime this weekend, fwiw)
5Vladimir_Nesov
I meant this thread specifically, with the action announcement, not the post. The thread was started 4 days after the post, so everyone who wasn't tracking the post had every opportunity to miss it. (It shouldn't matter for the point about scrutiny that I in particular might've been expected to not miss it.)
[-]Davidmanheim
2512

Just want to note that I'm less happy with a lesswrong without Duncan. I very much value Duncan's pushback against what I see as a slow decline in quality, and so I would prefer him to stay and continue doing what he's doing. The fact that he's being complained about makes sense, but is mostly a function of him doing something valuable. I have had a few times where I have been slapped down by Duncan, albeit in comments on his Facebook page, where it's much clearer that his norms are operative, and I've been annoyed, but each of those times, despite being frustrated, I have found that I'm being pushed in the right direction and corrected for something I'm doing wrong.

I agree that it's bad that his comments are often overly confrontational, but there's no way to deliver constructive feedback that doesn't involve a degree of confrontation, and I don't see many others pushing to raise the sanity waterline. In a world where a dozen people were fighting the good fight, I'd be happy to ask him to take a break. But this isn't that world, and it seems much better to actively promote a norm of people saying they don't have energy or time to engage than telling Duncan (and maybe / hopefully others) not to push back when they see thinking and comments which are bad. 
 

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[-]JBlack
2418

Is there any evidence that either Duncan or Said are actually detrimental to the site in general, or is it mostly in their interactions directly with each other? As far as I can see, 99% of the drama here is in their conflicts directly with each other and heavy moderation team involvement in it.

From my point of view (as an interested reader and commenter), this latest drama appears to have started partly due to site moderation essentially forcing them into direct conflict with each other via a proposal to adopt norms based on Duncan's post while Said and others were and continue to be banned from commenting on it.

From this point of view, I don't see what either of Said or Duncan have done to justify any sort of ban, temporary or not.

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[-]Raemon
112

This decision is based on mostly on past patterns with both of them, over the course of ~6 years.

The recent conflict, in isolation, is something where I'd kinda look sternly at them and kinda judge them (and maybe a couple others) for getting themselves into a demon thread*, where each decision might look locally reasonable but nonetheless it escalates into a weird proliferating discussion that is (at best) a huge attention sink and (at worst) gets people into an increasingly antagonistic fight that brings out people's worse instincts. If I spent a long time analyzing I might come to more clarity about who was more at fault, but I think the most I might do for this one instance is ban one or both of them for like a week or so and tell them to knock it off.

The motivation here is from a larger history. (I've summarized one chunk of that history from Said here, and expect to go into both a bit more detail about Said and a bit more about Duncan in some other comments soon, although I think I describe the broad strokes in the top-level-comment here)

And notably, my preference is for this not to result in a ban. I'm hoping we can work something out. The thing I'm laying down in this comment is "we do have to actually work something out."

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[-]Vaniver
236

The thing that feels actually bad is getting into a protracted discussion, on a particular (albeit fuzzy) cluster of topics

I think I want to reiterate my position that I would be sad about Said not being able to discuss Circling (which I think is one of the topics in that fuzzy cluster). I would still like to have a written explanation of Circling (for LW) that is intelligible to Said, and him being able to point out which bits are unintelligible and not feel required to pretend that they are intelligible seems like a necessary component of that.

With regards to Said's 'general pattern', I think there's a dynamic around socially recognized gnosis where sometimes people will say "sorry, my inability/unwillingness to explain this to you is your problem" and have the commons on their side or not, and I would be surprised to see LW take the position that authors decide for that themselves. Alternatively, tech that somehow makes this more discoverable and obvious--like polls or reacts or w/e--does seem good.

I think productive conversations stem from there being some (but not too much) diversity in what gnosis people are willing to recognize, and in the ability for subspaces to have smaller conversations that require participants to recognize some gnosis.

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[-]Zack_M_Davis
12-8

I condemn the restrictions on Said Achmiz's speech in the strongest possible terms. I will likely have more to say soon, but I think the outcome will be better if I take some time to choose my words carefully.

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4the gears to ascension
his speech is not being restricted in variety, it's being ratelimited. the difference there is enormous.
[-]Zack_M_Davis
127

Did we read the same verdict? The verdict says that the end of the ban is conditional on the users in question "credibly commit[ting] to changing their behavior in a fairly significant way", "accept[ing] some kind of tech solution that limits their engagement in some reliable way that doesn't depend on their continued behavior", or "be[ing] banned from commenting on other people's posts".

The first is a restriction on variety of speech. (I don't see what other kind of behavioral change the mods would insist on—or even could insist on, given the textual nature of an online forum where everything we do here is speech.) The third is a restriction of venue, which I claim predictably results in a restriction of variety. (Being forced to relegate your points into a shortform or your own post, won't result in the same kind of conversation as being able to participate in ordinary comment threads.) I suppose the "tech solution" of the second could be mere rate-limiting, but the "doesn't depend on their continued behavior" clause makes me think something more onerous is intended.

(The grandparent only mentions Achmiz because I particularly value his contributions, and because I think many people would prefer that I don't comment on the other case, but I'm deeply suspicious of censorship in general, for reasons that I will likely explain in a future post.)

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[-]Raemon
*1610

The tech solution I'm currently expecting is rate-limiting. Factoring in the costs of development time and finickiness, I'm leaning towards either "3 comments per post" or "3 comments per post per day". (My ideal world, for Said, is something like "3 comments per post to start, but, if nothing controversial happens and he's not ruining the vibe, he gets to comment more without limit." But that's fairly difficult to operationalize and a lot of dev-time for a custom-feature limiting one or two particular-users).

I do have a high level goal of "users who want to have the sorts of conversations that actually depend on a different culture/vibe than Said-and-some-others-explicitly-want are able to do so". The question here is "do you want the 'real work' of developing new rationality techniques to happen on LessWrong, or someplace else where Said/etc can't bother you and?" (which is what's mostly currently happening). 

So, yeah the concrete outcome here is Said not getting to comment everywhere he wants, but he's already not getting to do that, because the relevant content + associated usage-building happens off lesswrong, and then he finds himself in a world where everyone is "sudden... (read more)

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[-]Zack_M_Davis
10-4

a high level goal of "users who want to have the sorts of conversations that actually depend on a different culture/vibe than Said-and-some-others-explicitly-want are able to do so".

We already have a user-level personal ban feature! (Said doesn't like it, but he can't do anything about it.) Why isn't the solution here just, "Users who don't want to receive comments from Said ban him from their own posts"? How is that not sufficient? Why would you spend more dev time than you need to, in order to achieve your stated goal? This seems like a question you should be able to answer.

the concrete outcome here is Said not getting to comment everywhere he wants, but he's already not getting to do that, because the relevant content + associated usage-building happens off lesswrong

This is trivially false as stated. (Maybe you meant to say something else, but I fear that despite my general eagerness to do upfront interpretive labor, I'm unlikely to guess it; you'll have to clarify.) It's true that relevant content and associated usage-building happens off Less Wrong. It is not true that this prevents Said from commenting everywhere he wants (except where already banned from posts by indi... (read more)

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8philh
Stipulating that votes on this comment are more than negligibly informative on this question... it seems bizarre to count karma rather than agreement votes (currently 51 agreement from 37 votes). But also anyone who downvoted (or disagreed) here is someone who you're counting as not being taken into account, which seems exactly backwards.
5Raemon
Some other random notes (probably not maximally cruxy for you but 1. If Said seemed corrigible about actually integrating the spirit-of-our-models into his commenting style (such as proactively avoiding threads that benefit from a more open/curiosity/interpretative mode, without needing to wait for an author or mod to ban him from that post), then I'd be much more happy to just leave that as a high-level request from the mod team rather than an explicit code-based limitation. But we've had tons of conversations with Said asking him to adjust his behavior, and he seems pretty committed to sticking to his current behavior. At best he seems grudgingly willing to avoid some threads if there are clear-cut rules we can spell out, but I don't trust him to actually tell the difference in many edge cases. We've spent a hundred+ person hours over the years thinking about how to limit Said's damage, have a lot of other priorities on our plate. I consider it a priority to resolve this in a way that won't continue to eat up more of our time.  2. I did list "actually just encourage people to use the ban tool more" is an option. (DirectedEvolution didn't even know it was an option until pointed out to him recently). If you actually want to advocate for that over a Said-specific-rate-limit, I'm open to that (my model of you thinks that's worse). (Note, I and I think several other people on the mod team would have banned him from my comment sections if I didn't feel an obligation as a mod/site-admin to have a more open comment section) 3. I will probably build something that let's people Opt Into More Said. I think it's fairly likely the mod team will probably generally do some more heavier handed moderation in the nearish future, and I think a reasonable countermeasure to build, to alleviate some downsides of this, is to also give authors a "let this user comment unfettered on my posts, even though the mod teams have generally restricted them in some way." (I don't expect th
7Vaniver
I am a little worried that this is a generalization that doesn't line up with actual evidence on the ground, and instead is caused by some sort of vibe spiral. (I'm reluctant to suggest a lengthy evidence review, both because of the costs and because I'm somewhat uncertain of the benefits--if the problem is that lots of authors find Said annoying or his reactions unpredictable, and we review the record and say "actually Said isn't annoying", those authors are unlikely to find it convincing.) In particular, I keep thinking about this comment (noting that I might be updating too much on one example). I think we have evidence that "Said can engage with open/curious/interpretative topics/posts in a productive way", and should maybe try to figure out what was different that time.
5Vladimir_Nesov
I think in the sense of the general garden-style conflict (rather than Said/Duncan conflict specifically) this is the only satisfactory solution that's currently apparent, users picking the norms they get to operate under, like Commenting Guidelines, but more meaningful in practice. There should be for a start just two options, Athenian Garden and Socratic Garden, so that commenters can cheaply make decisions about what kinds of comments are appropriate for a particular post, without having to read custom guidelines. Excellent. I predict that Said wouldn't be averse to voluntarily not commenting on "open/curious/cooperative" posts, or not commenting there in the kind of style that adherents of that culture dislike, so that "specifically banning Said" from that is an unnecessary caveat.
4Zack_M_Davis
Well, I'm glad you're telling actual-me this rather than using your model of me. I count the fact your model of me is so egregiously poor (despite our having a number of interactions over the years) as a case study in favor of Said's interaction style (of just asking people things, instead of falsely imagining that you can model them). Yes, I would, actually, want to advocate for informing users about a feature that already exists that anyone can use, rather than writing new code specifically for the purpose of persecuting a particular user that you don't like. Analogously, if the town council of the city I live in passes a new tax increase, I might grumble about it, but I don't regard it as a direct personal threat. If the town council passes a tax increase that applies specifically to my friend Said Achmiz, and no one else, that's a threat to me and mine. A government that does that is not legitimate. So, usually when people make this kind of "hostile paraphrase" in an argument, I tend to take it in stride. I mostly regard it as "part of the game": I think most readers can tell the difference between an attempted fair paraphrase (which an author is expected to agree with) and an intentional hostile paraphrase (which is optimized to highlight a particular criticism, without the expectation that the author will agree with the paraphrase). I don't tell people to be more charitable to me; I don't ask them to pass my ideological Turing test; I just say, "That's not what I meant," and explain the idea again; I'm happy to do the extra work. In this particular situation, I'm inclined to try out a different commenting style that involves me doing less interpretive labor. I think you know very well that "criticize without trying to figure out what the OP is about" is not what Said and I think is at issue. Do you think you can rephrase that sentence in a way that would pass Said's ideological Turing test? Right, so if someone complains about Said, point out that they're
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
113

We already let authors write their own moderation guidelines! It's a blank text box!

Because it's a blank text box, it's not convenient for commenters to read it in detail every time, so I expect almost nobody reads it, these guidelines are not practical to follow.

With two standard options, color-coded or something, it becomes actually practical, so the distinction between blank text box and two standard options is crucial. You might still caveat the standard options with additional blank text boxes, but being easy to classify without actually reading is the important part.

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5philh
Also, moderation guidelines aren't visible on GreaterWrong at all, afaict. So Said specifically is unlikely to adjust his commenting in response to those guidelines, unless that changes. (I assume Said mostly uses GW, since he designed it.)
4Raemon
I've been busy, so hadn't replied to this yet, but specifically wanted to apologize for the hostile paraphrase (I notice I've done that at least twice now in this thread, I'm trying to better but seems important for me to notice and pay attention to). I think I the corrigible about actually integrating the spirit-of-our-models into his commenting style" line pretty badly, Oliver and Vaniver also both thought it was pretty alarming. The thing I was trying to say I eventually reworded in my subsequent mod announcement as: i.e. this isn't about Said changing this own thought process, but, like, there is a spirit-of-the-law relevant in the mod decision here, and whether I need to worry about specification-gaming. I expect you to still object to that for various reasons, and I think it's reasonable to be pretty suspicious of me for phrasing it the way I did the first time. (I think it does convey something sus about my thought process, but, fwiw I agree it is sus and am reflecting on it)
2Said Achmiz
FYI, my response to this is is waiting for an answer to my question in the first paragraph of this comment.
2evand
I'm still uncertain how I feel about a lot of the details on this (and am enough of a lurker rather than poster that I suspect it's not worth my time to figure that out / write it publicly), but I just wanted to say that I think this is an extremely good thing to include: This strikes me basically as a way to move the mod team's role more into "setting good defaults" and less "setting the only way things work". How much y'all should move in that direction seems an open question, as it does limit how much cultivation you can do, but it seems like a very useful tool to make use of in some cases.
1Screwtape
How technically troublesome would an allow list be? Maybe the default is everyone gets three comments on a post. People the author has banned get zero, people the author has opted in for get unlimited, the author automatically gets unlimited comments on their own post, mods automatically get unlimited comments. (Or if this feels more like a Said and/or Duncan specific issue, make the options "Unlimited", "Limited", and "None/Banned" then default to everyone at Unlimited except for Said and/or Duncan at Limited.)
4Raemon
My prediction is that those users are primarily upvoting it for what it's saying about Duncan rather than about Said.
2Raemon
To spell out what evidence I'm looking at: There is definitely some term in the my / the mod team's equation for "this user is providing a lot of valuable stuff that people want on the site". But the high level call the moderation team is making is something like "maximize useful truths we're figuring out". Hearing about how many people are getting concrete value out of Said or Duncan's comments is part of that equation, hearing about how many people are feeling scared or offput enough that they don't comment/post much is also part of that equation. And there are also subtler interplays that depend on our actual model of how progress gets made.
8Elizabeth
I wonder how much of the difference in intuitions about Duncan and Said come from whether people interact with LW primarily as commenters or as authors.  The concerns about Said seem to be entirely from and centered around the concerns of authors. He makes posting mostly costly, he drives content away. Meanwhile many concerns about Duncan could be phrased as being about how he interacts with commenters. If this trend exists it is complicated. Said gets >0 praise from author for his comments on their own post (e.g. Raemon here), and major Said defender Zack has written lots of well-regarded posts, Said banner DirectedEvolution writes good content but stands out to me as one of the best commenters on science posts. Duncan also generates a fair amount of concern for attempts to set norms outside his own posts. But I think there might be a thread here
7DirectedEvolution
Thank you for the complement! With writing science commentary, my participation is contingent on there being a specific job to do (often, "dig up quotes from links and citations and provide context") and a lively conversation. The units of work are bite-size. It's easy to be useful and appreciated. Writing posts is already relatively speaking not my strong suit. There's no preselection on people being interested enough to drive a discussion, what makes a post "interesting" is unclear, and the amount of work required to make it good is large enough that it feels like work more than play. When I do get a post out, it often fails to attract much attention. What attention it does receive is often negative, and Said is one of the more prolific providers of negative attention. Hence, I ban Said because he further inhibits me from developing in my areas of relative weakness.  My past conflict with Duncan arose when I would impute motives to him, or blur the precise distinctions in language he was attempting to draw - essentially failing to adopt the "referee" role that works so well in science posts, and putting the same negative energy I dislike receiving into my responses to Duncan's posts. When I realized this was going on, I apologized and changed my approach, and now I no longer feel a sense of "danger" in responding to Duncan's posts or comments. I feel that my commenting strong suit is quite compatible with friendly discourse with Duncan, and Duncan is good at generating lively discussions where my refereeing skillset may be of use. So if I had to explain it, some people (me, Duncan) are sensitive about posting, while others are sharp in their comments (Said, anonymousaisafety). Those who are sensitive about posting will get frustrated by Said, while those who write sharp comments will often get in conflict with Duncan.
4Zack_M_Davis
I'm not sure what other user you're referring to besides Achmiz—it looks like there's supposed to be another word between "about" and "and" in your first sentence, and between "about" and "could" in the last sentence of your second paragraph, but it's not rendering correctly in my browser? Weird. Anyway, I think the pattern you describe could be generated by a philosophical difference about where the burden of interpretive labor rests. A commenter who thinks that authors have a duty to be clear (and therefore asks clarifying questions, or makes attempted criticisms that miss the author's intended point) might annoy authors who think that commenters have a duty to read charitably. Then the commenter might be blamed for driving authors away, and the author might be blamed for getting too angrily defensive with commenters. I interact with this website as an author more than a commenter these days, but in terms of the dichotomy I describe above, I am very firmly of the belief that authors have a duty to be clear. (To the extent that I expect that someone who disagrees with me, also disagrees with my proposed dichotomy; I'm not claiming to be passing anyone's ideological Turing test.) The other month I published a post that I was feeling pretty good about, quietly hoping that it might break a hundred karma. In fact, the comment section was very critical (in ways that I didn't have satisfactory replies to), and the post only got 18 karma in 26 votes, an unusually poor showing for me. That made me feel a little bit sad that day, and less likely to write future posts that I could anticipate being disliked by commenters in the way that this post was disliked. In my worldview, this is exactly how things are supposed to work. I didn't have satisfactory replies to the critical comments. Of course that's going to result in downvotes! Of course it made me a little bit sad that day! (By "conservation of expected feelings": I would have felt a little bit happy if the post did w
[-]Elizabeth
3429

Thanks for engaging, I found this comment very… traction-ey? Like we’re getting closer to cruxes. And you’re right that I want to disagree with your ontology.

I think “duty to be clear” skips over the hard part, which is that “being clear” is a transitive verb. It doesn’t make sense to say if a post is clear or not clear, only who one is clear and unclear to. 

To use a trivial example:  Well taught physics 201 is clear if you’ve had the prerequisite physics classes or are a physics savant, but not to laymen. Poorly taught physics 201 is clear to a subset of the people who would understand it if well-taught.  And you can pile on complications from there. Not all prerequisites are as obvious as Physics 101 -> Physics 201, but that doesn’t make them not prerequisites. People have different writing and reading styles. Authors can decide the trade-offs are such that they want to write a post but use fairly large step sizes, and leave behind people who can’t fill in the gaps themselves.

So the question is never “is this post clear?”, it’s “who is this post intended for?” and “what percentage of its audience actually finds it clear?” The answers are never “everyone” and “10... (read more)

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[-]DirectedEvolution
2725

You might respond “fine, authors have a right not to answer, but that doesn’t mean commenters don’t have a right to ask”. I think that’s mostly correct but not at the limit, there is a combination of high volume, aggravating approach, and entitlement that drives off far more value than it creates.

 

YES. I think this is hugely important, and I think it's a pretty good definition of the difference between a confused person and a crank.

Confused people ask questions of people they think can help them resolve their confusion. They signal respect, because they perceive themselves as asking for a service to be performed on their behalf by somebody who understands more than they do. They put effort into clarifying their own confusion and figuring out what the author probably meant. They assume they're lucky if they get one reply from the author, and so they try not to waste their one question on uninteresting trivialities that they could have figured out for themselves.

Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or hi... (read more)

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[-]Elizabeth
144

This made something click for me. I wonder if some of the split is people who think comments are primarily communication with the author of a post, vs with other readers. 

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9Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
And this attitude is particularly corrosive to feelings of trust, collaboration, "jamming together," etc. ... it's like walking into a martial arts academy and finding a person present who scoffs at both the instructors and the other students alike, and who doesn't offer sufficient faith to even try a given exercise once before first a) hearing it comprehensively justified and b) checking the sparring records to see if people who did that exercise win more fights. Which, yeah, that's one way to zero in on the best martial arts practices, if the other people around you also signed up for that kind of culture and have patience for that level of suspicion and mistrust! (I choose martial arts specifically because it's a domain full of anti-epistemic garbage and claims that don't pan out.) But in practice, few people will participate in such a martial arts academy for long, and it's not true that a martial arts academy lacking that level of rigor makes no progress in discovering and teaching useful things to its students.
[-]jimmy
146

You're describing a deeply dysfunctional gym, and then implying that the problem lies with the attitude of this one character rather than the dysfunction that allows such an attitude to be disruptive.

The way to jam with such a character is to bet you can tap him with the move of the day, and find out if you're right. If you can, and he gets tapped 10 times in a row with the move he just scoffed at every day he does it, then it becomes increasingly difficult for him to scoff the next time, and increasingly funny and entertaining for everyone else. If you can't, and no one can, then he might have a point, and the gym gets to learn something new.

If your gym knows how to jam with and incorporate dissonance without perceiving it as a threat, then not only are such expressions of distrust/disrespect not corrosive, they're an active part of the productive collaboration, and serve as opportunities to form the trust and mutual respect which clearly weren't there in the first place. It's definitely more challenging to jam with dissonant characters like that (especially if they're dysfunctionally dissonant, as your description implies), and no one wants to train at a gym which fails to form trust and mutual respect, but it's important to realize that the problem isn't so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty, because the solutions to each are very different.
 

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1Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Strong disagree that I'm describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it's way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate "deeply dysfunctional" from what I said. There's a difference between "hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this" and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of "why are you even here, then?" Edit: I view the votes on this and the parent comment as indicative of a genuine problem; jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness) and the LWers who happen to be hanging around this particular comment thread are, uh, apparently unaware of this fact. Alas.
9localdeity
Well, you mentioned the scenario as an illustration of a "particularly corrosive" attitude.  It therefore seems reasonable to fill in the unspecified details (like just how disruptive the guy's behavior is, how much of everyone's time he wastes, how many instructors are driven away in shame or irritation) with pretty negative ones—to assume the gym has in fact been corroded, being at least, say, moderately dysfunctional as a result. Maybe "deeply dysfunctional" was going too far, but I don't think it's reasonable to call that "way overconfident/projection-y".  Nor does the difference between "deeply dysfunctional" and "moderately dysfunctional" matter for jimmy's point. FYI, I'm inclined to upvote jimmy's comment because of the second paragraph: it seems to be the perfect solution to the described situation (and to all hypothetical dysfunction in the gym, minor or major), and has some generalizability (look for cheap tests of beliefs, challenge people to do them).  And your comment seems to be calling jimmy out inappropriately (as I've argued above), so I'm inclined to at least disagree-vote it.
-2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
"Let's imagine that these unspecified details, which could be anywhere within a VERY wide range, are specifically such that the original point is ridiculous, in support of concluding that the original point is ridiculous" does not seem like a reasonable move to me. Separately: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WsvpkCekuxYSkwsuG/overconfidence-is-deceit
8philh
I think my feeling here is: * Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great. * But it's not clear how important that mistake is to his comment. I expect people were mostly reacting to paragraphs 2 and 3, and you could cut paragraph 1 out and they'd stand by themselves. * Do the more-interesting parts of the comment implicitly rely on the projection/unjustified-claim? Also not clear to me. I do think the comment is overstated. ("The way to jam"?) But e.g. "the problem isn’t so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty" seems... well, I'd say this is overstated too, but I do think it's pointing at something that seems valuable to keep in mind even if we accept that the gym is functional. * So I don't think it's unreasonable that the parent got significantly upvoted, though I didn't upvote it myself; and I don't think it's unreasonable that your correction didn't, since it looks correct to me but like it's not responding to the main point. * Maybe you think paragraphs 2 and 3 were relying more on the projection than it currently seems to me? In that case you actually are responding to what-I-see-as the main point. But if so I'd need it spelled out in more detail.
-1jimmy
FWIW, that is a claim I'm fully willing and able to justify. It's hard to disclaim all the possible misinterpretations in a brief comment (e.g. "deeply" != "very"), but I do stand by a pretty strong interpretation of what I said as being true, justifiable, important, and relevant.  
8jimmy
Yes, and that's why I described the attitude as "dysfunctionally dissonant" (emphasis in original). It's not a good way of challenging the instructors, and not the way I recommend behaving. What I'm talking about is how a healthy gym environment is robust to this sort of dysfunctional dissonance, and how to productively relate to unskilled dissonance by practicing skillfully enough yourself that the system's combined dysfunction never becomes supercritical and instead decays towards productive cooperation. That's certainly one possibility. But isn't it also conceivable though that I simply see underlying dynamics (and lack thereof) which you don't see, and which justify the confidence level I display? It certainly makes sense to track the hypothesis that I am overconfident here, but ironically it strikes me as overconfident to be asserting that I am being overconfident without first checking things like "Can I pass his ITT"/"Can I point to a flaw in his argument that makes him stutter if not change his mind"/etc. To be clear, my view here is based on years of thinking about this kind of problem and practicing my proposed solutions with success, including in a literal martial arts gym for the last eight years. Perhaps I should have written more about these things on LW so my confidence doesn't appear to come out of nowhere, but I do believe I am able to justify what I'm saying very well and won't hesitate to do so if anyone wants further explanation or sees something which doesn't seem to fit. And hey, if it turns out I'm wrong about how well supported my perspective is, I promise not to be a poor sport about it. In absence of an object level counterargument, this is textbook ad hominem. I won't argue that there isn't a place for that (or that it's impossible that my reasoning is flawed), but I think it's hard to argue that it isn't premature here. As a general rule, anyone that disagrees with anyone can come up with a million accusations of this sort, and it is
2Vaniver
I thought it was a reference to, among other things, this exchange where Said says one of Duncan's Medium posts was good, and Duncan responds that his decision to not post it on LW was because of Said. If you're observing that Said could just comment on Medium instead, or post it as a linkpost on LW and comment there, I think you're correct. [There are, of course, other things that are not posted publicly, where I think it then becomes true.]
2Raemon
I do want to acknowledge that based on various comments and vote patterns, I agree it seems like a pretty controversial call, and I model is as something like "spending down and or making a bet with a limited resource (maybe two specific resources of "trust in the mods" and "some groups of people's willingness to put up with the site being optimized a way they think is wrong.")  Despite that, I think it is the right call to limit Said significantly in some way, but I don't think we can make that many moderation calls on users this established that there this controversial without causing some pretty bad things to happen.
1Zack_M_Davis
Indeed. I would encourage you to ask yourself whether the number referred to by "that many" is greater than zero.
2Ruby
I don't remember this. I feel like Aella's post introduced the term? A better example might be Circling, though I think Said might have had a point of it hadn't been carefully scrutinized, a lot of people had just been doing it.
4Raemon
Frame control was a pretty central topic on "what's going on with Brent?" two years prior, as well as some other circumstances. We'd been talking about it internal at Lightcone/LessWrong during that time.
2Ruby
Hmm, yeah, I can see that. Perhaps just not under that name.
2Raemon
I think the term was getting used, but makes sense if you weren't as involved in those conversations. (I just checked and there's only one old internal lw-slack message about it from 2019, but it didn't feel like a new term to me at the time and pretty sure it came up a bunch on FB and in moderation convos periodically under that name)
[-]Ben Pace
116

Ray writes:

Here are some areas I think Said contributes in a way that seem important:

  • Various ops/dev work maintaining sites like readthesequences.com, greaterwrong.com, and gwern.com. 

For the record, I think the value here is "Said is the person independent of MIRI (including Vaniver) and Lightcone who contributes the most counterfactual bits to the sequences and LW still being alive in the world", and I don't think that comes across in this bullet.

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4Raemon
Yeah I agree with this, and agree it's worth emphasizing more. I'm updating the most recent announcement to indicate this more, since not everyone's going to read everything in this thread.
2Ben Pace
Great!
[-]DanielFilan
110

I could imagine an admin feature that literally just lets Said comment a few times on a post, but if he gets significantly downvoted, gives him a wordcount-based rate-limit that forces him to wrap up his current points quickly and then call it a day.

I feel like this incentivizes comments to be short, which doesn't make them less aggravating to people. For example, IIRC people have complained about him commenting "Examples?". This is not going to be hit hard by a rate limit.

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[-]gwern
7343

'Examples?' is one of the rationalist skills most lacking on LW2 and if I had the patience for arguments I used to have, I would be writing those comments myself. (Said is being generous in asking for only 1. I would be asking for 3, like Eliezer.) Anyone complaining about that should be ashamed that they either (1) cannot come up with any, or (2) cannot forthrightly admit "Oh, I don't have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV".

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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
2315

Spending my last remaining comment here.

I join Ray and Gwern in noting that asking for examples is generically good (and that I've never felt or argued to the contrary). Since my stance on this was called into question, I elaborated:

If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say "Examples?" would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say "Examples?" would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn't do their fair share of the labor.

"Do you have examples?" is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of "are we both contributing?" don't need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I'm the asker/learner and you're the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.

The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It's having 85+% of your engagement be asking other pe

... (read more)
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[-]Davidmanheim
104

Noting that my very first lesswrong post, back in the LW1 days, was an example of #2. I was wrong on some of the key parts of the intuition I was trying to convey, and ChristianKl corrected me. As an introduction to posting on LW, that was pretty good - I'd hate to think that's no longer acceptable.

At the same time, there is less room for it as the community got much bigger, and I'd probably weak downvote a similar post today, rather than trying to engage with a similar mistake, given how much content there is. Not sure if there is anything that can be done about this, but it's an issue.

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[-]Raemon
122

fwiw that seems like a pretty great interaction. ChristanKl seems to be usefully engaging with your frame while noting things about it that don't seem to work, seems (to me) to have optimized somewhat for being helpful, and also the conversation just wraps up pretty efficiently. (and I think this is all a higher bar than what I mean to be pushing for, i.e. having only one of those properties would have been fine)

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2Davidmanheim
I agree - but think that now, if and when similarly initial thoughts on a conceptual model are proposed, there is less ability or willingness to engage, especially with people who are fundamentally confused about some aspect of the issue. This is largely, I believe, due to the volume of new participants, and the reduced engagement for those types of posts.
8Raemon
I want to reiterate that I actually think the part where Said says "examples?" is basically just good (and is only bad insofar as it creates a looming worry of particular kinds of frustrating, unproductive and time-consuming conversations that are likely to follow in some subsets of discussions) (edit: I actually am pretty frustrated that "examples?" became the go-to example people talked about and reified as a kinda rude thing Said did. I think I basically agree this process is good: 1. Alice -> writes confident posts without examples 2. Bob -> says "examples?" 3. Alice -> either gives (at least one, and yeah ideally 3) examples, or says "Oh, I don't have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV", or doesn't reply but feels a bit chagrined.  )
4DanielFilan
Oops, sorry for saying something that probabilistically implied a strawman of you.
6Ruby
I'm not sure what you think this is strong evidence of?
7Raemon
I don't think it's "strong" evidence per se, but, it was evidence that something I'd previously thought was more of a specific pet-peeve of Duncan's, was more objected to by more LessWrongfolk.  (Where the thing in question is something like "making sweeping ungrounded claims about other people... but in a sort of colloquial/hyperbolic way which most social norms don't especially punish)
[-]Ruby
3425

Some evidence for that, also seems likely to get upvoted on the basis of "well written and evocative of a difficult personal experience", or people relate to being outliers and unusual even if they didn't feel alienated and hurt in quite the same way. I'm unsure.

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[-]the gears to ascension
*1511

I upvoted it because it made me finally understand what in the world might be going on in Duncan's head to make him react the way he does

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4Screwtape
If the lifeguard isn't on duty, then it's useful to have the ability to be your own lifeguard. I wanted to say that I appreciate the moderation style options and authors being able to delete and ban for their posts. While we're talking about what to change and what isn't working, I'd like to weigh in on the side of that being a good set of features that should be kept. Raemon, you've mentioned those features are there to be used. I've never used the capability and I'm still glad it exists. (I can barely use it actually.) Since site wide moderators aren't going to intervene everywhere quickly (which I don't think they should or even can, moderators are heavily outnumbered) then I think letting people moderate their local piece is good. If I ran into lots of negative feedback I didn't think was helpful and it wasn't getting moderated by me or the site admins, I'd just move my writing to a blog on a different website where I could control things. Possibly I'd set up crossposting like Zvi or Jefftk and then ignore the LessWrong comment section. If lots of people do that, then we get the diaspora effect from late LessWrong 1.0. Having people at least crossposting to LessWrong seems good to me, since I like tools like the agreement karma and the tag upvotes. Basically, the BATNA for a writer who doesn't like LessWrong's comment section is Wordpress or Substack. Some writers you'd rather go elsewhere obviously, but Said and Duncan's top level posts seem mostly a good fit here.  I do have a question about norm setting I'm curious about. If Duncan had titled his post "Duncan's Basics of Rationalist Discourse" would that have changed whether it merited the exception around pushing site wide norms? What if lots of people started picking Norm Enforcing for the moderation guidelines and linking to it?
4Raemon
Yeah I think this'd be much less cause for concern. (I haven't checked whether the rest of the post has anything else that felt LW-wide-police-y about it, I'd maybe have wanted a slightly different opening paragraph or something)
4Viliam
I think Duncan also posts all his articles on his own website, is this correct? In that case, would it be okay to replace the article on LW with a link to Duncan's website? So that the articles stay there, the comments stay here, the page with comments links the article, but the article does not link the page with comments. I am not suggesting to do this. I am asking that if Duncan (or anyone else) hypothetically at some moment decided for whatever reason that he is uncomfortable with his articles being on LW, whether doing this (moving the articles elsewhere and replacing them with the links towards the new place) would be acceptable for you? Like, whether this could be a policy "if you decide to move away from LW, this is our preferred way to do it".
3Drake Morrison
Are we entertaining technical solutions at this point? If so, I have some ideas. This feels to me like a problem of balancing the two kinds of content on the site. Balancing babble to prune, artist to critic, builder to breaker. I think Duncan wants an environment that encourages more Babbling/Building. Whereas it seems to me like Said wants an environment that encourages more Pruning/Breaking.  Both types of content are needed. Writing posts pattern matches with Babbling/Building, whereas writing comments matches closer to Pruning/Breaking. In my mind anyway. (update: prediction market) Inspired by this post I propose enforcing some kind of ratio between posts and comments. Say you get 3 comments per post before you get rate-limited?[1] This way if you have a disagreement or are misunderstanding a post there is room to clarify, but not room for demon threads. If it takes more than a few comments to clarify that is an indication of a deeper model disagreement and you should just go ahead and write your own post explaining your views. ( as an aside I would hope this creates an incentive to write posts in general, to help with the inevitable writer turn-over) Obviously the exact ratio doesn't have to be 3 comments to 1 post. It could be 10:1 or whatever the mod team wants to start with before adjusting as needed. 1. ^ I'm not suggesting that you get rate-limited site-wide if you start exceeding 3 comments per post. Just that you are rate-limited on that specific post. 
8Jasnah Kholin
i find the fact that you see comments as criticism, and not expanding and continuing the building, is indicative of what i see as problematic. good comments should most of the time not be critisim. be part of the building.  the dynamic that is good in my eyes, is one when comments are making the post better not by criticize it, but by sharing examples, personal experiences, intuitions, and the relations of those with the post.  counting all comments as prune instead of bubble disincentivize bubble-comments. this is what you want?
3Drake Morrison
I don't see all comments as criticism. Many comments are of the building up variety! It's that prune-comments and babble-comments have different risk-benefit profiles, and verifying whether a comment is building up or breaking down a post is difficult at times.  Send all the building-comments you like! I would find it surprising if you needed more than 3 comments per day to share examples, personal experiences, intuitions and relations. The benefits of building-comments is easy to get in 3 comments per day per post. The risks of prune-comments(spawning demon threads) are easy to mitigate by only getting 3 comments per day per post. 
[-]Jasnah Kholin
*118

i think we have very different models of things, so i will try to clarify mine. my best bubble site example is not in English, so i will give another one - the emotional Labor thread in MetaFilter, and MetaFilter as whole. just look on the sheer LENGTH of this page!

https://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor

there are much more then 3 comments from person there.

from my point of view, this rule create hard ceiling that forbid the best discussions to have. because the best discussions are creative back-and-forth. my best discussions with friends are  - one share model, one ask questions, or share different model, or share experience, the other react, etc. for way more then three comments. more like 30 comments. it's dialog. and there are lot of unproductive examples for that in LW. and it's quite possible (as in, i assign to it probability of 0.9) that in first-order effects, it will cut out unproductive discussions and will be positive.

but i find rules that prevent the best things from happening as bad in some way that i can't explain clearly. something like, I'm here to try to go higher. if it's impossible, then why bother? 

I also think it's V... (read more)

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5Raemon
Yeah this is the sort of solution I'm thinking of (although it sounds like you're maybe making a more sweeping assumption than me?) My current rough sense is that a rate limit of 3 comments per post per day (maybe with an additional wordcount based limit per post per day), would actually be pretty reasonable at curbing the things I'm worried about (for users that seem particularly prone to causing demon threads)
-3Said Achmiz
Complaints by whom? And why are these complaints significant? Are you taking the stance that all or most of these complaints are valid, i.e. that the things being complained about are clearly bad (and not merely dispreferred by this or that individual LW member)? (See also this recent comment, where I argue that at least one particular characterization of my commenting activity is just demonstrably inconsistent with reality.)
[-]Raemon
2118

Here's a bit of metadata on this: I can recall offhand 7 complaints from users with 2000+ karma who aren't on the mod team (most of whom had significantly more than 2000 karma, and all of them had some highly upvoted comments and/or posts that are upvoted in the annual review). One of them cites you as being the reason they left LessWrong a few years ago, and ~3-4 others cite you as being a central instance of a pattern that means they participate less on LessWrong, or can't have particularly important types of conversations here.

I also think most of the mod team (at least 4 of them? maybe more) of them have had such complaints (as users, rather than as moderators)

I think there's probably at least 5 more people who complained about you by name who I don't think have particularly legible credibility beyond "being some LessWrong users." 

I'm thinking about my reply to "are the complaints valid tho?". I have a different ontology here.

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[-]Vladimir_Nesov
*1513

There are some problems with this as pointing in a particular direction. There is little opportunity for people to be prompted to express opposite-sounding opinions, and so only the above opinions are available to you.

I have a concern that Said and Zack are an endangered species that I want there to be more of on LW and I'm sad they are not more prevalent. I have some issues with how they participate, mostly about tendencies towards cultivating infinite threads instead of quickly de-escalating and reframing, but this in my mind is a less important concern than the fact that there are not enough of them. Discouraging or even outlawing Said cuts that significantly, and will discourage others.

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[-]jefftk
209

Ray pointing out the level of complaints is informative even without (far more effort) judgement on the merits of each complaint. There being a lot of complaints is evidence (to both the moderation team and the site users) that it's worth putting in effort here to figure out if things could be better.

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[-]Vladimir_Nesov
1310

There being a lot of complaints is evidence [...] that it's worth putting in effort here to figure out if things could be better.

It is evidence that there is some sort of problem. It's not clear evidence about what should be done about it, about what "better" means specifically. Instituting ways of not talking about the problem anymore doesn't help with addressing it.

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9pseud
It didn't seem like Said was complaining about the reports being seen as evidence that it is worth figuring out whether thing could be better. Rather, he was complaining about them being used as evidence that things could be better.
2philh
If we speak precisely... in what way would they be the former without being the latter? Like, if I now think it's more worth figuring out whether things could be better, presumably that's because I now think it's more likely that things could be better? (I suppose I could also now think the amount-they-could-be-better, conditional on them being able to be better, is higher; but the probability that they could be better is unchanged. Or I could think that we're currently acting under the assumption that things could be better, I now think that's less likely so more worth figuring out whether the assumption is wrong. Neither seems like they fit in this case.) Separately, I think my model of Said would say that he was not complaining, he was merely asking questions (perhaps to try to decide whether there was something to complain about, though "complain" has connotations there that my model of Said would object to). So, if you think the mods are doing something that you think they shouldn't be, you should probably feel free to say that (though I think there are better and worse ways to do so). But if you think Said thinks the mods are doing something that Said thinks they shouldn't be... idk, it feels against-the-spirit-of-Said to try to infer that from his comment? Like you're doing the interpretive labor that he specifically wants people not to do.
-1pseud
My comment wasn't well written, I shouldn't have used the word "complaining" in reference to what Said was doing. To clarify: As I see it, there are two separate claims: 1. That the complaints prove that Said has misbehaved (at least a little bit) 2. That the complaints increase the probability that Said has misbehaved  Said was just asking questions - but baked into his questions is the idea of the significance of the complaints, and this significance seems to be tied to claim 1.  Jefftk seems to be speaking about claim 2. So, his comment doesn't seem like a direct response to Said's comment, although the point is still a relevant one. 
2Raemon
(fyi I do plan to respond to this, although don't know how satisfying it'll be when I do)
[-]Ruby
Moderator Comment374
Pinned by Ruby

Warning to Duncan

(See also: Raemon's moderator action on Said)

Since we were pretty much on the same page, Raemon delegated writing this warning to Duncan to me, and signed off on it.

Generally, I am quite sad if, when someone points/objects to bad behavior, they end up facing moderator action themselves. It doesn’t set a great incentive. At the same time, some of Duncan’s recent behavior also feels quite bad to me, and to not respond to it would also create a bad incentive – particularly if the undesirable behavior results in something a person likes.

Here’s my story of what happened, building off of some of Duncan’s own words and some endorsement of something I said previous exchange with him:

Duncan felt that Said engaged in various behaviors that hurt him (confident based on Duncan’s words) and were in general bad (inferred from Duncan writing posts describing why those behaviors are bad). Such bad/hurtful behaviors include strawmanning, psychologizing at length, and failing to put in symmetric effort. For example, Said argued that Duncan banned him from his posts because Said disagreed. I am pretty sympathetic to these accusations against Said (and endorse moderation action agains... (read more)

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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
332

Just noting as a "for what it's worth"

(b/c I don't think my personal opinion on this is super important or should be particularly cruxy for very many other people)

that I accept, largely endorse, and overall feel fairly treated by the above (including the week suspension that preceded it).

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[-]Raemon
*Moderator Comment2611
Pinned by Raemon

Moderation action on Said

(See also: Ruby's moderator warning for Duncan)

I’ve been thinking for a week, and trying to sanity-check whether there are actual good examples of Said doing-the-thing-I’ve-complained-about, rather than “I formed a stereotype of Said and pattern match to it too quickly”, and such. 

I think Said is a pretty confusing case though. I’m going to lay out my current thinking here, in a number of comments, and I expect at least a few more days of discussion as the LessWrong community digests this. I’ve pinned this post to the top of the frontpage for the day so users who weren’t following the discussion can decide whether to weigh in.

Here’s a quick overview of how I think about Said moderation:

  • Re: Recent Duncan Conflict. 
    • I think he did some moderation-worthy things in the recent conflict with Duncan, but a) so did Duncan, and I think there’s a “it takes two-to-tango” aspect of demon threads, b) at most, those’d result in me giving one or both of them a 1-week ban and then calling it a day. I basically endorse Vaniver’s take on some object level stuff. I have a bit more to say but not much.
  • Overall pattern. 
    • I think Said’s overall pattern of commen
... (read more)
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[-]rsaarelm
189

This sounds drastic enough that it makes me wonder, since the claimed reason was that Said's commenting style was driving high-quality contributors away from the site, do you have a plan to follow up and see if there is any sort of measurable increase in comment quality, site mood or good contributors becoming more active moving forward?

Also, is this thing an experiment with a set duration, or a permanent measure? If it's permanent, it has a very rubber room vibe to it, where you don't outright ban someone but continually humiliate them if they keep coming by and wish they'll eventually get the hint.

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5Raemon
A background model I want to put out here: two frames that feel relevant to me here are "harm minimization" and "taxing". I think the behavior Said does has unacceptably large costs in aggregate (and, perhaps to remind/clarify, I think a similar-in-some-ways set of behaviors I've seen Duncan do also would have unacceptably large costs in aggregate). And the three solutions I'd consider here, at some level of abstraction, are: 1. So-and-so agrees to stop doing the behavior (harder when the behavior is subtle and multifaceted, but, doable in principle) 2. Moderators restrict the user such that they can't do the behavior to unacceptable degrees 3. Moderators tax the behavior such that doing-too-much-of-it is harder overall (but, it's still something of the user's choice if they want to do more of it and pay more tax).  All three options seem reasonable to me apriori, it's mostly a question of "is there a good way to implement them?". The current rate-limit-proposal for Said is mostly option 2. All else being equal I'd probably prefer option 3, but the options I can think of seem harder to implement and dev-time for this sort of thing is not unlimited.
4Raemon
Quick update for now: @Said Achmiz's rate limit has expired, and I don't plan to revisit applying-it-again unless a problem comes up.  I do feel like there's some important stuff left unresolved here. @Zack_M_Davis's comment on this other post asks some questions that seem worth answering.  I'd hoped to write up something longer this week but was fairly busy, and it seemed better to explicitly acknowledge it. For the immediate future I think improving on the auto-rate-limits and some other systemic stuff seems more important that arguing or clarifying the particular points here.
3jimmy
  It seems like the natural solution here would be something that establishes this common knowledge. Something like the twitter "community notes" being attached to relevant comments that says something like "There is no obligation to respond to this comment, please feel comfortable ignoring this user if you don't feel he will productive to engage with. Discussion here"
5Raemon
Yeah I did list that as one of my options I'd consider in the previous announcement.  A problem I anticipate is that it's some combination of ineffective, and also in some ways a harsher punishment. But if Said actively preferred some version of this solution I wouldn't be opposed to doing it instead of rate-limiting.
7Said Achmiz
Forgive me for making what may be an obvious suggestion which you’ve dismissed for some good reason, but… is there, actually, some reason why you can’t attach such a note to all comments? (UI-wise, perhaps as a note above the comment form, or something?) There isn’t an obligation, in terms of either the site rules or the community norms as the moderators have defined them, to respond to any comment, is there? (Perhaps with the exception of comments written by moderators…? Or maybe not even those?) That is, it seems to me that the concern here can be characterized as a question of communicating forum norms to new participants. Can it not be treated as such? (It’s surely not unreasonable to want community members to refrain from actively interfering with the process of communicating rules and norms to newcomers, such as by lying to them about what those rules/norms are, or some such… but the problem, as such, is one which should be approached directly, by means of centralized action, no?)
4Ben Pace
I think it could be quite nice to give new users information about what site norms are and give a suggested spirit in which to engage with comments. (Though I'm sure there's lots of things it'd be quite nice to tell new users about the spirit of the site, but there's of course bandwidth limitations on how much they'll read, so just because it's an improvement doesn't mean it's worth doing.)
6Said Achmiz
If it’s worth banning[1] someone (and even urgently investing development resources into a feature that enables that banning-or-whatever!) because their comments might, possibly, on some occasions, potentially mislead users into falsely believing X… then it surely must be worthwhile to simply outright tell users ¬X? (I mean, of all the things that it might be nice to tell new users, this, which—if this topic, and all the moderators’ comments on it, are to be believed—is so consequential, has to be right up at the top of list?) ---------------------------------------- 1. Or rate-limiting, or applying any other such moderation action to. ↩︎
4Raemon
This is not what I said though.
2Said Achmiz
Now that you’ve clarified your objection here, I want to note that this does not respond to the central point of the grandparent comment: If it’s worth applying moderation action and developing novel moderation technology to (among other things, sure) prevent one user from potentially sometimes misleading users into falsely believing X, then it must surely be worthwhile to simply outright tell users ¬X? Communicating this to users seems like an obvious win, and one which would make a huge chunk of this entire discussion utterly moot.
[-]habryka
123

If it’s worth applying moderation action and developing novel moderation technology to (among other things, sure) prevent one user from potentially sometimes misleading users into falsely believing X, then it must surely be worthwhile to simply outright tell users ¬X?

Adding a UI element, visible to every user, on every new comment they write, on every post they will ever interface with, because one specific user tends to have a confusing communication style seems unlikely to be the right choice. You are a UI designer and you are well-aware of the limits of UI complexity, so I am pretty surprised you are suggesting this as a real solution. 

But even assuming we did add such a message, there are many other problems: 

  • Posting such a message would communicate a level of importance of this specific norm, which does not actually come up very frequently in conversations that don't involve you and a small number of other users, that is not commensurate with its actual importance. We have the standard frontpage commenting guidelines, and they cover what I consider the actually most important things to communicate, and they are approximately the maximum length I expect new users to r
... (read more)
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[-]Said Achmiz
142

First, concerning the first half of your comment (re: importance of this information, best way of communicating it):

I mean, look, either this is an important thing for users to know or it isn’t. If it’s important for users to know, then it just seems bizarre to go about ensuring that they know it in this extremely reactive way, where you make no real attempt to communicate it, but then when a single user very occasionally says something that sometimes gets interpreted by some people as implying the opposite of the thing, you ban that user. You’re saying “Said, stop telling people X!” And quite aside from “But I haven’t actually done that”, my response, simply from a UX design perspective, is “Sure, but have you actually tried just telling people ¬X?”

Have you checked that users understand that they don’t have an obligation to respond to comments?

If they don’t, then it sure seems like some effort should be spent on conveying this. Right? (If not, then what’s the point of all of this?)

Second, concerning the second half of your comment:

Frankly, this whole perspective you describe just seems bizarre.

Of course I can’t possibly create a formal obligation to respond to comments. Of course ... (read more)

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[-]habryka
2019

(I am not planning to engage further at this point. 

My guess is you can figure out what I mean by various things I have said by asking other LessWrong users, since I don't think I am saying particularly complicated things, and I think I've communicated enough of my generators so that most people reading this can understand what the rules are that we are setting without having to be worried that they will somehow accidentally violate them. 

My guess is we also both agree that it is not necessary for moderators and users to come to consensus in cases like this. The moderation call is made, it might or might not improve things, and you are either capable of understanding what we are aiming for, or we'll continue to take some moderator actions until things look better by our models. I think we've both gone far beyond our duty of effort to explain where we are coming from and what our models are.)

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-4Said Achmiz
This seems like an odd response. In the first part of the grandparent comment, I asked a couple of questions. I can’t possibly “figure out what you mean” in those cases, since they were questions about what you’ve done or haven’t done, and about what you think of something I asked. In the second part of the grandparent comment, I gave arguments for why some things you said seem wrong or incoherent. There, too, “figuring out what you mean” seems like an inapplicable concept. You and the other moderators have certainly written many words. But only the last few comments on this topic have contained even an attempted explanation of what problem you’re trying to solve (this “enforcement of norms” thing), and there, you’ve not only not “gone far beyond your duty” to explain—you’ve explicitly disclaimed any attempt at explanation. You’ve outright said that you won’t explain and won’t try!
2Jiro
It's important for users to know when it comes up. It doesn't come up much except with you.
[-]Raemon
1111

(I wrote the following before habryka wrote his message)

While I still have some disagreement here about how much of this conversation gets rendered moot, I do agree this is a fairly obvious good thing to do which would help in general, and help at least somewhat with the things I've been expressing concerns about in this particular discussion. 

The challenge is communicating the right things to users at the moments they actually would be useful to know (there are lots and lots of potentially important/useful things for users to know about the site, and trying to say all of them would turn into noise).

But, I think it'd be fairly tractable to have a message like "btw, if this conversation doesn't seem productive to you, consider downvoting it and moving on with your day [link to some background]" appear when, say, a user has downvoted-and-replied to a user twice in one comment thread or something (or when ~2 other users in a thread have done so)

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[-]Said Achmiz
100

But, I think it’d be fairly tractable to have a message like “btw, if this conversation doesn’t seem productive to you, consider downvoting it and moving on with your day [link to some background]” appear when, say, a user has downvoted-and-replied to a user twice in one comment thread or something (or when ~2 other users in a thread have done so)

This definitely seems like a good direction for the design of such a feature, yeah. (Some finessing is needed, no doubt, but I do think that something like this approach looks likely to be workable and effective.)

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-8Said Achmiz
3Said Achmiz
Do I understand you correctly as saying that the problem, specifically, is… that people reading my comments might, or do, get a mistaken impression that there exists on Less Wrong some sort of social norm which holds that authors have a social obligation to respond to comments on their posts? ---------------------------------------- That aside, I have questions about this rate limit: * Does it apply to all posts of any kind, written by anyone? More specifically: * Does it apply to both personal and frontpage posts? * Does it apply to posts written by moderators? Posts written about me (or specifically addressing me)? Posts written by moderators about me? * Does it apply to this post? (I assume that it must not, since you mention that you’d like me to make a case that so-and-so, you say “I am interested in what Said actually prefers here”, etc., but just want to confirm this) EDIT: See below * Does it apply to “open thread” type posts (where the post itself is just a “container”, so to speak, and entirely different conversations may be happening under different top-level comments)? * Does it apply to my own posts? (That would be very strange, of course, but it wouldn’t be the strangest edge case that’s ever been left unhandled in a feature implementation, so seems worth checking…) * Does it apply retroactively to existing posts (including very old posts), or only new posts going forward? * Is there any way for a post author to disable this rate limit, or opt out of it? * Does the rate limit reset at a specific time each week, or is there simply a check for whether 3 posts have been written in the period starting one week before current time? * Is there any rate limit on editing comments, or only posting new ones? (It is presumably not the intent to have the rate limit triggered by fixing a typo, for instance…) * Is there a way for me to see the status of the rate limit prior to posting, or do I only find out whether the limit’s active when I
5Raemon
Aww christ I am very sorry about this. I had planned to ship the "posts can be manually overridden to ignore rate limiting" feature first thing this morning and apply it to this post, but I forgot that you'd still have made some comments less than a week ago which would block you for awhile. I agree that was a really terrible experience and I should have noticed it. The feature is getting deployed now and will probably be live within a half hour.  For now, I'm manually applying the "ignore rate limit" flag to posts that seem relevant. (I'll likely do a migration backfill on all posts by admins that are tagged "Site Meta". I haven't made a call yet about Open Threads) I think some of your questions are answered in the previous comment: I'll write a more thorough response after we've finished deploying the "ignoreRateLimits flag for posts" PR.
2Ruby
Site Meta posts contains a lot more moderation, so not sure we should do that.
2Raemon
Basically yes, although I note I said a lot of other words here that  were all fairly important, including the links back to previous comments. For example, it's important that I think you are factually incorrect about there being "normatively correct general principles" that people who don't engage with your comments "should be interpreted as ignorant". (While I recall you explicitly disclaiming such an obligation in some other recent comments... if you don't think there is some kind of social norm about this, why did you previously use phrasing like "there is always such an obligation" and "Then they shouldn’t post on a discussion forum, should they? What is the point of posting here, if you’re not going to engage with commenters?". Even if you think most of your comments don't have the described effect, I think the linked comment straightforwardly implies a social norm. And I think the attitude in that comment shines through in many of your other comments) I think my actual crux "somehow, at the end of the day, people feel comfortable ignoring and/or downvoting your comments if they don't think they'll be productive to engage with."  I believe "Said's commenting style actively pushes against this in a norm-enforcing-feeling way", but, as noted in the post, I'm still kind of confused about that (and I'll say explicitly here: I am still not sure I've named the exact problem). I said a whole lot of words about various problems and caveats and how they fit together and I don't think you can simplify it down to "the problem is X". I said at the end, a major crux is "Said can adhere to the spirit of '“don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with your comments'," where "spirit" is doing some important work of indicating the problem is fuzzy. We've given you a ton of feedback about this over 5-6 years. I'm happy to talk or answer questions for a couple more days if the questions look like they're aimed at 'actually figure out how to comply with the spirit of
[-]Said Achmiz
179

Basically yes, although I note I said a lot of other words here that were all fairly important, including the links back to previous comments. For example, it’s important that I think you are factually incorrect about there being “normatively correct general principles” that people who don’t engage with your comments “should be interpreted as ignorant”.

Well, no doubt most or all of what you wrote was important, but by “important” do you specifically mean “forms part of the description of what you take to be ‘the problem’, which this moderation action is attempting to solve”?

For example, as far as the “normatively correct general principles” thing goes—alright, so you think I’m factually incorrect about this particular thing I said once.[1] Let’s take for granted that I disagree. Well, and is that… a moderation-worthy offense? To disagree (with the mods? with the consensus—established how?—of Less Wrong? with anyone?) about what is essentially a philosophical claim? Are you suggesting that your correctness on this is so obvious that disagreeing can only constitute either some sort of bad faith, or blameworthy ignorance? That hardly seems true!

Or, take the links. One of them is cl... (read more)

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7Ben Pace
The philosophical disagreement is related-to but not itself the thing I believe Ray is saying is bad. The claim I understand Ray to be making is that he believes you gave a false account of the site-wide norms about what users are obligated to do, and that this is reflective of you otherwise implicitly enforcing such a norm many times that you comment on posts. Enforcing norms on behalf of a space that you don't have buy-in for and that the space would reject tricks people into wasting their time and energy trying to be good citizens of the space in a way that isn't helping and isn't being asked of them. If you did so, I think that behavior ought to be clearly punished in some way. I think this regardless of whether you earnestly believed that an obligation-to-reply-to-comments was a site-wide norm, and also regardless of whether you were fully aware that you were doing so. I think it's often correct to issue a blanket punishment of a costly behavior even on the occasions that it is done unknowingly, to ensure that there is a consistent incentive against the behavior — similar to how it is typically illegal to commit a crime even if you aren't aware what you did was a crime.
[-]Said Achmiz
101

The claim I understand Ray to be making is that he believes you gave a false account of the site-wide norms about what users are obligated to do

Is that really the claim? I must object to it, if that’s so. I don’t think I’ve ever made any false claims about what social norms obtain on Less Wrong (and to the extent that some of my comments were interpreted that way, I was quick to clearly correct that misinterpretation).

Certainly the “normatively correct general principles” comment didn’t contain any such false claims. (And Raemon does not seem to be claiming otherwise.) So, the question remains: what exactly is the relevance of the philosophical disagreement? How is it connected to any purported violations of site rules or norms or anything?

… and that this is reflective of you otherwise implicitly enforcing such a norm many times that you comment on posts

I am not sure what this means. I am not a moderator, so it’s not clear to me how I can enforce any norm. (I can exemplify conformance to a norm, of course, but that, in this case, would be me replying to comments on my posts, which is not what we’re talking about here. And I can encourage or even demand conformance to some fa... (read more)

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6Raemon
For a quick answer connecting the dots between "What does the recent Duncan/Said conflict have to do with Said's past behavior," I think your behavior in the various you/Duncan threads was bad in basically the same way we gave you a mod warning about 5 years ago, and also similar to a preliminary warning we gave you 6 years ago (in intercom, which ended in us deciding to take no action ath the time) (i.e. some flavor of aggressiveness/insultingness, along with demanding more work from others than you were bringing yourself). As I said, I cut you some slack for it because of some patterns Duncan brought to the table, but not that much slack.  The previous mod warning said "we'd ban you for a month if you did it again", I don't really feel great about that since over the past 5 years there's been various comments that flirted with the same behavior and the cost of evaluating it each time is pretty high. I will think on whether this changes anything for me. I do think it's helpful, offhand I don't feel that it completely (or obviously more than 50%) solves the problem, but, I do appreciate it and will think on it.
[-]Said Achmiz
185

… bad in basically the same way we gave you a mod warning about 5 years ago …

I wonder if you find this comment by Benquo (i.e., the author of the post in question; note that this comment was written just months after that post) relevant, in any way, to your views on the matter?

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4Raemon
Yeah I do find that comment/concept important. I think I basically already counting that class of thing in the list of positive things I'd mentioned elsethread, but yes, I am grateful to you for that. (Benquo being one to say it in that context is a bit more evidence of it's weight which I had missed before, but I do think I was already weighting the concept approximately the right amount for the right reasons. Partly from having already generally updated on some parts of the Benquo worldview)
5Said Achmiz
Please note, my point in linking that comment wasn’t to suggest that the things Benquo wrote are necessarily true and that the purported truth of those assertions, in itself, bears on the current situation. (Certainly I do agree with what he wrote—but then, I would, wouldn’t I?) Rather, I was making a meta-level point. Namely: your thesis is that there is some behavior on my part which is bad, and that what makes it bad is that it makes post authors feel… bad in some way (“attacked”? “annoyed”? “discouraged”? I couldn’t say what the right adjective is, here), and that as a consequence, they stop posting on Less Wrong. And as the primary example of this purported bad behavior, you linked the discussion in the comments of the “Zetetic Explanation” post by Benquo (which resulted in the mod warning you noted). But the comment which I linked has Benquo writing, mere months afterward, that the sort of critique/objection/commentary which I write (including the sort which I wrote in response to his aforesaid post) is “helpful and important”, “very important to the success of an epistemic community”, etc. (Which, I must note, is tremendously to Benquo’s credit. I have the greatest respect for anyone who can view, and treat, their sometime critics in such a fair-minded way.) This seems like very much the opposite of leaving Less Wrong as a result of my commenting style. It seems to me that when the prime example you provide of my participation in discussions on Less Wrong purportedly being the sort of thing that drive authors away, actually turns out to be an example of exactly the opposite—of an author (whose post I criticized, in somewhat harsh terms) fairly soon (months) thereafter saying that my critical comments are good and important to the community and that I should continue… … well, then regardless of whether you agree with the author in question about whether or not my comments are good/important/whatever, the fact that he holds this view casts very serious dou
6Raemon
The reason it's not additional evidence to me is that I, too, find value in the comments you write for the reasons Benquo states, despite also finding them annoying at the time. So, Benquo's response here seems like an additional instance of my viewpoint here, rather than a counterexample. (though I'm not claiming Benquo agrees with me on everything on this domain)
5Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Said is asking Ray, not me, but I strongly disagree. Point 1 is that a black raven is not strong evidence against white ravens. (Said knows this, I think.) Point 2 is that a behavior which displeases many authors can still be pleasant or valuable to some authors. (Said knows this, I think.) Point 3 is that benquo's view on even that specific comment is not the only author-view that matters; benquo eventually being like "this critical feedback was great" does not mean that other authors watching the interaction at the time did not feel "ugh, I sure don't want to write a post and have to deal with comments like this one." (Said knows this, I think.) (Notably, benquo once publicly stated that he suspected a rough interaction would likely have gone much better under Duncan moderation norms specifically; if we're updating on benquo's endorsements then it comes out to "both sets of norms useful," presumably for different things.) I'd say it casts mild doubt on the thesis, at best, and that the most likely resolution is that Ray ends up feeling something like "yeah, fair, this did not turn out to be the best example," not "oh snap, you're right, turns out it was all a house of cards." (This will be my only comment in this chain, so as to avoid repeating past cycles.)
9Said Achmiz
A black raven is, indeed, not strong evidence against white ravens. But that’s not quite the right analogy. The more accurate analogy would go somewhat like this: Alice: White ravens exist! Bob: Yeah? For real? Where, can I see? Alice (looking around and then pointing): Right… there! That one! Bob (peering at the bird in question): But… that raven is actually black? Like, it’s definitely black and not white at all. Now not only is Bob (once again, as he was at the start) in the position of having exactly zero examples of white ravens (Alice’s one purported example having been revealed to be not an example at all), but—and perhaps even more importantly!—Bob has reason to doubt not only Alice’s possession of any examples of her claim (of white ravens existing), but her very ability to correctly perceive what color any given raven is. Now if Alice says “Well, I’ve seen a lot of white ravens, though”, Bob might quite reasonably reply: “Have you, though? Really? Because you just said that that raven was white, and it is definitely, totally black.” What’s more, not only Bob but also Alice herself ought rightly to significantly downgrade her confidence in her belief in white ravens (by a degree commensurate with how big a role her own supposed observations of white ravens have played in forming that belief). Just so. But, once again, we must make our analysis more specific and more precise in order for it to be useful. There are two points to make in response to this. First is what I said above: the point is not just that the commenting style/approach in question is valuable to some authors (although even that, by itself, is surely important!), but that it turns out to be valuable specifically to the author who served as an—indeed, as the—example of said commenting style/approach being bad. This calls into question not just the thesis that said approach is bad in general, but also the weight of any purported evidence of the approach’s badness, which comes from the sam
2Raemon
Answering some other questions: By default, the rate limit applies to all posts, unless we've made an exception for it. There are two exceptions to it: 1. I just shipped the "ignore rate limits" flag on posts, which authors or admins can set so that a given post allows rate-limited comments to comment without restriction. 2. I haven't shipped yet, but expect within the next day to ship "rate-limited authors can comment on their own posts without restriction." (for the immediate future this just applies to authors, I expect to ship something that makes it work for coauthors) In general, we are starting by rolling out the simplest versions of the rate-limiting feature (which is being used on many users, not just you), and solving problems as we notice them. I acknowledge this makes for some bad experiences along the way. I think I stand by that decision because I'm not even sure rate limits will turn out to work as a moderator tool, and investing like 3 months of upfront work ironing out the bugs first doesn't seem like the right call.  For the general question of "whether a given such-and-such post will be rate limited", the answer will route through "will individual authors choose to do set "ignoreRateLimit", and/or will site admins choose to do it?".  Ruby and I have some disagreements on how important it is to set the flag on moderation posts. I personally think it makes sense to be extra cautious about limiting people's ability to speak in discussions that will impact their future ability to speak, since those can snowball and I think people are rightly wary of that.  There are some other tradeoffs important to @Ruby, which I guess he can elaborate on if he wants.  For now, I'm toggling on the ignoreRateLimits flag on most of my own moderation posts (I've currently done so for LW Team is adjusting moderation policy and "Rate limiting" as a mod tool) Other random questions: * Re: Open threads – I haven't made a call yet, but I'm leaving the flag disabled
2Ruby
A lot of this is that the set of "all moderation posts" covers a wide range of topics and the potential set "all rate limited users" might include a wide diversity of users, making me reluctant to commit upfront to not rate limits apply blanketly across the board on moderation posts. The concern about excluding people from conversations that affect whether they get to speak is a valid consideration, but I think there are others too. Chiefly, people are likely rate limited primarily because they get in the way of productive conversation, and in so far as I care about moderation conversations going well, I might want to continue to exclude rate limited users there. Note that there are ways, albeit with friction, for people to get to weigh in on moderation questions freely. If it seemed necessary, I'd be down with creating special un-rate-limited side-posts for moderation posts. ---------------------------------------- I am realizing that what seems reasonable here will depend on your conception of rate limits. A couple of conceptions you might have: 1. You're currently not producing stuff that meets the bar for LessWrong, but you're writing a lot, so we'll rate limit you as a warning with teeth to up your quality. 2. We would have / are close to banning you, however we think rate limits might serve either as 1. a sufficient disincentive against the actions we dislike 2. a restriction that simply stops you getting into unproductive things, e.g. Demon Threads Regarding 2., a banned user wouldn't get to participate in moderation discussions either, so under that frame, it's not clear rate limited users should get to. I guess it really depends if it was more of a warning / light rate ban or something more severe, close to an actual ban. I can say more here, not exactly a complete thought. Will do so if people are interested.
2Raemon
I just shipped the "ignore rate limit" flag for posts, and removed the rate limit for this post. All users can set the flag on individual posts.  Currently they have to set it for each individual post. I think it's moderately likely we'll make it such that users can set it as a default setting, although I haven't talked it through with other team members yet so can't make an entirely confident statement on it. We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent) I'm working on a longer response to the other questions.
[-]Three-Monkey Mind
119

We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)

I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you've just implemented, but…

Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users' posts? Shouldn't I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?

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4Ruby
100+ karma means something like you've been vetted for some degree of investment in the site and enculturation, reducing the likelihood you'll do something with poor judgment and ill intention. I might worry about new users creating posts that ignore rate limits, then attracting all the rate-limited new users who were not having good effects on the site to come comment there (haven't thought about it hard, but it's the kind of thing we consider).  The important thing is that the way the site currently works, any behavior on the site is likely to affect other parts of the site, such that to ensure the site is a well-kept garden, the site admins do have to consider which users should get which privileges. (There are similarly restrictions on which users can be users from which posts.)
2habryka
I expect Ray will respond more. My guess is you not being able to comment on this specific post is unintentional and it does indeed seem good to have a place where you can write more of a response to the moderation stuff. The other details will likely be figured out as the feature gets used. My guess is how things behave are kind of random until we spend more time figuring out the details. My sense was that the feature was kind of thrown together and is now being iterated on more.
0Said Achmiz
The discussion under this post is an excellent example of the way that a 3-per-week per-post comment limit makes any kind of useful discussion effectively impossible.
-1Zack_M_Davis
I continue to be disgusted with this arbitrary moderator harrassment of a long-time, well-regarded user, apparently on the pretext that some people don't like his writing style. Achmiz is not a spammer or a troll, and has made many highly-upvoted contributions. If someone doesn't like Achmiz's comments, they're free to downvote (just as I am free to upvote). If someone doesn't want to receive comments from Achmiz, they're free to use already-existing site functionality to block him from commenting on their own posts. If someone doesn't like his three-year-old views about an author's responsibility or lack thereof to reply to criticisms, they're free to downvote or offer counterarguments. Why isn't that the end of the matter? Elsewhere, Raymond Arnold complains that Achmiz isn't "corrigible about actually integrating the spirit-of-our-models into his commenting style". Arnold also proposes that awareness of frame control—a concept that Achmiz has criticized—become something one is "obligated to learn, as a good LW citizen". I find this attitude shockingly anti-intellectual. Since when is it the job of a website administrator to micromanage how intellectuals think and write, and what concepts they need to accept? (As contrated to removing low-quality, spam, or off-topic comments; breaking up flame wars, &c.) My first comment on Overcoming Bias was on 15 December 2007. I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup on 21 February 2008. Back then, there was no conept of being a "good citizen" of Overcoming Bias. It was a blog. People read the blog, and left comments when they had something to say, speaking in their own voice, accountable to no authority but their own perception of reality, with no obligation to be corrigible to the spirit of someone else's models. Achmiz's first comment on Less Wrong was in May 2010. We were here first. This is our garden, too—or it was. Why is the mod team persecuting us? By what right—by what code—by what standard? Perhaps it will be
[-]habryka
298

I think Oli Habryka has the integrity to give me a staight, no-bullshit answer here.

Sure, but... I think I don't know what question you are asking. I will say some broad things here, but probably best for you to try to operationalize your question more. 

Some quick thoughts: 

  • LessWrong totally has prerequisites. I don't think you necessarily need to be an atheist to participate in LessWrong, but if you straightforwardly believe in the Christian god, and haven't really engaged with the relevant arguments on the site, and you comment on posts that assume that there is no god, I will likely just ban you or ask you to stop. There are many other dimensions for which this is also true. Awareness of stuff like Frame Control seems IMO reasonable as a prerequisite, though not one I would defend super hard. Does sure seem like a somewhat important concept.
  • Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism is IMO one of the central moderation principles of LessWrong. I have huge warning flags around your language here and feel like it's doing something pretty similar to the outraged calls for "censorship" that Eliezer refers to in that post, but I might just be misunderstanding you. In-general, LessWr
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[-]Vladimir_Nesov
160

But when the fools begin their invasion, some communities think themselves too good to use their banhammer for—gasp!—censorship.

I affirm importance of the distinction between defending a forum from an invasion of barbarians (while guiding new non-barbarians safely past the defensive measures) and treatment of its citizens. The quote is clearly noncentral for this case.

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[-]Zack_M_Davis
14-6

Thanks, to clarify: I don't intend to make a "how dare the moderators moderate Less Wrong" objection. Rather, the objection is, "How dare the moderators permanently restrict the account of Said Achmiz, specifically, who has been here since 2010 and has 13,500 karma." (That's why the grandparent specifies "long-time, well-regarded", "many highly-upvoted contributions", "We were here first", &c.) I'm saying that Said Achmiz, specifically, is someone you very, very obviously want to have free speech as a first-class citizen on your platform, even though you don't want to accept literally any speech (which is why the grandparent mentions "removing low-quality [...] comments" as a legitimate moderator duty).

Note that "permanently restrict the account of" is different from "moderate". For example, on 6 April, Arnold asked Achmiz to stop commenting on a particular topic, and Achmiz complied. I have no objections to that kind of moderation. I also have no objections to rate limits on particular threads, or based on recent karma scores, or for new users. The thing that I'm accusing of being arbitrary persecution is specifically the 3-comments-per-post-per-week restriction on Said Achmiz... (read more)

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[-]habryka
*266

Hmm, I am still not fully sure about the question (your original comment said "I think Oli Habryka has the integrity to give me a staight, no-bullshit answer here", which feels like it implies a question that should have a short and clear answer, which I am definitely not providing here), but this does clarify things a bit. 

There are a bunch of different dimensions to unpack here, though I think I want to first say that I am quite grateful for a ton of stuff that Said has done over the years, and have (for example) recently recommended a grant to him from the Long Term Future Fund to allow him to do more of that kind of the kind of work he has done in the past (and would continue recommending grants to him in the future). I think Said's net-contributions to the problems that I care about have likely been quite positive, though this stuff is pretty messy and I am not super confident here. 

One solution that I actually proposed to Ray (who is owning this decision) was that instead of banning Said we do something like "purchase him out of his right to use LessWrong" or something like that, by offering him like $10k-$100k to change his commenting style or to comment less in ce... (read more)

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[-]Elizabeth
*1412

But second, and more importantly, there is a huge bias in karma towards positive karma.

 

I don't know if it's good that there's a positive bias towards karma, but I'm pretty sure the generator for it is a good impulse. I worry that calls to handle things with downvoting lead people to weaken that generator in ways that make the site worse overall even if it is the best way to handle Said-type cases in particular. 

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7Zack_M_Davis
I think I mostly meant "answer" in the sense of "reply" (to my complaint about rate-limiting Achmiz being an outrage, rather than to a narrower question); sorry for the ambiguity. I have a lot of extremely strong disagreements with this, but they can wait three months.
2habryka
Cool, makes sense. Also happy to chat in-person sometime if you want. 
3Celarix
What other community on the entire Internet would offer 5 to 6 figures to any user in exchange for them to clean up some of their behavior? how is this even a reasonable- Isn't this community close in idea terms to Effective Altruism? Wouldn't it be better to say "Said, if you change your commenting habits in the manner we prescribe, we'll donate $10k-$100k to a charity of your choice?" I can't believe there's a community where, even for a second, having a specific kind of disagreement with the moderators and community (while also being a long-time contributor) results in considering a possibly-six-figure buyout. I've been a member on other sites with members who were both a) long-standing contributors and b) difficult to deal with in moderation terms, and the thought of any sort of payout, even $1, would not have even been thought of.
[-]habryka
1510

Seems sad! Seems like there is an opportunity for trade here.

Salaries in Silicon Valley are high and probably just the time for this specific moderation decision has cost around 2.5 total staff weeks for engineers that can make probably around $270k on average in industry, so that already suggests something in the $10k range of costs.

And I would definitely much prefer to just give Said that money instead of spending that time arguing, if there is a mutually positive agreement to be found.

We can also donate instead, but I don't really like that. I want to find a trade here if one exists, and honestly I prefer Said having more money more than most charities having more money, so I don't really get what this would improve. Also, not everyone cares about donating to charity, and that's fine.

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5Celarix
The amount of moderator time spent on this issue is both very large and sad, I agree, but I think it causes really bad incentives to offer money to users with whom moderation has a problem. Even if only offered to users in good standing over the course of many years, that still represents a pretty big payday if you can play your cards right and annoy people just enough to fall in the middle between "good user" and "ban". I guess I'm having trouble seeing how LW is more than a (good!) Internet forum. The Internet forums I'm familiar with would have just suspended or banned Said long, long ago (maybe Duncan, too, I don't know). I do want to note that my problem isn't with offering Said money - any offer to any user of any Internet community feels... extremely surprising to me. Now, if you were contracting a user to write stuff on your behalf, sure, that's contracting and not unusual. I'm not even necessarily offended by such an offer, just, again, extremely surprised.
4habryka
I think if you model things as just "an internet community" this will give you the wrong intuitions.  I currently model the extended rationality and AI Alignment community as a professional community which for many people constitutes their primary work context, is responsible for their salary, and is responsible for a lot of daily infrastructure they use. I think viewing it through that lens, it makes sense that limiting someone's access to some piece of community infrastructure can be quite costly, and somehow compensating people for the considerate cost that lack of access can cause seems reasonable.  I am not too worried about this being abusable. There are maybe 100 users who seem to me to use LessWrong as much as Said and who have contributed a similar amount to the overall rationality and AI Alignment project that I care about. At $10k paying each one of them would only end up around $1MM, which is less than the annual budget of Lightcone, and so doesn't seem totally crazy.
3Celarix
This, plus Vaniver's comment, has made me update - LW has been doing some pretty confusing things if you look at it like a traditional Internet community that make more sense if you look at it as a professional community, perhaps akin to many of the academic pursuits of science and high-level mathematics. The high dollar figures quoted in many posts confused me until now.
2Richard_Ngo
I've had a nagging feeling in the past that the rationalist community isn't careful enough about the incentive problems and conflicts of interest that arise when transferring reasonably large sums of money (despite being very careful about incentive landscapes in other ways—e.g. setting the incentives right for people to post, comment, etc, on LW—and also being fairly scrupulous in general). Most of the other examples I've seen have been kinda small-scale and so I haven't really poked at them, but this proposal seems like it pretty clearly sets up terrible incentives, and is also hard to distinguish from nepotism. I think most people in other communities have gut-level deontological instincts about money which help protect them against these problems (e.g. I take Celarix to be expressing this sort of sentiment upthread), which rationalists are more likely to lack or override—and although I think those people get a lot wrong about money too, cases like these sure seems like a good place to apply Chesterton's fence.
7Vaniver
It might help to think of LW as more like a small town's newspaper (with paid staff) than a hobbyist forum (with purely volunteer labor), which considers issues with "business expense" lenses instead of "personal budget" lenses. 
1Celarix
Yeah, that does seem like what LW wants to be, and I have no problem with that. A payout like this doesn't really fit neatly into my categories of what money paid to a person is for, and that may be on my assumptions more than anything else. Said could be hired, contracted, paid for a service he provides or a product he creates, paid for the rights to something he's made, paid to settle a legal issue... the idea of a payout to change part of his behavior around commenting on LW posts was just, as noted on my reply to habryka, extremely surprising.
6localdeity
Exactly.  It's hilarious and awesome.  (That is, the decision at least plausibly makes sense in context; and the fact that this is the result, as viewed from the outside, is delightful.)
[-]Raemon
2413

We were here first. This is our garden, too—or it was. Why is the mod team persecuting us? By what right—by what code—by what standard?

I endorse much of Oliver's replies, and I'm mostly burnt out from this convo at the moment so can't do the followthrough here I'd ideally like. But, it seemed important to publicly state some thoughts here before the moment passed:

Yes, the bar for banning or permanently limiting the speech of a longterm member in Said's reference class is very high, and I'd treat it very differently from moderating a troll, crank, or confused newcomer. But to say you can never do such moderation proves too much – that longterm users can never have enough negative effects to warrant taking permanent action on. My model of Eliezer-2009 believed and intended something similar in Well Kept Gardens. 

I don't think the Spirit of LessWrong 2009 actually supports you on the specific claims you're making here.

As for “by what right do we moderate?” Well, LessWrong had died, no one was owning it, people spontaneously elected Vaniver as leader, Vaniver delegated to habrkya who founded the LessWrong team and got Eliezer's buy-in, and now we have 6 years of track of reco... (read more)

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7Ruby
Not to respond to everything you've said, but I question the argument (as I understand it) that because someone is {been around a long-time, well-regarded, many highly-upvoted contributions, lots of karma}, this means they are necessarily someone who at the end of the day you want around / are net positive for the site. Good contributions are relevant. But so are costs. Arguing against the costs seems valid, saying benefits outweigh costs seems valid, but assuming this is what you're saying, I don't think just saying someone has benefits means that obviously obviously you want them as unrestricted citizen. (I think in fact how it's actually gone is that all of those positive factors you list have gone into moderators decisions so far in not outright banning Said over the years, and why Ray preferred to rate limit Said rather than ban him. If Said was all negatives, no positives, he'd have been banned long ago.) Correct me though if there's a deeper argument here that I'm not seeing.
[-]Said Achmiz
118

In my experience (e.g., with Data Secrets Lox), moderators tend to be too hesitant to ban trolls (i.e., those who maliciously and deliberately subvert the good functioning of the forum) and cranks (i.e., those who come to the forum just to repeatedly push their own agenda, and drown out everything else with their inability to shut up or change the subject), while at the same time being too quick to ban forum regulars—both the (as these figures are usually cited) 1% of authors and the 9% of commenters—for perceived offenses against “politeness” or “swipes against the outgroup” or “not commenting in a prosocial way” or other superficial violations. These two failure modes, which go in opposite directions, somewhat paradoxically coexist quite often.

It is therefore not at all strange or incoherent to (a) agree with Eliezer that moderators should not let “free speech” concerns stop them from banning trolls and cranks, while also (b) thinking that the moderators are being much too willing (even, perhaps, to the point of ultimately self-destructive abusiveness) to ban good-faith participants whose preferences about, and quirks of, communicative styles, are just slightly to the side of the... (read more)

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9Said Achmiz
Before there can be any question of “awareness” of the concept being a prerequisite, surely it’s first necessary that the concept be explained in some coherent way? As far as I know, no such thing has been done. (Aella’s post on the subject was manifestly nonsensical, to say the least; if that’s the best explanation we’ve got, then I think that it’s safe to say that the concept is incoherent nonsense, and using it does more harm than good.) But perhaps I’ve missed it?
4Ruby
In the comment Zack cites, Raemon said the same when raising the idea of making it a prerequisite:
4Raemon
Also for everyone's awareness, I have since wrote up Tabooing "Frame Control" (which I'd hope would be like part 1 of 2 posts on the topic), but the reception of the post,  i.e. 60ish karma, didn't seem like everyone was like "okay yeah this concept is great", and I currently think the ball is still in my court for either explaining the idea better, refactoring it into other ideas, or abandoning the project.
2habryka
Yep! As far as I remember the thread Ray said something akin to "it might be reasonable to treat this as a prerequisite if someone wrote a better explanation of it and there had been a bunch of discussion of this", but I don't fully remember. Aella's post did seem like it had a bunch of issues and I would feel kind of uncomfortable with having a canonical concept with that as its only reference (I overall liked the post and thought it was good, but I don't think a concept should reach canonicity just on the basis of that post, given its specific flaws).
8philh
Arnold says he is thinking about maybe proposing that, in future, after he has done the work to justify it and paying attention to how people react to it.
[-]Wei Dai
10081

(Tangentially) If users are allowed to ban other users from commenting on their posts, how can I tell when the lack of criticism in the comments of some post means that nobody wanted to criticize it (which is a very useful signal that I would want to update on), or that the author has banned some or all of their most prominent/frequent critics? In addition, I think many users may be mislead by lack of criticism if they're simply not aware of the second possibility or have forgotten it. (I think I knew it but it hasn't entered my conscious awareness for a while, until I read this post today.)

(Assuming there's not a good answer to the above concerns) I think I would prefer to change this feature/rule to something like allowing the author of a post to "hide" commenters or individual comments, which means that those comments are collapsed by default (and marked as "hidden by the post author") but can be individually expanded, and each user can set an option to always expand those comments for themselves.

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6gilch
Maybe a middle ground would be to give authors a double-strong downvote power for comments on their posts. A comment with low enough karma is already hidden by default, and repeated strong downvotes without further response would tend chill rather than inflame the ensuing discussion, or at least push the bulk of it away from the author's arena, without silencing critics completely.
2Wei Dai
I think a problem that my proposal tries to solve, and this one doesn't, is that some authors seem easily triggered by some commenters, and apparently would prefer not to see their comments at all. (Personally if I was running a discussion site I might not try so hard to accommodate such authors, but apparently they include some authors that the LW team really wants to keep or attract.)
5Adam Zerner
To me it seems unlikely that there'd be enough banning to prevent criticism from surfacing. Skimming through https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation, the amount of bans seems to be pretty small. And if there is an important critique to be made I'd expect it to be something that more than the few banned users would think of and decide to post a comment on.
[-]Wei Dai
4139

And if there is an important critique to be made I’d expect it to be something that more than the few banned users would think of and decide to post a comment on.

This may be true in some cases, but not all. My experience here comes from cryptography where it often takes hundreds of person-hours to find a flaw in a new idea (which can sometimes be completely fatal), and UDT, where I found a couple of issues in my own initial idea only after several months/years of thinking (hence going to UDT1.1 and UDT2). I think if you ban a few users who might have the highest motivation to scrutinize your idea/post closely, you could easily reduce the probability (at any given time) of anyone finding an important flaw by a lot.

Another reason for my concern is that the bans directly disincentivize other critics, and people who are willing to ban their critics are often unpleasant for critics to interact with in other ways, further disincentivizing critiques. I have this impression for Duncan myself which may explain why I've rarely commented on any of his posts. I seem to remember once trying to talk him out of (what seemed to me like) overreacting to a critique and banning the critic on Faceb... (read more)

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4Adam Zerner
Hm, interesting points. My impression is that there are some domains for which this is true, but those are the exception rather than the rule. However, this impression is just based off of, err, vaguely querying my brain? I'm not super confident in it. And your claim is one that I think is "important if true". So then, it does seem worth an investigation. Maybe enumerating through different domains and asking "Is it true here? Is it true here?". One thing I'd like to point out is that, being a community, something very similar is happening. Only a certain type of person comes to LessWrong (this is true of all communities to some extent; they attract a subset of people). It's not that "outsiders" are explicitly banned, they just don't join and don't thus don't comment. So then, effectively, ideas presented here currently aren't available to "outsiders" for critiques. I think there is a trade off at play: the more you make ideas available to "outsiders" the lower the chance something gets overlooked, but it also has the downside of some sort of friction. (Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I feel like I didn't articulate it very well but couldn't easily think of a better way to say it.) Good point. I think that's true and something to factor in.
5Vaniver
While the current number of bans is pretty small, I think this is in part because lots of users don't know about the option to ban people from their posts. (See here, for example.)
2Adam Zerner
That makes sense. Still, even if it were more well known, I wouldn't expect the number of bans to reach the point where it is causing real problems with respect to criticism surfacing.
4lsusr
One solution is to limit the number of banned users to a small fraction of overall commentors. I've written 297 posts so far and have banned only 3 users from commenting on them. (I did not ban Duncan or Said.) My highest-quality criticism comes from users who I have never even considered banning. Their comments are consistently well-reasoned and factually correct.
3ChristianKl
What exactly does "nobody wanted to criticize it" signal that you don't get from high/low karma votes?
[-]Raemon
*1515

Some UI thoughts as I think about this:

Right now, you see total karma for posts and comments, and total vote count, but not the number of upvotes/downvotes. So you can't actually tell when something is controversial.

One reason for this is because we (once) briefly tried turning this on, and immediately found it made the site much more stressful and anxiety inducing. Getting a single downvote felt like "something is WRONG!" which didn't feel productive or useful. Another reason is that it can de-anonymize strong-votes because their voting power is a less common number.

But, an idea I just had was that maybe we should expose that sort of information once a post becomes popular enough. Like maybe over 75 karma. [Better idea: once a post has a certain number of votes. Maybe at least 25]. At that point you have more of a sense of the overall karma distribution so individual votes feel less weighty, and also hopefully it's harder to infer individual voters.

Tagging @jp who might be interested.

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[-]Wei Dai
2211

I support exposing the number of upvotes/downvotes. (I wrote a userscript for GW to always show the total number of votes, which allows me to infer this somewhat.) However that doesn't address the bulk of my concerns, which I've laid out in more detail in this comment. In connection with karma, I've observed that sometimes a post is initially upvoted a lot, until someone posts a good critique, which then causes the karma of the post to plummet. This makes me think that the karma could be very misleading (even with upvotes/downvotes exposed) if the critique had been banned or disincentivized.

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3jp
We've been thinking about this for the EA Forum. I endorse Raemon's thoughts here, I think, but I know I can't pass the ITT of a more transparent side here.
[-]Vaniver
759

First, my read of both Said and Duncan is that they appreciate attention to the object level in conflicts like this. If what's at stake for them is a fact of the matter, shouldn't that fact get settled before considering other issues? So I will begin with that. What follows is my interpretation (mentioned here so I can avoid saying "according to me" each sentence).

In this comment, Said describes as bad "various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on", without specifically identifying Duncan as proposing that norm (tho I think it's heavily implied).

Then gjm objects to that characterization as a straw man.

In this comment Said defends it, pointing out that Duncan's standard of "critics should do some of the work of crossing the gap" is implicitly a rule against "asking people for examples of their claims [without anything else]", given that Duncan thinks asking for examples doesn't count as doing the work of crossing the gap. (Earlier in the conversation Duncan calls it 0% of the work.) I think the point as I have written it here is correct and uncontroversial; I think there is an important difference between the point as I wrot... (read more)

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[-]Said Achmiz
*142

Vaniver privately suggested to me that I may want to offer some commentary on what I could’ve done in this situation in order for it to have gone better, which I thought was a good and reasonable suggestion. I’ll do that in this comment, using Vaniver’s summary of the situation as a springboard of sorts.

In this comment, Said describes as bad “various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on”, without specifically identifying Duncan as proposing that norm (tho I think it’s heavily implied).

Then gjm objects to that characterization as a straw man.

So, first of all, yes, I was clearly referring to Duncan. (I didn’t expect that to be obscure to anyone who’d bother to read that subthread in the first place, and indeed—so far as I can tell—it was not. If anyone had been confused, they would presumably have asked “what do you mean?”, and then I’d have linked what I mean—which is pretty close to what happened anyway. This part, in any case, is not the problem.)

The obvious problem here is that “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”—taken literally—is, indeed, a strawman.

The question is, whose problem (to solve) is it?

There a... (read more)

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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
1213

In the response I would have wanted to see, Duncan would have clearly and correctly pointed to that difference. He is in favor of people asking for examples [combined with other efforts to cross the gap], does it himself, gives examples himself, and so on. The unsaid [without anything else] part is load-bearing and thus inappropriate to leave out or merely hint at. [Or, alternatively, using "ask people for examples" to refer to comments that do only that, as opposed to the conversational move which can be included or not in a comment with other moves.]

I agree that the hypothetical comment you describe as better is in fact better. I think something like ... twenty-or-so exchanges with Said ago, I would have written that comment?  I don't quite know how to weigh up [the comment I actually wrote is worse on these axes of prosocial cooperation and revealing cruxes and productively clarifying disagreement and so forth] with [having a justified true belief that putting forth that effort with Said in particular is just rewarded with more branches being created].

(e.g. there was that one time recently where Said said I'd blocked people due to disagreeing with me/criticizing me, and I s... (read more)

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[-]Ruby
*6931

At the risk of guessing wrong, and perhaps typical-mind-fallacying, I imagining that you're [rightly?] feeling a lot frustration, exasperation, and even despair about moderation on LessWrong. You've spend dozens (more?) and tens of thousands of words trying to make LessWrong the garden you think it ought to be (and to protect yourself here against attackers) and just to try to uphold, indeed basic standards for truthseeking discourse.  You've written that some small validation goes a long way, so this is me trying to say that I think your feelings have a helluva lot of validity.

I don't think that you and I share exactly the same ideals for LessWrong. PerfectLessWrong!Ruby and PerfectLessWrong!Duncan would be different (or heck, even just VeryGoodLessWrongs), though I also am pretty sure that you'd be much happier with my ideal, you'd think it was pretty good if not perfect. Respectable, maybe adequate. A garden.

And I'm really sad that the current LessWrong feels really really far short of my own ideals (and Ray of his ideals, and Oli of his ideals), etc. And not just short of a super-amazing-lofty-ideal, also short of a "this place is really under control" kind of ideal. I tak... (read more)

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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
253

But sir, you impugn my and my site's honor

This is fair, and I apologize; in that line I was speaking from despair and not particularly tracking Truth.

A [less straightforwardly wrong and unfair] phrasing would have been something like "this is not a Japanese tea garden; it is a British cottage garden."

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7Ruby
I have been to the Japanese tea garden in Portland, and found it exquisite, so I think get your referent there. Aye, indeed it is not that.
[-]Ruby
202

I probably rushed this comment out the door in a "defend my honor, set the record straight" instinct that I don't think reliably leads to good discourse and is not what I should be modeling on LessWrong. 

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[-]Vaniver
157

I didn't make it to every point, but hopefully you find this more of the substantive engagement you were hoping for.

I did, thanks.

gjm specifically noted the separation between the major issue of whether balance is required, and this other, narrower claim.

I think gjm's comment was missing the observation that "comment that just ask for examples" are themselves an example of "unproductive modes of discussion where he is constantly demanding more and more rigour and detail from his interlocutors while not providing it himself", and so it wasn't cleanly about "balance: required or not?". I think a reasonable reader could come away from that comment of gjm's uncertain whether or not Said simply saying "examples?" would count as an example.

My interpretation of this section is basically the double crux dots arguing over the labels they should have, with Said disagreeing strenuously with calling his mode "unproductive" (and elsewhere over whether labor is good or bad, or how best to minimize it) and moving from the concrete examples to an abstract pattern (I suspect because he thinks the former is easier to defend than the latter).

I should also note here that I don't think you have explici... (read more)

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8Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
To clarify: If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say "Examples?" would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say "Examples?" would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn't do their fair share of the labor. "Do you have examples?" is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so.  It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of "are we both contributing?" don't need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation.  Sometimes I'm the asker/learner and you're the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth. The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It's having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it. Said simply saying "examples?" is an example, then, but only because of the strong prior from his accumulated behavior; if the rule is something like "doing this <100x/wk is fine, doing it >100x/wk is less fine," then the question of whether a given instance "is an example" is slightly tricky. Yeah, you may have pinned it down (the disagreement).  I definitely don't (currently) think it's sensible to read the second comment that way, and certainly not sensible enough to mentally dock someone for not reading it that way even if that reading is technically available (which I agree it is).   I perhaps have some learned helplessness around what I can, in fact, expect from the mod team; I claim that if I had believed that this would be received as defensible I would've done that instead. At the time, I felt helpless and alone*/had no expectati
[-]Said Achmiz
12-4

The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.

But why should this be a problem?

Why should people say “hey, could you not, or even just a little less”? If you do something that isn’t bad, that isn’t not a problem, why should people ask you to stop? If it’s a good thing to do, why wouldn’t they instead ask you to do it more?

And why, indeed, are you still speaking in this transactional way?

If you write a post about some abstract concept, without any examples of it, and I write a post that says “What are some examples?”, I am not asking you to do labor on my behalf, I am not asking for a favor (which must be justified by some “favor credit”, some positive account of favors in the bank of Duncan). Quite frankly, I find that claim ridiculous to the point of offensiveness. What I am doing, in that scenario, is making a positive contribution to the discussion, both for your benefit and (even more importantly) for the benefit of other readers and com... (read more)

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[-]Vladimir_Nesov
1512

There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”.

Maybe "resent" is doing most work here, but an excellent reason to not respond is that it takes work. To the extent that there are norms in place that urge response, they create motivation to suppress criticism that would urge response. An expectation that it's normal for criticism to be a request for response that should normally be granted is pressure to do the work of responding, which is costly, which motivates defensive action in the form of suppressing criticism.

A culture could make it costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made. This is an inessential reason for suppressing criticism that can be removed, and therefore should, to make criticism cheaper and more abundant.

The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism's posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that's Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.

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5Said Achmiz
It’s certainly doing a decent amount of work, I agree. Anyhow, your overall point is taken—although I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence. That having been said, of course the content of criticism matters. A piece of criticism could simply be bad, and clearly wrong; and then it’s good and proper to just ignore it (perhaps after having made sure that an interested party could, if they so wished, easily see or learn why that criticism is bad). I do not, and would not, advocate for a norm that all comments, all critical questions, etc., regardless of their content, must always be responded to. That is unreasonable. I also want to note—as I’ve said several times in this discussion, but it bears repeating—there is nothing problematic or blameworthy about someone other than the author of a post responding to questions, criticism, requests for examples, etc. That is fine. Collaborative development of ideas is a perfectly normal and good thing. What that adds up to, I think, is a set of requirements for a set of social norms which is quite compatible with your suggestion of making it “costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made”.
2Vladimir_Nesov
They are in opposition, but the point is that they are about different kinds of things, and one of them can't respond to policy decisions. It's useful to have a norm that lessens the burden of addressing criticism. It's Law of reasoning that this burden can nonetheless materialize. The Law is implacable but importantly asymmetric, it only holds when it does, not when the court of public opinion says it should. While the norms are the other way around, and their pressure is somewhat insensitive to facts of a particular situation, so it's worth pointing them in a generally useful direction, with no hope for their nuanced or at all sane response to details. Perhaps the presence of Law justifies norms that are over-the-top forgiving to ignoring criticism, or find ignoring criticism a bit praiseworthy when it would be at all unpleasant not to ignore it, to oppose the average valence of Law, while of course attempting to preserve its asymmetry. So I'd say my last sentence in that comment argues that the next-to-last sentence should be stronger. Which I'm not sure I agree with, but here's the argument.
5Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims. He can't pass my ITT (not that I've asked him to), which means that he doesn't understand the thing he's trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.
2Said Achmiz
This response is manifestly untenable, given the comment of yours that I was responding to.
4Vaniver
BTW I was surprised earlier to see you agree with the 'relational' piece of this comment because Duncan's grandparent comment seems like it's a pretty central example of that. (I view you as having more of a "visitor-commons" orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
3Said Achmiz
Sorry, I’m not quite sure I follow the references here. You’re saying that… this comment… is a central example of… what, exactly? That… seems like it’s probably accurate… I think? I think I’d have to more clearly understand what you’re getting at in your comment, in order to judge whether this part makes sense to me.
2Vaniver
Sorry, my previous comment wasn't very clear. Earlier I said: and you responded with: (and a few related comments) which made me think "hmm, I don't think we mean the same thing by 'relational'. Then Duncan's comment had a frame that I would have described as 'relational'--as in focusing on the relationships between the people saying and hearing the words--which you then described as transactional. 
2Said Achmiz
Ah, I see. I think that the sense in which I would characterize Duncan’s description as “transactional” is… mostly orthogonal to the question of “is this a relational frame”. I don’t think that this has much to do with the “‘visitor commons’ vs. ‘pairwise relationships’” distinction, either (although that distinction is an interesting and possibly important one in its own right, and you’re certainly more right than wrong about where my preferences lie in that regard). (There’s more that I could say about this, but I don’t know whether anything of importance hinges on this point. It seems like it mostly shouldn’t, but perhaps you are a better judge of that…)
7Raemon
A couple quick notes for now: I agree with Duncan here it's kinda silly to start the clock at "Killing Socrates". Insofar as there's a current live fight that is worth tracking separately from overall history, I think it probably starts in the comments of LW Team is adjusting moderation policy, and I think the recent-ish back and forth on Basics of Rationalist Discourse and "Rationalist Discourse" Is Like "Physicist Motors" is recent enough to be relevant (hence me including the in the OP) I think Vaniver right now is focusing on resolving the point "is Said a liar?", but not resolving the "who did most wrong?" question. (I'm not actually 100% sure on Vaniver's goals/takes at the moment). I agree this is an important subquestion but it's not the primary question I'm interested in.  I'm somewhat worried about this thread taking in more energy that it quite warrants, and making Duncan feel more persecuted than really makes sense here.  I roughly agree with Vaniver than "Liar!" isn't the right accusation to have levied, but also don't judge you harshly for having made it.  I think this comment of mine summarizes my relevant opinions here. (tagging @Vaniver to make sure he's at least tracking this comment)
6Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Thanks. I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. "everyone should be able to see that he's a liar" or "if you don't think he's a liar you are definitely wrong." (This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said's comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem to others].) This is much much closer to saying "Liar!" than it is to not saying "Liar!" ... if one is to round me off, that's the correct place to round me off to. But it is still a rounding.
2Raemon
Nod, seems fair to note.
[-]Said Achmiz
105

I interpret a lot of Duncan’s complaints here thru the lens of imaginary injury that he writes about here.

I just want to highlight this link (to one of Duncan’s essays on his Medium blog), which I think most people are likely to miss otherwise.

That is an excellent post! If it was posted on Less Wrong (I understand why it wasn’t, of course EDIT: I was mistaken about understanding this; see replies), I’d strong-upvote it without reservation. (I disagree with some parts of it, of course, such as one of the examples—but then, that is (a) an excellent reason to provide specific examples, and part of what makes this an excellent post, and (b) the reason why top-level posts quite rightly don’t have agree/disagree voting. On the whole, the post’s thesis is simply correct, and I appreciate and respect Duncan for having written it.)

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4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
It's not on LessWrong because of you, specifically. Like, literally that specific essay, I consciously considered where to put it, and decided not to put it here because, at the time, there was no way to prevent you from being part of the subsequent conversation.
-1Said Achmiz
Hmm. I retract the “I understand why it wasn’t [posted on Less Wrong]” part of my earlier comment! I definitely no longer understand. (I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.)
8DirectedEvolution
Said, as a quick note - this particular comment reminds me of the "bite my thumb" scene from Romeo and Juliet. To you, it might be innocuous, but to me, and I suspect to Duncan and others, it sounds like a deliberate insult, with just enough of a veil of innocence to make it especially infuriating. I am presuming you did not actually mean this as an insult, but were instead meaning to express your genuine confusion about Duncan's thought process. I am curious to know a few things: 1. Did you recognize that it sounded potentially insulting? 2. If so, why did you choose to express yourself in this insulting-sounding manner? 3. If not, does it concern you that you may not recognize when you are expressing yourself in an insulting-sounding way, and is that something you are interested in changing? 4. And if you didn't know you sounded insulting, and don't care to change, why is that?
[-]Said Achmiz
11-3

There are some things which cannot be expressed in a non-insulting manner (unless we suppose that the target is such a saint that no criticism can affect their ego; but who among us can pretend to that?).

I did not intend insult, in the sense that insult wasn’t my goal. (I never intend insult, as a rule. What few exceptions exist, concern no one involved in this discussion.)

But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.

So, you ask:

If so, why did you choose to express yourself in this insulting-sounding manner?

The choice was between writing something that was necessary for the purpose of fulfilling appropriate and reasonable conversational goals, but could be written only in such a way that anyone but a saint would be insulted by it—or writing nothing.

I chose the former because I judged it to be the correct choice: writing nothing, simply in order to to avoid insult, would have been worse than writing the comment which I wrote.

(This explanation is also quite likely to apply to any past or future comments I write which seem to be insulting in similar fashion.)

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[-]benwr
2926

But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.


I want to register that I don't believe you that you cannot, if we're using the ordinary meaning of "cannot". I believe that it would be more costly for you, but it seems to me that people are very often able to express content like that in your comment, without being insulting.

I'm tempted to try to rephrase your comment in a non-insulting way, but I would only be able to convey its meaning-to-me, and I predict that this is different enough from its meaning-to-you that you would object on those grounds. However, insofar as you communicated a thing to me, you could have said that thing in a non-insulting way.

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3Said Achmiz
I believe you when you say that you don’t believe me. But I submit to you that unless you can provide a rephrasing which (a) preserves all relevant meaning while not being insulting, and (b) could have been generated by me, your disbelief is not evidence of anything except the fact that some things seem easy until you discover that they’re impossible.
9benwr
My guess is that you believe it's impossible because the content of your comment implies a negative fact about the person you're responding to. But insofar as you communicated a thing to me, it was in fact a thing about your own failure to comprehend, and your own experience of bizarreness. These are not unflattering facts about Duncan, except insofar as I already believe your ability to comprehend is vast enough to contain all "reasonable" thought processes.
[-]Said Achmiz
104

These are not unflattering facts about Duncan

Indeed, they are not—or so it would seem. So why would my comment be insulting?

After all, I didn’t write “your stated reason is bizarre”, but “I find your stated reason bizarre”. I didn’t write “it seems like your thinking here is incoherent”, but “I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here”. I didn’t… etc.

So what makes my comment insulting?

Please note, I am not saying “my comment isn’t insulting, and anyone who finds it so is silly”. It is insulting! And it’s going to stay insulting no matter how you rewrite it, unless you either change what it actually says or so obfuscate the meaning that it’s not possible to tell what it actually says.

The thing I am actually saying—the meaning of the words, the communicated claims—imply unflattering facts about Duncan.[1] There’s no getting around that.

The only defensible recourse, for someone who objects to my comment, is to say that one should simply not say insulting things; and if there are relevant things to say which cannot be said non-insultingly, then they oughtn’t be said… and if anything is lost thereby, well, too bad.

And that would be a consistent point of view, certainly. Bu... (read more)

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7benwr
For what it's worth, I don't think that one should never say insulting things. I think that people should avoid saying insulting things in certain contexts, and that LessWrong comments are one such context. I find it hard to square your claim that insultingness was not the comment's purpose with the claim that it cannot be rewritten to elide the insult. An insult is not simply a statement with a meaning that is unflattering to its target - it involves using words in a way that aggressively emphasizes the unflatteringness and suggests, to some extent, a call to non-belief-based action on the part of the reader. If I write a comment entirely in bold, in some sense I cannot un-bold it without changing its effect on the reader. But I think it would be pretty frustrating to most people if I then claimed that I could not un-bold it without changing its meaning.
3Czynski
You still haven't actually attempted the challenge Said laid out.
4benwr
I'm not sure what you mean - as far as I can tell, I'm the one who suggested trying to rephrase the insulting comment, and in my world Said roughly agreed with me about its infeasibility in his response, since it's not going to be possible for me to prove either point: Any rephrasing I give will elicit objections on both semantics-relative-to-Said and Said-generatability grounds, and readers who believe Said will go on believing him, while readers who disbelieve will go on disbelieving.
-1Czynski
You haven't even given an attempt at rephrasing.
9benwr
Nor should I, unless I believe that someone somewhere might honestly reconsider their position based on such an attempt. So far my guess is that you're not saying that you expect to honestly reconsider your position, and Said certainly isn't. If that's wrong then let me know! I don't make a habit of starting doomed projects.
5Vladimir_Nesov
I think for the purposes of promoting clarity this is a bad rule of thumb. The decision to explain should be more guided by effort/hedonicity and availability of other explanations of the same thing that are already there, not by strategically withholding things based on predictions of how others would treat an explanation. (So for example "I don't feel like it" seems like an excellent reason not to do this, and doesn't need to be voiced to be equally valid.)
6benwr
I think I agree that this isn't a good explicit rule of thumb, and I somewhat regret how I put this. But it's also true that a belief in someone's good-faith engagement (including an onlooker's), and in particular their openness to honest reconsideration, is an important factor in the motivational calculus, and for good reasons.
7Vladimir_Nesov
The structure of a conflict and motivation prompted by that structure functions in a symmetric way, with the same influence irrespective of whether the argument is right or wrong. But the argument itself, once presented, is asymmetric, it's all else equal stronger when correct than when it's not. This is a reason to lean towards publishing things, perhaps even setting up weird mechanisms like encouraging people to ignore criticism they dislike in order to make its publication more likely.
-3Czynski
If you're not even willing to attempt the thing you say should be done, you have no business claiming to be arguing or negotiating in good faith. You claimed this was low-effort. You then did not put in the effort to do it. This strongly implies that you don't even believe your own claim, in which case why should anyone else believe it? It also tests your theory. If you can make the modification easily, then there is room for debate about whether Said could. If you can't, then your claim was wrong and Said obviously can't either.
[-]benwr
1312

I think it's pretty rough for me to engage with you here, because you seem to be consistently failing to read the things I've written. I did not say it was low-effort. I said that it was possible. Separately, you seem to think that I owe you something that I just definitely do not owe you. For the moment, I don't care whether you think I'm arguing in bad faith; at least I'm reading what you've written.

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-18Czynski
-32Czynski
3Said Achmiz
I more or less agree with this; I think that posting and commenting on Less Wrong is definitely a place to try to avoid saying anything insulting. But not to try infinitely hard. Sometimes, there is no avoiding insult. If you remove all the insult that isn’t core to what you’re saying, and if what you’re saying is appropriate, relevant, etc., and there’s still insult left over—I do not think that it’s a good general policy to avoid saying the thing, just because it’s insulting. By that measure, my comment does not qualify as an insult. (And indeed, as it happens, I wouldn’t call it “an insult”; but “insulting” is slightly different in connotation, I think. Either way, I don’t think that my comment may fairly be said to have these qualities which you list. Certainly there’s no “call to non-belief-based action”…!) True, of course… but also, so thoroughly dis-analogous to the actual thing that we’re discussing that it mostly seems to me to be a non sequitur.
7benwr
I think I disagree that your comment does not have these qualities in some measure, and they are roughly what I'm objecting to when I ask that people not be insulting. I don't think I want you to never say anything with an unflattering implication, though I do think this is usually best avoided as well. I'm hopeful that this is a crux, as it might explain some of the other conversation I've seen about the extent to which you can predict people's perception of rudeness. There are of course more insulting ways you could have conveyed the same meaning. But there are also less insulting ways (when considering the extent to which the comment emphasizes the unflatteringness and the call to action that I'm suggesting readers will infer).   I believe that none was intended, but I also expect that people (mostly subconsciously!) interpret (a very small) one from the particular choice of words and phrasing. Where the action is something like "you should scorn this person", and not just "this person has unflattering quality X". The latter does not imply the former.
1Said Achmiz
I think that, at this point, we’re talking about nuances so subtle, distinctions so fragile (in that they only rarely survive even minor changes of context, etc.), that it’s basically impossible to predict how they will affect any particular person’s response to any particular comment in any particular situation. To put it another way, the variation (between people, between situations, etc.) in how any particular bit of wording will be perceived, is much greater than the difference made by the changes in wording that you seem to be talking about. So the effects of any attempt to apply the principles you suggest is going to be indistinguishable from noise. And that means that any effort spent on doing so will be wasted.
3Jasnah Kholin
I actually DO believe you can't write this in not-insulting way. I find it the result of not prioritizing developing and practicing those skills in general.  while i do judge you for this, i judge you for this one time, on the meta-level, instead of judging any instance separately. as i find this behavior orderly and predictable.  
-12Czynski
3DirectedEvolution
I'm not quite clear: are you saying that it's literally impossible to express certain non-insulting meanings in a non-insulting way? Or that you personally are not capable of doing so? Or that you potentially could, but you're not motivated to figure out how? Edit - also, do you mean that it's impossible to even reduce the degree to which it sounds insulting? Or are you just saying that such comments are always going to sound at least a tiny bit insulting? This is helpful to me understanding you better. Thank you.
2Said Achmiz
I… think that the concept of “non-insulting meaning” is fundamentally a confused one in this context. Reduce the degree? Well, it seems like it should be possible, in principle, in at least some cases. (The logic being that it seems like it should be quite possible to increase the degree of insultingness without changing the substance, and if that’s the case, then one would have to claim that I always succeed at selecting exactly the least insulting possible version—without changes in substance—of any comment; and that seems like it’s probably unlikely. But there’s a lot of “seems” in that reasoning, so I wouldn’t place very much confidence in it. And I can also tell a comparably plausible story that leads to the opposite conclusion, reducing my confidence even further.) But I am not sure what consequence that apparent in-principle truth has on anything.
[-]DirectedEvolution
154

Here's a potential alternative wording of your previous statement.

Original: (I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.)

New version: I am very confused by your stated reason, and I'm genuinely having trouble seeing things from your point of view. But I would genuinely like to. Here's a version that makes a little more sense to me [give it your best shot]... but here's where that breaks down [explain]. What am I missing?

I claim with very high confidence that this new version is much less insulting (or is not insulting at all). It took me all of 15 seconds to come up with, and I claim that it either conveys the same thing as your original comment (plus added extras), or that the difference is negligible and could be overcome with an ongoing and collegial dialog of a kind that the original, insulting version makes impossible. If you have an explanation for what of value is lost in translation here, I'm listening.

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3Said Achmiz
It’s certainly possible to write more words and thereby to obfuscate what you’re saying and/or alter your meaning in the direction of vagueness. And you can, certainly, simply say additional things—things not contained in the original message, and that aren’t simply transformations of the meaning, but genuinely new content—that might (you may hope) “soften the blow”, as it were. But all of that aside, what I’d actually like to note, in your comment, is this part: First of all, while it may be literally true that coming up with that specific wording, with the bracketed parts un-filled-in, took you 15 seconds (if you say it, I believe it), the connotation that transmuting a comment from the “original” to the (fully qualified, as it were) “new version” takes somewhere on the order of 15 seconds (give or take a couple of factors of two, perhaps) is not believable. Of course you didn’t claim that—it’s a connotation, not a denotation. But do you think it’s true? I don’t. I don’t think that it’s true even for you. (For one thing, simply typing out the “fully qualified” version—with the “best shot” at explanation outlined, and the pitfalls noted, and the caveats properly caveated—is going to take a good bit longer. Type at 60 WPM? Then you’ve got the average adult beat, and qualify as a “professional typist”; but even so just the second paragraph of your comment would take you most of a minute to type out. Fill out those brackets, and how many words are you adding? 100? 300? More?) But, perhaps more importantly, that stuff requires not just more typing, but much more thinking (and reading). What is worse, it’s thinking of a sort that is very, very likely to be a complete waste of time, because it turns out to be completely wrong. For example, consider this attempt, by me, to describe in detail Duncan’s approach to banning people from his posts. It seemed—and still seems—to me to be an accurate characterization; and certainly it was written in such a way that I quite
5DirectedEvolution
This is the part I think is important in your objection - I agree with you that expanding the bracketed part would take more than 15 seconds. You're claiming somewhere on the implicit-explicit spectrum that something substantial is lost in the translation from the original insulting version by you to the new non-insulting version by me. I just straightforwaredly disagree with that, and I challenge you to articulate what exactly you think is lost and why it matters.
8Said Achmiz
I confess that I am not sure what you’re asking. As far as saying additional things goes—well, uh, the additional things are the additional things. The original version doesn’t contain any guessing of meaning or any kind of thing like that. That’s strictly new. As I said, the rest is transparent boilerplate. It doesn’t much obfuscate anything, but nor does it improve anything. It’s just more words for more words’ sake. I don’t think anything substantive is lost in terms of meaning; the losses are (a) the time and effort on the part of the comment-writer, (b) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the inevitably-incorrect guessing), (c) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the transparent fluff that pretends to hide a fundamentally insulting meaning). The only way for someone not to be insulted by a comment that says something like this is just to not be insulted by what it says. (Take my word for this—I’ve had comments along these lines directed at me many, many times, in many places! I mostly don’t find them insulting—and it’s not because people who say such things couch them in fluff. They do no such thing.)
0DirectedEvolution
  Ah, I see. So the main thing I'm understanding here is that the meaning you were trying to convey to Duncan is understood, by you, as a fundamentally insulting one. You could "soften" it by the type of rewording I proposed. But this is not a case where you mean to say something non-insulting, and it comes out sounding insulting by accident. Instead, you mean to say something insulting, and so you're just saying it, understanding that the other person will probably, very naturally, feel insulted. An example of saying something fundamentally insulting is to tell somebody that you think they are stupid or ugly. You are making a statement of this kind. Is that correct?
7Said Achmiz
No, I don’t think so… But this comment of yours baffles me. Did we not already cover this ground?
2DirectedEvolution
Then what did you mean by this: My understanding of this statement was that you are asserting that the core meaning of the original quote by you, in both your original version and my rewrite, was a fundamentally insulting one. Are you saying it was a different kind of fundamental insult from calling somebody stupid or ugly? Or are you now saying it was not an insult?
1Said Achmiz
Well, firstly—as I say here, I think that there’s a subtle difference between “insulting” and “an insult”. But that’s perhaps not the key point. That aside, it really seems like your question is answered, very explicitly, in this earlier comment of mine. But let’s try again: Is my comment insulting? Yes, as I said earlier, I think that it is (or at least, it would not be unreasonable for someone to perceive it thus). (Should it be insulting? Who knows; it’s complicated. Is it gratuitously insulting, or insulting in a way that is extraneous to its propositional meaning? No, I don’t think so. Would all / most people perceive it as insulting if they were its target? No / probably, respectively. Is it possible not to be insulted by it? Yes, it’s possible; as I said earlier, I’ve had this sort of thing said to me, many times, and I have generally failed to be insulted by it. Is it possible for Duncan, specifically, to not be insulted by that comment as written by me, specifically? I don’t know; probably not. Is that, specifically, un-virtuous of Duncan? No, probably not.) Is my comment thereby similar to other things which are also insulting, in that it shares with those other things the quality of being insulting? By definition, yes. Is it insulting in the same way as is calling someone stupid, or calling someone ugly? No, all three of these are different things, which can all be said to be insulting in some way, but not in the same way.
4DirectedEvolution
OK, this is helpful. So it sounds like you perceive your comment as conveying information - a fact or a sober judgment of yours - that will, in its substance, tend to trigger a feeling of being insulted in the other person, possibly because they are sensitive to that fact or judgment being called to their attention. But it is not primarily intended by you to provoke that feeling of being insulted. You might prefer it if the other person did not experience the feeling of being insulted (or you might simply not care) - your aim is to convey the information, irrespective of whether or not it makes the other person feel insulted. Is that correct?
4Said Achmiz
Sounds about right.
2DirectedEvolution
Now that we've established this, what is your goal when you make insulting comments? (Note: I'll refer to your comments as "insulting comments," defined in the way I described in my previous comment). If you subscribe to a utilitarian framework, how does the cost/benefit analysis work out? If you are a virtue ethicist, what virtue are you practicing? If you are a deontologist, what maxim are you using? If none of these characterizes the normative beliefs you're acting under, then please articulate what motivates you to make them in whatever manner makes sense to you. Making statements, however true, that you expect to make the other person feel insulted seems like a substantial drawback that needs some rationale.
[-]Czynski
113

If you care more about not making social attacks than telling the truth, you will get an environment which does not tell the truth when it might be socially inconvenient. And the truth is almost always socially inconvenient to someone.

So if you are a rationalist, i.e. someone who strongly cares about truth-seeking, this is highly undesirable.

Most people are not capable of executing on this obvious truth even when they try hard; the instinct to socially-smooth is too strong. The people who are capable of executing on it are, generally, big-D Disagreeable, and therefore also usually little-d disagreeable and often unpleasant. (I count myself as all three, TBC. I'd guess Said would as well, but won't put words in his mouth.)

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7Viliam
Yes, caring too much about not offending people means that people do not call out bullshit. However, are rude environments more rational? Or do they just have different ways of optimizing for something other than truth? -- Just guessing here, but maybe disagreeable people derive too much pleasure from disagreeing with someone, or offending someone, so their debates skew that way. (How many "harsh truths" are not true at all; they are just popular because offend someone?) (When I tried to think about examples, I thought I found one: military. No one cares about the feelings of their subordinates, and yet things get done. However, people in the military care about not offending their superiors. So, probably not a convincing example for either side of the argument.)
[-]Czynski
10-8

I'm sure there is an amount of rudeness which generates more optimization-away-from-truth than it prevents. I'm less sure that this is a level of rudeness achievable in actual human societies. And for whether LW could attain that level of rudeness within five years even if it started pushing for rudeness as normative immediately and never touched the brakes - well, I'm pretty sure it couldn't. You'd need to replace most of the mod team (stereotypically, with New Yorkers, which TBF seems both feasible and plausibly effective) to get that to actually stick, probably, and it'd still be a large ship turning slowly.

A monoculture is generally bad, so having a diversity of permitted conduct is probably a good idea regardless. That's extremely hard to measure, so as a proxy, ensuring there are people representing both extremes who are prolific and part of most important conversations will do well enough.

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9Viliam
I am probably just saying the obvious here, but a rude environment is not only one where people say true things rudely, but also where people say false things rudely. So when we imagine the interactions that happen there, it is not just "someone says the truth, ignoring the social consequences" which many people would approve, but also "someone tries to explain something complicated, and people not only respond by misunderstanding and making fallacies, but they are also assholes about it" where many people would be tempted to say 'fuck this' and walk away. So the website would gravitate towards a monoculture anyway. (I wanted to give theMotte as an example of a place that is further in that direction and the quality seems to be lower... but I just noticed that the place is effectively dead.)
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
*154

a rude environment is not only one where people say true things rudely, but also where people say false things rudely

The concern is with requiring the kind of politeness that induces substantive self-censorship. This reduces efficiency of communicating dissenting observations, sometimes drastically. This favors beliefs/arguments that fit the reigning vibe.

The problems with (tolerating) rudeness don't seem as asymmetric, it's a problem across the board, as you say. It's a price to consider for getting rid of the asymmetry of over-the-top substantive-self-censorship-inducing politeness.

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4philh
The Motte has its own site now. (I agree the quality is lower than LW, or at least it was several months ago and that's part of why I stopped reading. Though idk if I'd attribute that to rudeness.)
3Czynski
I do not think that is the usual result.
2[comment deleted]
1M. Y. Zuo
There's another example, frats. Even though the older frat members harass their subordinates via hazing rituals and so on, the new members wouldn't stick around if they genuinely thought the older members were disagreeable people out to get them. 
4Said Achmiz
I write comments for many different reasons. (See this, this, etc.) Whether a comment happens to be (or be likely to be perceived as) “insulting” or not generally doesn’t change those reasons. I do not agree. Please see this comment and this comment for more details on my approach to such matters.
4DirectedEvolution
OK, I have read the comments you linked. My understanding is this: * You understand that you have a reputation for making comments perceived as social attacks, although you don't intend them as such. * You don't care whether or not the other person feels insulted by what you have to say. It's just not a moral consideration for your commenting behavior. * Your aesthetic is that you prefer to accept that what you have to say has an insulting meaning, and to just say it clearly and succinctly. Do you care about the manner in which other people talk to you? For example, if somebody wished to say something with an insulting meaning to you, would you prefer them to say it to you in the same way you say such things to others? (Incidentally, I don't know who's been going through our comment thread downvoting you, but it wasn't me. I'm saying this because I now see myself being downvoted, and I suspect it may be retaliation from you, but I am not sure about that).
[-]Said Achmiz
153

You understand that you have a reputation for making comments perceived as social attacks, although you don’t intend them as such.

I have (it would seem) a reputation for making certain sorts of comments, which are of course not intended as “attacks” of any sort (social, personal, etc.), but which are sometimes perceived as such—and which perception, in my view, reflects quite poorly on those who thus perceive said comments.

You don’t care whether or not the other person feels insulted by what you have to say. It’s just not a moral consideration for your commenting behavior.

Certainly I would prefer that things were otherwise. (Isn’t this often the case, for all of us?) But this cannot be a reason to avoid making such comments; to do so would be even more blameworthy, morally speaking, than is the habit on the part of certain interlocutors to take those comments as attacks in the first place. (See also this old comment thread, which deals with the general questions of whether, and how, to alter one’s behavior in response to purported offense experienced by some person.)

Your aesthetic is that you prefer to accept that what you have to say has an insulting meaning, and to just

... (read more)
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3Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Just a small note that "Said interpreting someone as [interpreting Said's comment as an attack]" is, in my own personal experience, not particularly correlated with [that person in fact having interpreted Said's comment as an attack]. Said has, in the past, seemed to have perceived me as perceiving him as attacking me, when in fact I was objecting to his comments for other reasons, and did not perceive them as an attack, and did not describe them as attacks, either.
0Said Achmiz
The comment you quoted was not, in fact, about you. It was about this (which you can see if you read the thread in which you’re commenting). Note that in the linked discussion thread, it is not I, but someone else, who claims that certain of my comments are perceived as attacks. In short, your comment is a non sequitur in this context.
0Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
No, it's relevant context, especially given that you're saying in the above ~[and I judge people for it]. (To be clear, I didn't think that the comment I quoted was about me. Added a small edit to make that clearer.)
0DirectedEvolution
I wrote about five paragraphs in response to this, which I am fine with sharing with you on two conditions. First, because my honest answer contains quite a bit of potentially insulting commentary toward you (expressed in the same matter of fact tone I've tried to adopt throughout our interaction here), I want your explicit approval to share it. I am open to not sharing it, DMing it to you, or posting it here. Secondly, if I do share it, I want you to precommit not to respond with insulting comments directed at me.
4Said Achmiz
This seems like a very strange, and strangely unfair, condition. I can’t make much sense of it unless I read “insulting” as “deliberately insulting”, or “intentionally insulting”, or something like it. (But surely you don’t mean it that way, given the conversational context…?) Could you explain the point of this? I find that I’m increasingly perplexed by just what the heck is going on in this conversation, and this latest comment has made me more confused than ever…
4DirectedEvolution
Yes, it's definitely an unfair condition, and I knew that when I wrote it. Nevertheless - that is my condition. If you would prefer a vague answer with no preconditions, I am satisfying my curiosity about somebody who thinks very differently about commenting norms than I do.
4Said Achmiz
Alright, thanks.
2Said Achmiz
I did (weak-)downvote one comment of yours in this comment section, but only one. If you’re seeing multiple comments downvoted, then those downvotes aren’t from me. (Of course I don’t know how I’d prove that… but for whatever my word’s worth, you have it.)
2DirectedEvolution
I believe you, and it doesn't matter to me. I just didn't want you to perceive me incorrectly as downvoting you.
2Vladimir_Nesov
I like the norm of discussing a hypothetical interpretation you find interesting/relevant, without a need to discuss (let alone justify) its relation to the original statement or God forbid intended meaning. If someone finds it interesting to move the hypothetical in another direction (perhaps towards the original statement, or even intended meaning), that is a move of the same kind, not a move of a different and privileged kind.
4Said Achmiz
I agree that this can often be a reasonable and interesting thing to do. I would certainly not support any such thing becoming expected or mandatory. (Not that you implied such a thing—I just want to forestall the obvious bad extrapolation.)
2Vladimir_Nesov
Do you mean that you don't support the norm of it not being expected for hypothetical interpretations of statements to not needing to justify themselves as being related to those statements? In other words, that (1) you endorse the need to justify discussion of hypothetical interpretations of statements by showing those interpretations to be related to the statements they interpret, or something like that? Or (2) that you don't endorse endless tangents becoming the norm, forgetting about the original statement? The daisy chain is too long. It's unclear how to shape the latter option with policy. For the former option, the issue is demand for particular proof. Things can be interesting for whatever reason, doesn't have to be a standard kind of reason. Prohibiting arbitrary reasons is damaging to the results, in this case I think for no gain.
[-]Said Achmiz
124

Do you mean that … (1) you endorse the need to justify discussion of hypothetical interpretations of statements by showing those interpretations to be related to the statements they interpret, or something like that?

No, absolutely not.

Or (2) that you don’t endorse endless tangents becoming the norm, forgetting about the original statement?

Yeah.

My view is that first it’s important to get clear on what was meant by some claim or statement or what have you. Then we can discuss whatever. (If that “whatever” includes some hypothetical interpretation of the original (ambiguous) claim, which someone in the conversation found interesting—sure, why not.) Or, at the very least, it’s important to get that clarity regardless—the tangent can proceed in parallel, if it’s something the participants wish.

EDIT: More than anything, what I don’t endorse is a norm that says that someone asking “what did you mean by that word/phrase/sentence/etc.?” must provide some intepretation of their own, whether that be a guess at the OP’s meaning, or some hypothetical, or what have you. Just plain asking “what did you mean by that?” should be ok!

Things can be interesting for whatever reason, doesn’t have to be a standard kind of reason. Prohibiting arbitrary reasons is damaging to the results, in this case I think for no gain.

Totally agreed.

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7Said Achmiz
(Expanding on this comment) The key thing missing from your account of my views is that while I certainly think that “local validity checking” is important, I also—and, perhaps, more importantly—think that the interactions in question are not only fine, but good, in a “relational” sense. So, for example, it’s not just that a comment that just says “What are some examples of this?” doesn’t, by itself, break any rules or norms, and is “locally valid”. It’s that it’s a positive contribution to the discussion, which is aimed at (a) helping a post author to get the greatest use out of his post and the process and experience of posting it, and (b) helping the commentariat get the greatest use out of the author’s post. (Of course, (b) is more important than (a)—but they are both important!) Some points that follow from this, or depend on this: First, such contributions should be socially rewarded to the degree that they are necessary. By “necessary”, here, I mean that if it is the case that some particular sort of criticism or some particular sort of question is good (i.e., it contributes substantially to how much use can be gotten out of a post), but usually nobody asks that sort of question or makes that sort of criticism, then anyone who does do that, should be seen as making not only a good but a very important contribution. (And it’s a bad sign when this sort of thing is common—it means that at least some sorts of important criticisms, or some sorts of important questions, are not asked nearly often enough!) Meanwhile, asking a sort of question or making a sort of criticism which is equally good but is usually or often made, such that it is fairly predictable and authors can, with decent probability, expect to get it, then such a question or criticism is still good and praiseworthy, but not individually as important (though of course still virtuous!). In the limit, an author will know that if they don’t address something in their post, somebody will ask about it
6Said Achmiz
Thank you for laying out your reasoning. I don’t have any strong objections to any of this (various minor ones, but that’s to be expected)… … except the last paragraph (#5, starting with “I think Said is trying to figure out …”). There I think you importantly mis-characterize my views; or, to be more precise, you leave out a major aspect, which (in addition to being a missing key point), by its absence colors the rest of your characterization. (What is there is not wrong, per se, but, again, the missing aspect makes it importantly misleading.) I would, of course, normally elaborate here, but I hesitate to end up with this comment thread/section being filled with my comments. Let me know if you want me to give my thoughts on this in detail here, or elsewhere. (EDIT: Now expanded upon in this comment.)
4Vaniver
I would appreciate more color on your views; by that point I was veering into speculation and hesitant to go too much further, which naturally leads to incompleteness.
4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
By the way, I will note that I am both quite surprised and, separately, something like dismayed, at how devastatingly effective has been what I will characterize as "Said's privileging-the-hypothesis gambit." Like, Said proposed, essentially, "Duncan holds a position which basically no sane person would advocate, and he has somehow held this position for years without anyone noticing, and he conspicuously left this position out of his very-in-depth statement of his beliefs about discourse norms just a couple of months ago" and if I had realized that I actually needed to seriously counter this claim, I might have started with "bro do you even Bayes?" (Surely a reasonable prior on someone holding such a position is very very very low even before taking into account the latter parts of the conjunction.) Like, that Vaniver would go so far as to take the hypothesis and then go sifting through the past few comments with an eye toward using them to distinguish between "true" and "false" is startling to me. The observation "Duncan groused at Said for doing too little interpretive and intellectual labor relative to that which he solicited from others" is not adequate support for "Duncan generally thinks that asking for examples is unacceptable." This is what I meant by the strength of the phrase "blatant falsehood." I suppose if you are starting from "either Mortimer Snodgrass did it, or not," rather than from "I wonder who did the murder," then you can squint at my previous comments— (including the one that was satirical, which satire, I infer from Vaniver pinging me about my beliefs on that particular phrase offline, was missed) —and see in them that the murderer has dark hair, and conclude from Mortimer's dark hair that there should be a large update toward his guilt. But I rather thought we didn't do that around here, and did not expect anyone besides Said to seriously entertain the hypothesis, which is ludicrous. (I get that Said probably genuinely believed it
[-]habryka
315

Again, just chiming in, leaving the actual decision up to Ray: 

My current take here is indeed that Said's hypothesis, taking fully literal and within your frame was quite confused and bad. 

But also, like, people's frames, especially in the domain of adversarial actions, hugely differ, and I've in the past been surprised by the degree to which some people's frames, despite seeming insane and gaslighty to me at first turned out to be quite valuable. Most concretely I have in my internal monologue indeed basically fully shifted towards using "lying" and "deception" the way Zack, Benquo and Jessica are using it, because their concept seems to carve reality at its joints much better than my previous concept of lying and deception. This despite me telling them many times that their usage of those terms is quite adversarial and gaslighty. 

My current model is that when Said was talking about the preference he ascribes to you, there is a bunch of miscommunication going on, and I probably also have deep disagreements with his underlying model, but I have updated against trying to stamp down on that kind of stuff super hard, even if it sounds quite adversarial to me on first gl... (read more)

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[-]Vaniver
1412

I think you are mistaken about the process that generated my previous comment; I would have preferred a response that engaged more with what I wrote.

In particular, it looks to me like you think the core questions are "is the hypothesis I quote correct? Is it backed up by the four examples?", and the parent comment looks to me like you wrote it thinking I thought the hypothesis you quote is correct and backed up by the examples. I think my grandparent comment makes clear that I think the hypothesis you quote is not correct and is not backed up by the four examples. 

Why does the comment not just say "Duncan is straightforwardly right"? Well, I think we disagree about what the core questions are. If you are interested in engaging with that disagreement, so am I; I don't think it looks like your previous comment.

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4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
(I intended to convey with "by the way" that I did not think I had (yet) responded to the full substance of your comment/that I was doing something of an aside.)
3Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I plan to just leave/not post essays here anymore if this isn't fixed. LW is a miserable place to be, right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I also said the following in a chat with several of the moderators on 4/8: > I spent some time wondering if I would endorse a LW where both Duncan and Said were banned, and my conclusion was "yes, b/c that place sounds like it knows what it's for and is pruning and weeding accordingly.")
0Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I note that this is leaving out recent and relevant background mentioned in this comment.
[-]Alicorn
6154

I don't keep track of people's posting styles and correlate them with their names very well. Most people who post on LW, even if they do it a lot, I have negligible associations beyond "that person sounds vaguely familiar" or "are they [other person] or am I mixing them up?".

I have persistent impressions of both Said and Duncan, though.

I am limited in my ability to look up any specific Said comment or things I've said elsewhere about him because his name tragically shares a spelling with a common English word, but my model of him is strongly positive.  I don't think I've ever read a Said comment and thought it was a waste of time, or personally bothersome to me, or sneaky or pushy or anything.

Meanwhile I find Duncan vaguely fascinating like he is a very weird bug which has not, yet, sprayed me personally with defensive bug juice or bitten me with its weird bug pincers.  Normally I watch him from a safe distance and marvel at how high a ratio of "incredibly suspicious and hackle-raising" to "not often literally facially wrong in any identifiable ways" he maintains when he writes things.  It's not against any rules to be incredibly suspicious and hackle-raising in a pu... (read more)

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[-]RobertM
4539

Meanwhile I find Duncan vaguely fascinating like he is a very weird bug

I don't know[1] for sure what purpose this analogy is serving in this comment, and without it the comment would have felt much less like it was trying to hijack me into associating Duncan with something viscerally unpleasant.

  1. ^

    My guess is that it's meant to convey something like your internal emotional experience, with regards to Duncan, to readers.

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[-]DanielFilan
145

I think weird bugs are neat.

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3Alicorn
I wasn't sure if I should include the analogy.  I came up with it weeks ago when I was remarking to people in my server about how suspicious I find things Duncan writes, and it was popular there; I guess people here are less universally delighted by metaphors about weird bugs than people on my server, whoops!  For what it's worth I think the world is enriched by the presence of weird bugs.  The other day someone remarked that they'd found a weird caterpillar on the sidewalk near my house and half my dinner guests got up to go look at it and I almost did myself.  I just don't want to touch weird bugs, and am nervous in a similar way about making it publicly knowable that I have an opinion about Duncan.
[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
2213

I've tried for a bit to produce a useful response to the top-level comment and mostly failed, but I did want to note that

"Oh, it sort of didn't occur to me that this analogy might've carried a negative connotation, because when I was negatively gossiping about Duncan behind his back with a bunch of other people who also have an overall negative opinion of him, the analogy was popular!"

is a hell of a take. =/

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9Alicorn
Oh, no, it's absolutely negative.  I don't like you.  I just don't specifically think that you are disgusting, and it's that bit of the reaction to the analogy that caught me by surprise. "Oh, I'm going to impute malice with the phrase 'gossiping behind my back' about someone I have never personally interacted with before who talked about my public blog posts with her friends, when she's specifically remarked that she's worried about fallout from letting me know that she doesn't care for me!" is also kind of a take, and a pretty good example of why I don't like you.  I retract the tentative positive update I made when your only reaction to my comment had been radio silence; I'd found that really encouraging wrt it being safe to have opinions about you where you might see them, but no longer.
[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
*4113

It is only safe for you to have opinions if the other people don't dislike them?

I think you're trying to set up a really mean dynamic where you get to say mean things about me in public, but if I point out anything frowny about that fact you're like "ah, see, I knew that guy was Bad; he's making it Unsafe for me to say rude stuff about him in the public square."

(Where "Unsafe" means, apparently, "he'll respond with any kind of objection at all."  Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was "I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.")

*shrug

I won't respond further, since you clearly don't want a big back-and-forth, but calling people a weird bug and then pretending that doesn't in practice connote disgust is a motte and bailey.

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[-]Alicorn
366

I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.

  • I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into.  Even if you make out like it's a "get out the vote" campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don't require avowing that you're a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you're the sort who'll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates.  This social power with your clique of admirers in combination with your contagious lens on the world that they pick up from you is what unnerves me.
  • I experience a lot of your word choices (e.g. "gossiping behind [your] back") as squirrelly[1] , manipulative, and more rhetoric than content.  I would not have had this experience in this particular case if, for example, you'd said "criticizing [me] to an unsympathetic audience".  Gossip behind one's back is a social move for a social relationship.  One doesn't clutch one's pearls about random people gossiping about Kim Kardashian behind her back.  We have never met.  I'd stand a better chance of recognizing Ms. Ka
... (read more)
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6DirectedEvolution
Positive reinforcement for disengaging!
2RobertM
It doesn't seem like too many people had a reaction similar to mine, so I don't know that you were especially miscalibrated.  (On reflection, I think the "bug" part is maybe only half of what I found disagreeable about the analogy.  Not sure this is worth the derailment.)
[-]quanticle
2830

For what it's worth, I had a very similar reaction to yours. Insects and arthropods are a common source of disgust and revulsion, and so comparing anyone to an insect or an arthropod, to me, shows that you're trying to indicate that this person is either disgusting or repulsive.

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8Alicorn
I'm sorry!  I'm sincerely not trying to indicate that.  Duncan fascinates and unnerves me but he does not revolt me.  I think that "weird bug" made sense to my metaphor generator instead of "weird plant" or "weird bird" or something is that bugs have extremely widely varying danger levels - an unfamiliar bug may have all kinds of surprises in the mobility, chemical weapons, aggressiveness, etc. department, whereas plants reliably don't jump on you and birds are basically all just WYSIWYG; but many weird bugs are completely harmless, and I simply do not know what will happen to me if I poke Duncan.
4jefftk
What about "weird frog"? Frogs don't have the same negative connotations as bugs and they have the same wide range of danger levels.
4Alicorn
I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn't very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.
[-]jefftk
113

Poisonous frogs often have bright colors to say "hey don't eat me", but there are also ones that use a "if you don't notice me you won't eat me" strategy. Ex: cane toad, pickerel frog, black-legged poison dart frog.

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[-]Alicorn
122

Welp, guess I shouldn't pick up frogs.  Not what I expected to be the main takeaway from this thread but still good to know.

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5M. Y. Zuo
Don't pick up amphibians, or anything else with soft porous skin, in general, unless your sure.
9Raemon
...why do they bother being poisonous then tho?
3RobertM
I believe it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
1agrippa
I liked the analogy and I also like weird bugs
7Adam Zerner
Yup, I strongly agree with this. And it seems to me that the effort spent moderating this is mostly going to be consequential for Duncan and Said's future interactions instead of generalizing and being consequential to the interactions between other people on LessWrong, because these sorts of conflicts seem to be quite infrequent. If so, it doesn't seem worth spending too much time on. Maybe as a path forward, Duncan and Said can agree to keep exchanges to a maximum of 10 total comments and subsequently move the conversation to a private DM, see if that works, and if it doesn't re-evaluate from there?
[-]tcheasdfjkl
5732

I have not read all the words in this comment section, let alone in all the linked posts, let alone in their comments sections, but/and - it seems to me like there's something wrong with a process that generates SO MANY WORDS from SO MANY PEOPLE and takes up SO MUCH PERSON-TIME for what is essentially two people not getting along. I get that an individual social conflict can be a microcosm of important broader dynamics, and I suspect that Duncan and/or Said might find my "not getting along" summary trivializing, which may even be true, as noted I haven't read all the words - just, still, is this really the best thing for everyone involved to be doing with their time?

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4Viliam
It is already happening, so the choices are either one big thread, or dozen (not much) smaller ones.
3TekhneMakre
Or at least, if there's something so compelling-in-some-way going on for some people that they want to keep engaging, at least we could hope that somehow they could be facilitated in doing mental work that will be helpful for whatever broader things there are. Like, if it's a microcosm of stuff, if it represents some important trends, if there's something important but hard to see without trying really hard, then it might be good for them to focus on that rather than being in a fight. (Of course, easier said than done(can); a lot of the ink spilled will feel like trying to touch on the broader things, but only some of it actually will.)
[-]Adam Zerner
4862

This seems like a situation that is likely to end up ballooning into something that takes up a lot of time and energy. So then, it seems worth deciding on an "appetite" up front. Is this worth an additional two hours of time? Six? Sixty? Deciding on that now will help avoid a scenario where (significantly) more time is spent than is desirable.

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[-]LoganStrohl
426

Here is some information about my relationship with posting essays and comments to LessWrong. I originally wrote it for a different context (in response to a discussion about how many people avoid LW because the comments are too nitpicky/counterproductive) so it's not engaging directly with anything in the OP, but @Raemon mentioned it would be useful to have here.

*

I *do* post on LW, but in a very different way than I think I would ideally. For example, I can imagine a world where I post my thoughts piecemeal pretty much as I have them, where I have a research agenda or a sequence in mind and I post each piece *as* I write it, in the hope that engagement with my writing will inform what I think, do, and write next. Instead, I do a year's worth of work (or more), make a 10-essay sequence, send it through many rounds of editing, and only begin publishing any part of it when I'm completely done, having decided in advance to mostly ignore the comments.

It appears to me that what I write is strongly in line with the vision of LW (as I understand it; my understanding is more an extrapolation of Eliezer's founding essays and the name of the site than a reflection of discussion with current ... (read more)

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5MondSemmel
I also have the sense that most posts don't get enough / any high-quality engagement, and my bar for such engagement is likely lower than yours. I suspect though that the main culprit here is not the site culture, but instead a bunch of related reasons: the sheer amount of words on the site and in each essay, which cause the readership to spread out over a gigantic corpus of work; standard Internet engagement patterns (only a small fraction of readers write comments, and only a small fraction of those are high-quality); median LW essays receive too few views to produce healthy discussions; high-average-quality commenters are rare on the Internet, and their comments are spread out over everything they read; imperfect karma incentives; etc. Are there ways for individuals to reliably get a number of comments sufficiently large to produce the occasional high-quality engagement? The only ways I've seen are for them to either already be famous essayists (e.g. the comments sections on ACX or Slow Boring are sufficiently big to contain the occasional gem), or to post in their own Facebook community or something. Feed-like sites like Facebook suffer from their recency bias, however, which is kind of antithetical to the goal of writing truth-seeking and timeless essays.
3TekhneMakre
Strong agree. Though I also engage in the commenting behavior, at an uncharitable view of my behavior. One can dream of some genius cracking the filtering problem and creating a criss-crossing tesseract of subcultures that can occupy the same space (e.g. LW) but go off in their own shared-goals directions (those people who jam and analyze with each other; those people who carefully nitpick and verify; those people who gather facts; those people who just vibe; ...).
[-]Richard_Ngo
3616

Skimmed all the comments here and wanted to throw in my 2c (while also being unlikely to substantively engage further, take that into account if you're thinking about responding):

  • It seems to me that people should spend less time litigating this particular fight and more time figuring out the net effects that Duncan and Said have on LW overall. It seems like mods may be dramatically underrating the value of their time and/or being way too procedurally careful here, and I would like to express that I'd support them saying stuff like "idk exactly what went wrong but you are causing many people on our site (including mods) to have an unproductive time, that's plenty of grounds for a ban".
  • It seems to me that many (probably most) people who engage with Said will end up having an unproductive and unpleasant time. So then my brain started generating solutions like "what if you added a flair to his comments saying 'often unproductive to engage'" and then I was like "wait this is clearly a missing stair situation (in terms of the structural features not the severity of the misbehavior) and people are in general way too slow to act on those; at the point where this seems like a plausibly-net-
... (read more)
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[-]Wei Dai
189

Wei Dai had a comment below about how important it is to know whether there’s any criticism or not, but mostly I don’t care about this either because my prior is just that it’s bad whether or not there’s criticism. In other words, I think the only good approach here is to focus on farming the rare good stuff and ignoring the bad stuff (except for the stuff that ends up way overrated, like (IMO) Babble or Simulators, which I think should be called out directly).

But how do you find the rare good stuff amidst all the bad stuff? I tend to do it with a combination of looking at karma, checking the comments to see whether or not there’s good criticism, and finally reading it myself if it passes the previous two filters. But if a potentially good criticism was banned or disincentivized, then that 1) causes me to waste time (since it distorts both signals I rely on), and 2) potentially causes me to incorrectly judge the post as "good" because I fail to notice the flaw myself. So what do you do such that it doesn't matter whether or not there's criticism?

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3Richard_Ngo
My approach is to read the title, then if I like it read the first paragraph, then if I like that skim the post, then in rare cases read the post in full (all informed by karma). I can't usually evaluate the quality of criticism without at least having skimmed the post. And once I've done that then I don't usually gain much from the criticisms (although I do agree they're sometimes useful). I'm partly informed here by the fact that I tend to find Said's criticisms unusually non-useful.
[-]Raemon
107

Thanks for weighing in! Fwiw I've been skimming but not particularly focused on the litigation of the current dispute, and instead focusing on broader patterns. (I think some amount of litigation of the object level was worth doing but we're past the point where I expect marginal efforts there to help)

One of the things that's most cruxy to me is what people who contribute a lot of top content* feel about the broader patterns, so, I appreciate you chiming in here.

*roughly operationalized as "write stuff that ends up in the top 20 or top 50 of the annual review"

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3Richard_Ngo
Makes sense. FYI I personally haven't had bad experiences with Said (and in fact I remember talking to mods who were at one point surprised by how positively he engaged with some of my posts). My main concern here is the missing stair dynamic of "predictable problem that newcomers will face".
7Said Achmiz
You know, I’ve seen this sort of characterization of my commenting activity quite a few times in these discussions, and I’ve mostly shrugged it off; but (with apologies, as I don’t mean to single you out, and indeed you’re one of the LW members whom I respect significantly more than average) I think at this point I have to take the time to address it. My objection is simply this: Is it actually true that I “comment pessimistically on lots of stuff”? Do I do this more than other people? There are many ways of operationalizing that, of course. Here’s one that seems reasonable to me: let’s find all the posts (not counting “meta”-type posts that are already about me, or referring to me, or having to do with moderation norms that affect me, etc.) on which I’ve commented “pessimistically” in, let’s say, the last six months, and see if my comments are, in their level of “pessimism”, distinguishable from those of other commenters there; and also what the results of those comments turn out to be. #1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hsix7D2rHyumLAAys/run-posts-by-orgs Multiple people commenting in similarly “pessimistic” ways, including me. The most, shall we say, vigorous, discussion that takes place there doesn’t involve me at all. #2: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2yWnNxEPuLnujxKiW/tabooing-frame-control My overall view is certainly critical, but here I write multiple medium-length comments, which contain substantive analyses of the concept being discussed. (There is, however, a very brief comment from someone else which is just a request—or “demand”?—for clarification; such is given, without protest.) #3: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/67NrgoFKCWmnG3afd/you-ll-never-persuade-people-like-that Here I post what can be said to be a critical comment, but one that offers my own take. Other comments are substantially more critical than mine. #4: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y4hN7SkTwnKPNCPx5/why-don-t-more-people-talk-about-ecological-psychology#JcADzrnoJjhFHWE5W
8Richard_Ngo
Not responding to the main claim, cos mods have way more context on this than me, will defer to them. Very plausibly. But pessimism itself isn't bad, the question is whether it's the sort of pessimism that leads to better content or the sort that leads to worse content. Where, again, I'm going to defer to mods since they've aggregated much more data on how your commenting patterns affect people's posting patterns.
[-]Max H
*3613

This set of issues sounds like a huge time sink for all involved.

My own plan is to upvote this post, hide it from my frontpage, and then not follow any further discussion about it closely, or possibly at all, at least until the conclusions are posted. I'd encourage anyone else who is able, and thinks they're at risk of getting sucked in, to do the same.

I trust that Raemon and the rest of the mod team will make good decisions regardless of my (or anyone else's) input on the matter, and I'm very grateful that they are willing to put in the time to do so, so that others may be spared.

My only advice to them is not to put too much of their own time in, to the detriment of their other priorities and sanity. (This too is a decision I trust them to make on their own, but I think it's worth repeating publicly.)

A tiny bit of object-level discourse: I like Duncan's posts, and would be sad to see fewer of them in the future. I mostly don't pay attention to comments by anyone else mentioned here, including Duncan.

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[-]Lukas_Gloor
*3216

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. I don't find it okay myself, but it seems like the sort of thing that's hard to pin down with legible rules. Like, if he were to ask me "what is it that you don't like, exactly" – I feel like it's hard to pin down.

Edit: So, on the topic of moderation policy, seems like the option that individual users can ban specific other users if they have trouble dealing with their style or just if conflicts happen, that seems like a good solution to me. And I don't think it should reflect poorly on the banner (unless they ban an extraordinary number of other users). 

Update May 2024: It's been more than a year since the above comment and in that year, I remember I 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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[-]Raemon
313

Okay, overall outline of thoughts on my mind here:

  • What actually happened in the recent set of exchanges? Did anyone break any site norms? Did anyone do things that maybe should be site norms but we hadn't actually made it an explicit rule and we should take the opportunity to develop some case law and warn people not to do it in the future?
  • 5 years ago, the moderation team has issued Said a mod warning about a common pattern of engagment he does that a lot of people have complained about (this was operationalized as "demanding more interpretive labor than he has given"). We said if he did it again we'd ban him for a month. My vague recollection is he basically didn't do it for a couple years after the warning, but maybe started to somewhat over the past couple years, but I'm not sure, (I think he may have not done the particular thing we asked him not to, but I've had a growing sense his commenting making me more wary of how I use the site). What are my overall thoughts on that?
  • Various LW team members have concerns about how Duncan handles conflict. I'm a bit confused about how to think about it in this case. I think a number of other users are worried about this too. We should prob
... (read more)
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[-]Raemon
2316

Maybe explicit rules against blocking users from "norm-setting" posts.

On blocking users from commenting 

I still endorse authors being able to block other users (whether for principles reasons, or just "this user is annoying"). I think a) it's actually really important for authors for the site to be fun to use, b) there's a lot of users who are dealbreakingly annoying to some people but not others. Banning them from the whole site would be overkill. c) authors aren't obligated to lend their own karma/reputation to give space to other people's content. If an author doesn't want your comments on his post, whether for defensible reasons or not, I think it's an okay answer that those commenters make their own post or shortform arguing the point elsewhere. 

Yes, there are some trivial inconveniences to posting that criticism. I do track that in the cost. But I think that is outweighed by the effect on authors being motivated to post.

That all said...

Blocking users on "norm-setting posts"

I think it's more worrisome to block users on posts that are making major momentum towards changing site norms/culture. I don't think the censorship effects are that strong or distorting in most c... (read more)

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9DirectedEvolution
This is exactly why I wrote Here's Why I'm Hesitant To Respond In More Depth. The purpose wasn't just to explain myself to somebody specific. It was to give myself an alternative resource when I received a specific time of common feedback that was giving me negative vibes. Instead of my usual behaviors (get in an argument, ignore and feel bad, downvote without explanation, or whatever), I could link to this post, which conveyed more detail, warmth and charity than I would be able to muster reliably or in the moment. I advocate that others should write their own versions tailored to their particular sensitivities, and I think it would be a step toward a healthier site culture.
2Jasnah Kholin
"I do generally wish Duncan did more of this and less trying to set-the-record straight in ways that escalate in IMO very costly ways" strongly agree.
2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I note for context/as a bit of explanation that Zack was blocked because of having shot from the hip with "This is insane" on what was literally a previous partial draft of that very post (made public by accident); I didn't want a repeat of a specific sort of interaction I had specific reason to fear.
[-]Raemon
182

Recap of mod team history with Said Achmiz

First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forth with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him. 

Ultimately we told him this:

As Eliezer is wont to say, things are often bad because the way in which they are bad is a Nash equilibrium. If I attempt to apply it here, it suggests we need both a great generative and a great evaluative process before the standards problem is solved, at the same time as the actually-having-a-community-who-likes-to-contribute-thoughtful-and-effortful-essays-about-important-topics problem is solved, and only having one solved does not solve the problem.

I, Oli and Ray will build a better evaluative process for this online community, that incentivises powerful criticism. But right now this site is trying to build a place where we can be generative (and evaluative) together in a way that's fun and not aggressive. While we have an incentive toward better ideas (weighted karma and curation), it is far from a finished system. We have to build this part as well as the

... (read more)
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[-]Vaniver
121

I think some additional relevant context is this discussion from three years ago, which I think was 1) an example of Said asking for definitions without doing any interpretive labor, 2) appreciated by some commenters (including the post author, me), and 3) reacted to strongly by people who expected it to go poorly, including some mods. I can't quickly find any summaries we posted after the fact. 

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[-]Raemon
139

Death by a thousand cuts and "proportionate"(?) response

A way this all feels relevant to current disputes with Duncan is that thing that is frustrating about Said is not any individual comment, but an overall pattern that doesn't emerge as extremely costly until you see the whole thing. (i.e. if there's a spectrum of how bad behavior is, from 0-10, and things that are a "3" are considered bad enough to punish, someone who's doing things that are bad at a "2.5" or "2.9" level don't quite feel worth reacting to. But if someone does them a lot it actually adds up to being pretty bad. 

If you point this out, people mostly shrug and move on with their day. So, to point it out in a way that people actually listen to, you have to do something that looks disproportionate if you're just paying attention to the current situation. And, also, the people who care strongly enough to see that through tend to be in an extra-triggered/frustrated state, which means they're not at their best when they're dong it.

I think Duncan's response looks very out-of-proportion. I think Duncan's response is out of proportion to some degree (see Vaniver thread for some reasons why. I have some more reasons I ... (read more)

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[-]Czynski
12-37

Personally, the thing I think should change with Said is that we need more of him, preferably a dozen more people doing the same thing. If there were a competing site run according to Said's norms, it would be much better for pursuing the art of rationality than modern LessWrong is; disagreeable challenges to question-framing and social moves are desperately necessary to keep discussion norms truth-tracking rather than convenience-tracking.

But this is not an argument I expect to be able to win without actually trying the experiment. And even then I would expect at least five years would be required to get unambiguous results.

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5Viliam
It would definitely be an interesting experiment. Different people would make different predictions about its outcome, but that's exactly what the experiments are good for. (My bet would be that the participants would only discuss "safe" topics, such as math and programming.)
3Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
When Said was spilling thousands of words uncharitably psychoanalyzing me last week, I asked for mod help, and got none. I did, in fact, try the strategy of "don't engage much" (I think I left like three total comments to Said's dozens) and "get someone else to handle the conflict," and the moderators demurred. If you don't want me to defend myself my way, please make it not necessary to defend myself.
[-]habryka
113

I am not sure what you mean, didn't Ray respond on the same day that you tagged him? 

I haven't read the details of all of the threads, but I interpreted your comment here as "the mod team ignored your call for clarification" as opposed to "the mod team did respond to your call for clarification basically immediately, but there was some <unspecified issue> with it".

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0Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
He responded to say ~"I don't like this much but we're not gonna do anything." EDIT: to elaborate, Ray actually put quite a bit of effort into a back and forth with Said, and eventually asked him to stop commenting/put a pause on the whole conversation.  But there wasn't any "this thing that Said was doing before I showed up is not clearing the bar for LW."
[-]habryka
254

EDIT: to elaborate, Ray actually put quite a bit of effort into a back and forth with Said, and eventually asked him to stop commenting/put a pause on the whole conversation.  But there wasn't any "this thing that Said was doing before I showed up is not clearing the bar for LW."

Yeah, I think Ray is currently working on figuring out what the actual norms here should be, which I do think just takes awhile. Ideally we would have a moderation philosophy pinned down in which the judgement here is obvious, but as moderation disputes go, a common pattern is if people disagree with a moderation philosophy, they tend to go right up to the edge of the clear rules you have established (in a way I don't really think is inherently bad, in domains where I disagree with the law I also tend to go right up to the edge of what it allows).

This seems like one of those cases, where my sense is there is a bunch of relatively deep disagreement about character and spirit of LessWrong, and people are going right up to the edge of what's allowed, and disputing those edge-cases almost always tends to require multiple days of thought. My model of you thinks that things were pretty clearly over your line... (read more)

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[-]habryka
238

That does not seem like an accurate summary of this comment? 

My current take is "this thread seems pretty bad overall and I wish everyone would stop, but I don't have an easy succinct articulation of why and what the overall moderation policy is for things like this." I'm trying to mostly focus on actually resolving a giant backlog of new users who need to be reviewed while thinking about our new policies, but expect to respond to this sometime in the next few days. 

What I will say immediately to @Said Achmiz is "This point of this thread is not to prosecute your specific complaints about Duncan. Duncan banning you is the current moderation policy working as intended. If you want to argue about that, you should be directing your arguments at the LessWrong team, and you should be trying to identify and address our cruxes."

I have more to say about this but it gets into an effortcomment that I want to allocate more time/attention to.

I'd note: I do think it's an okay time to open up Said's longstanding disagreements with LW moderation policy, but, like, all the previous arguments still apply. Said's comments so far haven't added new information we didn't already consider.

I th

... (read more)
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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
178

Yeah, as you were typing this I was also typing an edit. My apologies, Ray, for the off-the-cuff wrong summary.

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4habryka
Cool, no problem.
[-]Raemon
299

A lot of digital ink has been spilled, and if I were a random commenter I wouldn't think it that valuable to dig into my object level reasoning. But, since I'm the one making the final calls here it seemed important to lay out how I think about the broader patterns in Said's behavior.

I'll start by clarifying my own take on the "what's up with Said and asking for examples?"

I think it is (all else being equal) basically always fine to ask for examples. I think most posts could be improved by having them, I agree that the process of thinking about concrete examples is useful for sanity checking that your idea is real at all. And there is something good and rationalistly wholesome about not seeing it as an attack, but just as "hey, this is a useful thing to consider" (whether or not Said is consistent about this interpretation)

My take on "what the problem here is" is not the part where Said asks for examples, but that when Said shows up in a particular kind of thread, I have a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won't actually clarify anything important.

The "particular kind of thread" is a cluster of things surrounding introspection, inter... (read more)

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[-]Adam Zerner
1712

My take on "what the problem here is" is not the part where Said asks for examples, but that when Said shows up in a particular kind of thread, I have a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won't actually clarify anything important.

Agreed. It reminds me of this excerpt from HPMoR:

"You should have deduced it yourself, Mr. Potter," Professor Quirrell said mildly. "You must learn to blur your vision until you can see the forest obscured by the trees. Anyone who heard the stories about you, and who did not know that you were the mysterious Boy-Who-Lived, could easily deduce your ownership of an invisibility cloak. Step back from these events, blur away their details, and what do we observe? There was a great rivalry between students, and their competition ended in a perfect tie. That sort of thing only happens in stories, Mr. Potter, and there is one person in this school who thinks in stories. There was a strange and complicated plot, which you should have realized was uncharacteristic of the young Slytherin you faced. But there is a person in this school who deals in plots that elaborate, and his name is not Zabini. And I did warn you that the

... (read more)
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[-]Wei Dai
148

I feel fine doing this because I feel comfortable just ignoring him after he’s said those initial things, when a normal/common social script would consider that somewhat rude. But this requires a significant amount of backbone.

I still wish that LW would try my idea for solving this (and related) problem(s), but it doesn't seem like that's ever going to happen. (I've tried to remind LW admins about my feature request over the years, but don't think I've ever seen an admin say why it's not worth trying.) As an alternative, I've seen people suggest that it's fine to ignore comments unless they're upvoted. That makes sense to me (as a second best solution). What about making that a site-wide norm, i.e., making it explicit that we don't or shouldn't consider it rude or otherwise norm-violating to ignore comments unless they've been upvoted above some specific karma threshold?

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6Vladimir_Nesov
My guess is that people should be rewarded for ignoring criticism they want to ignore, it should be convenient for them to do so. So I disagree with the caveat. This way authors are less motivated to take steps that discourage criticism (including steps such as not writing things). Criticism should remain convenient, not costly, and directly associated with the criticised thing (instead of getting pushed to be published elsewhere).
3Raemon
I already wrote a separate reply saying a similar, but I did particularly like your frame here and wanted to +1 it.
3Raemon
Hmm. On one hand, I do think it's moderately likely we experiment with Reacts, which can partially address your desire here.  But it seems like the problem you're mostly trying to solve is not that big a problem to me (i.e I think it's totally fine for conversations to just peter out, nobody is entitled to being responded to. I'd at least want to see a second established user asking for it before I considered prioritizing it more. I personally expect a "there is a norm of responding to upvoted comments" to make the site much worse. "Getting annoying comments that miss the point" is one of the most cited things people dislike about LW, and forcing authors to engage with them seems like it'd exacerbate it.) Generally, people are busy, don't have time to reply to everything, and commenters should just assume they won't necessarily get a response unless the author/their-conversation-partner continues to thinks a conversation is rewarding.
[-]Wei Dai
211

I’d at least want to see a second established user asking for it before I considered prioritizing it more.

I doubt you'll ever see this, because when you're an established / high status member, ignoring other people feels pretty natural and right, and few people ignore you so you don't notice any problems. I made the request back when I had lower status on this forum. I got ignored by others way more than I do now, and ignored others way less than I do now. (I had higher motivation to "prove" myself to my critics and the audience.)

If I hadn't written down my request back then, in all likelihood I would have forgotten my old perspective and wouldn't be talking about this today.

“Getting annoying comments that miss the point” is one of the most cited things people dislike about LW, and forcing authors to engage with them seems like it’d exacerbate it.)

In my original feature request, I had a couple of "agreement statuses" that require only minimal engagement, like "I don’t understand this. I give up." and "I disagree, but don’t want to bother writing out why." We could easily add more, like "I think further engagement won't be productive." or "This isn't material to my main poin... (read more)

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2RobertM
We are currently thinking about "reacts" as a way of providing users with an 80:20 for giving feedback on comments, though motivated by a somewhat different set of concerns.  It's a tricky UX problem and not at the very top of our priority list, but it has come up recently.
5Said Achmiz
This… still misconstrues my views, in quite substantive and important ways. Very frustrating. You write: I absolutely am not doing that. It makes no sense to say this! It would be like saying “this user test that you’re doing with our wireframe is holding the app we’re developing to the standard of a final-release product”. It’s simply a complete confusion about what testing is even for. The whole point of doing the user test now is that it is just a wireframe, not even a prototype or an alpha version, so getting as much information as possible now is extremely helpful! Nobody’s saying that you have to throw out the whole project and fire everyone involved into the sun the moment you get a single piece of negative user feedback; but if you don’t subject the thing to testing, you’re losing out on a critical opportunity to improve, to correct course… heck, to just plain learn something new! (And for all you know, the test might have a surprisingly positive result! Maybe some minor feature or little widget, which your designers threw in on a lark, elicits an effusive response from your test users, and clues you in to a highly fruitful design approach which you wouldn’t’ve thought worth pursuing. But you’ll never learn that if you don’t test!) It feels to me like I’ve explained this… maybe as many as a dozen times in this post’s comment section alone. (I haven’t counted. Probably it’s not quite that many. But several, at least!) I have to ask: is that you read my explanations but found them unconvincing, and concluded that “oh sure, Said says he believes so-and-so, but I don’t find his actions consistent with those purported beliefs, despite his explicit explanations of why they are consistent with them”? If so, then the follow-up question is: why do you think that? What jumps out at me immediately, in this description, is that you describe the people in question as having put a lot of time into studying how to teach rationality. (This, you imply, allows us to ass
4Raemon
Yeah I agree this phrasing didn't capture your take correctly, and I do recall explicit comments about that in this thread, sorry.  I do claim your approach is in practice often anti-conducive to people doing early stage research. You've stated a willingness (I think eagerness?) to drive people away and cause fewer posts from people who I think are actually promising.  My actual answer is "To varying degrees, some more than others." I definitely do not claim any of them have reached the point of 'we have a thing working well enough we could persuade an arbitrary skeptic our thing is real and important.' (i.e. a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes). But I think this is a process you should naturally expect to take 4-20 years.  Meanwhile, there are many steps along the way that don't "produce a cake a skeptical third party can eat", but if you're actually involved and paying attention, like, clearly are having an effect that is relevant, and is at least an indication that you're on a promising path worth experimenting more with. I observe the people practicing various CFAR and Leverage techniques seem to have a good combination of habits that makes it easier to have difficult conversations in domains with poor feedback loops. The people doing the teaching have hundreds of hours of practice trying to teach skills, seeing mistakes people make along the way, and see them making fewer mistakes and actually grokking the skill.  Some of the people involved do feel a bit like they're making some stuff up and coasting on CFAR's position in the ecosystem, but other seem like they're legitimately embarking on longterm research projects, tracking their progress in ways that make sense, looking for the best feedback loops they can find, etc.  Anecdata: I talked a bunch with a colleague who I respect a lot in 2014, who seemed much smarter -. We parted ways for 3 years. Later, I met him again, we talked a bunch over the course
[-]Said Achmiz
115

My actual answer is “To varying degrees, some more than others.” I definitely do not claim any of them have reached the point of ‘we have a thing working well enough we could persuade an arbitrary skeptic our thing is real and important.’ (i.e. a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes).

An arbitrary skeptic is perhaps too high a bar, but what about a reasonable skeptic? I think that, from that perspective (and especially given the “outside view” on similar things attempted in the past), if you don’t have “a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes”, you basically just don’t have anything. If someone asks you “do you have anything to show for all of this”, and all you’ve got is what you’ve got, then… well, I think that I’m not showing any even slightly unreasonable skepticism, here.

But I think this is a process you should naturally expect to take 4-20 years.

Well, CFAR was founded 11 years ago. That’s well within the “4–20” range. Are you saying that it’s still too early to see clear results?

Is there any reason to believe that there will be anything like “a reliable training program th... (read more)

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[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley
*298

I don't have especially strong opinions about what to do here. But, for the curious, I've had run ins with both Said and Duncan on LW and elsewhere, so perhaps this is useful background information to folks outside the moderation team look at this who aren't already aware (I know they are aware of basically everything I have to say here because I've talked to some of them about these situations).

Also, before I say anything else, I've not had extensive bad interactions with either Said or Duncan recently. Maybe that's because I've been writing a book instead of making posts of the sort I used to make? Either way, this is a bit historical and is based on interactions from 1+ years ago.

I've faced the brunt of Said's comments before. I've spent a lot of very long threads discussing things with him and finally gave up because it felt like talking to a brick wall. I have a soft ban on Said on my posts and comments, where I've committed to only reply to him once and not reply to his replies to me, since it seems to go in circles and not get anywhere. I often feel frustrated with Said because I feel like I've put in a lot of work in a conversation to just have him ignore what I said, so th... (read more)

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[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
150

Sorry for the lack of links above.

I affirm the accuracy of Gordon's summary of our interactions; it feels fair and like a reasonable view on them.

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2Said Achmiz
To clarify—you’re not including me in the “and elsewhere” part, are you? (To my knowledge, I’ve only ever interacted with you on Less Wrong. Is there something else that I’m forgetting…?)
4Gordon Seidoh Worley
No, just LW.
[-]Ruby
293

Some meta notes about moderation process

Preamble: I like transparency

I think it is much better when the LessWrong userbase knows more about how site moderation happens, i.e. who does it, what the tools are, what actions and decisions are, who’s responsible for what, how they think about things, etc. While being careful to say that LessWrong is not a democracy and we will not care equally about the judgments of everyone on the site just because they're an active member[1], I think transparency is valuable here for at least these overlapping reasons:

  • It means we can be held accountable by people either calling out decisions or policies they think are bad, or leaving because of them (vote with your feet). I really value getting feedback.
  • By letting ourselves be held accountable by people we wish to be accountable to, we set up good incentives and allow us to get corrective feedback.
  • It builds trust and confidence (assuming people like what we're doing) that the site is somewhere worth investing your time and attention.

LessWrong team members mostly speak for themselves

I think it's important that LessWrong team members don't have to pretend to all agree with each other some aggregate offic... (read more)

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3RHollerith
Very informative (and thanks for your efforts)! Who owns the domain name lesswrong.com?
[-]RobertM
*2218

This is not directly related to the current situation, but I think is in part responsible for it.

Said claims that it is impossible to guess what someone might mean by something they wrote, if for some reason the reader decided that the writer likely didn't intend the straightforward interpretation parsed by the reader.  It's somewhat ambiguous to me whether Said thinks that this is impossible for him, specifically, or impossible for people (either most or all).

Relevant part of the first comment making this point:

(B) Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote.

What might that be? Who knows. I could try to guess what Alice meant. However, that is impossible. So I won’t try. If Alice didn’t mean the thing that it seems, on a straightforward reading, like she meant, then what she actually meant could be anything at all.

Relevant part of the second comment:

“Impossible” in a social context means “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident” (rather than “the laws of physics forbid it!”). Also, it is, of course, possible to guess what someone means by sheer dumb luck—picking an interpretation at random out of some pool of possibilit

... (read more)
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9Vladimir_Nesov
Ability to be successful is crucially different from considering it a useful activity. The expectation of engaging isn't justified by capability to do so.
3Said Achmiz
Separately from my other reply, I want to call attention to this: I have said this in the past, I think, but I want to note again that I am deeply skeptical of the claim that such “interpretive labor” actually succeeds often enough to be worth its serious downsides. I think that—much more often than most people here care to admit—the result of such efforts are illusionary understanding, and (to speak frankly) the erosion of the ability, of all involved, to detect bullshit (both their own and that of others), and to identify when they simply do not know or do not understand something. I think that it would be greatly to the benefit of all participants of Less Wrong if everyone here was all much, much more reluctant to perform such “labor”.
1Said Achmiz
I just want to make it clear—since I think this point may have gotten lost in the shuffle—that I still think that this part of my comment is pretty clearly true: (The next sentence, which says “I really do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan.”, is now clearly false; it is, obviously, controversial, as demonstrated by the controversy which has resulted. I think that to retain its truth value while still being assertable now, that sentence would now have to say something like “I really do not see why it should be controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan”, or perhaps “I don’t see that there was any reason, prior to that point, to have expected it to be controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan”, or something else along these lines. But this is not as important as the previous two sentences.) I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this is false. (I am aware that Duncan specifically disclaims this, and do not find that to be a compelling reason, in this circumstance.) (EDIT: See below for more) I say this to forestall any potential misunderstandings in general, but also, more specifically, to note that any analysis of the situation which depends on the notion that I’ve admitted to having been wrong, or to have insisted on a position which I now admit was untenable, must be mistaken—as I have, indeed, neither admitted doing, nor done, either of those things. Finally, I must object that, relative to the original, sloppily phrased, version of the claim (‘various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on’, with the contextual implication that this referred to Duncan), the above-quoted sentences absolutely (and, in my view, quite obviously) do count as clarifying and narrowing the claim. The quoted text provides a narrower and more specific rendition of the claim, and makes it clear that this is the claim which was intended. (It is, again, a
9habryka
Just to provide a concrete example, I am quite confident Duncan would not mind a comment of the form "Do you have more examples?" from me or really anyone else on the Lightcone team, I am pretty sure. I don't know whether he would always respond, but my sense is the cost Duncan (and a decent number of other authors) perceive as a result of that post is related primarily to the follow-up conversation to that question, not the question itself, as well as the background model of the motivations of the person asking it. Not sure how much this counts as evidence for you, but I do want to flag that I would take bets against your current suggested prediction.
0Said Achmiz
This certainly counts as evidence. (I’m not sure how we’d operationalize “how much” here, but that’s probably not necessary anyhow.) Basically, what you’re providing here is part of an answer to the question I ask (“you”, again, refers to Duncan): And you’re saying, I take it, that the answer is “indeed, there are circumstantial factors at play”. Well, fair enough. The follow-up questions are then things like “What is the import of those circumstantial factors?”, and “Taking into account those factors, what then is the fully clarified principle/belief?”, and “What justifies that principle/belief?”, and so on. I don’t know if it would be productive to explore those questions here, in this thread. (Or anywhere? Well, that depends on the outcome of this discussion, I imagine…) I will note, though, that it seems like a whole lot of this could’ve been avoided if Duncan had replied to one of my earliest comments, in that thread or perhaps even an earlier thread on a previous topic, with something like: “To clarify, I think asking for examples is fine, and here are links to me doing so [A] [B] [C] and here are links to other people doing so to me and me answering them [1] [2] [3], but I specifically think that when you, Said, ask for examples, that is bad, for specific reasons X Y Z which, as we can see, do not apply to my other examples”. (Indeed, he can still do so!)
[-]Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
121

I note for any other readers that Said is evincing a confusion somewhere in the neighborhood of the Second Guideline and the typical mind fallacy.

In particular, it's false that I "write and act as though I did hold that belief," in the sense that a supermajority of those polled would check "true" on a true-false question about it, after reading through (say) two of my essays and a couple dozen of my comments.

("That belief" = "Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says 'what are some examples of this claim?' is, in his view, unacceptable.")

It's pretty obvious that it seems to Said that I write and act in this way. But one of the skills of a competent rationalist is noticing that [how things seem to me] might not be [how they actually are] or [how they seem to others].

Said, in my experience, is not versed in this skill, and does not, as a matter of habit, notice "ah, here I'm stating a thing about my interpretation as if it's fact, or as if it's nearly-universal among others."

e.g. an unequivocally true statement would have been something like "But that still leaves the question of why you write and act in a way that indicates to me that you do hold tha... (read more)

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1Said Achmiz
There is nothing shocking about finding oneself to be unusual, even (or, perhaps, especially) on Less Wrong. So this particular revelation isn’t very… revelatory. But I don’t think that many of the things that baffle and confuse me actually make sense to many others. What I do think is that many others think that those things make sense to them—but beneath that perception of understanding is not, fact, any real understanding. Of course this isn’t true of everything that I find confusing. (How could it be?) But it sure is true of many more things than anyone generally cares to admit. (As for using words in a nonstandard way, I hardly think that you’re one to make such an accusation characterization! Of the two of us, it seems to me that your use of language is considerably more “nonstandard” than is mine…) (EDIT: Wording)
1Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I think the best response to this is one of Said's own comments: I am not optimizing particularly hard for Said not feeling criticized but also treating my comment above as an "accusation" seems to somewhat belie Said's nominal policy of looking down on people for interpreting statements as attacks. In any event: oh yah for sure I use language SUPER weird, on the regular, but I'm also a professional communicator whose speech and writing is widely acclaimed and effective and "nuh uh YOU'RE the one who uses words weird" is orthogonal to the question of whether Said has blind spots and disabilities here (which he does).   (If there was another copy of Said lying around, I might summon him to point out the sheer ridiculousness of responding to "You do X" with "how dare you say I do X when YOU do X", since that seems like the sort of thing Said loves to do.  But in any event, I don't think having a trait would in fact make me less able to notice and diagnose the trait in others.)
2Said Achmiz
“Accusation” in the grandparent wasn’t meant to imply anything particularly blameworthy or adversarial, though I see how it could be thus perceived, given the context. Consider the word substituted with “characterization” (and I will so edit the previous comment).
0Said Achmiz
I dispute the claim of effectiveness. (As for “acclaimed”, well, the value of this really depends on who’s doing the acclaiming.) And the question certainly is not orthogonal. My point was that your use of words is more weird and more often weird than mine. You have no place to stand, in my view, when saying of me that I use words weirdly, in some way that leads to misunderstandings. (I also don’t think that the claim is true; but regardless of whether it’s true in general, it’s unusually unconvincing coming from you.) Indeed this is not ridiculous, when the X in question is something like “using words weirdly”, which can be understood only in a relative way. The point is not “how dare you” but rather “you are unusually unqualified to evaluate this”. This could surely not be claimed for arbitrary traits, but for a trait like this, it seems to me to make plenty of sense.
6Raemon
Quick note re: "acclaimed": Duncan had fairly largish number of posts highly upvoted during the 2021 Review. You might dispute whether that's a noteworthy achievement, but, well, in terms of what content should be considered good on LessWrong, I don't know of a more objective measure of "what the LessWrong community voted on as good, with lots of opportunity for people to argue that each other are mistaken." (and, notably, Duncan's posts show up in the top 50 and a couple in the top 20 whether you're tracking votes from all users or just high karma ones) (I suppose seeing posts actually cited outside the LessWrong community would be a better/more-objective measure of "something demonstrably good is happening, not potentially just circle-jerky". I'm interested in tracking that although it seems trickier) ((Not intending to weigh in on any of the other points in this comment))
9Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
In order from "slightly outside of LessWrong" to "very far outside of LessWrong," I refactored the CFAR handbook against (mild) internal resistance from CFAR and it was received well, I semi-regularly get paid four or low-five figures to teach people rationality, I've been invited to speak at 4+ EA Globals and counting, my In Defense of Punch Bug essay has 1800 claps which definitely did not primarily come from this community, my Magic color wheel article has 18,800 claps and got a shoutout from CGPGrey, my sixth grade classroom was featured in a chapter in a book on modern education, and my documentary on parkour was translated by volunteers into like eight different languages and cited by the founder as his favorite parkour video of all time (at at least one moment in time). *shrug
[-]localdeity
164

Let's see if I can give constructive advice to the parties in question.

First, I'll address Said, on the subject of asking for examples (and this will inform some later commentary to Duncan):

It might be helpful, when asking for examples, to include a few words about why, or what kind of examples you're looking for, or other information.  This serves multiple purposes: (a) it can help the author choose a good example and good explanation [and avoid wasteful "No, not that kind of example; I wanted [...]" exchanges]; (b) it signals cognitive effort on your part and helps to distinguish you from a "low-effort obtuse fool or nitpicker"; (c) it gives the author feedback about how their post landed with real users [based on you as a sample, plus the votes on your comment suggesting how the rest of the audience feels]; (d) a sort of proof-of-work assures other people that you care at least some amount about getting their reply.

Examples of being a little more specific:

  • I am skeptical of your claim.  Can you give an example?
    • To add weight to this, you could say "I googled X and the most plausible result was Y, which still doesn't match your claim."  (As a general principle, if it
... (read more)
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[-]Algon
147

I find Said Achmiz for be vaguely offputting, abrasive. And yet, I find it difficult not to read his comments when I see them. Even so, reading Said's opinions has ~always left me better off than I was before. Thinking about it, the vibe of Said's posts remind me of Hanson's, which can only be an endorsement in my view.
 

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[-]Ruby
140

Some of Ruby's high-level broader thoughts about Moderation Philosophy, what LessWrong ought to be, kinds of behavior that are okay, what to do with users who are perhaps behaving badly, etc.

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[-]Ruby
175

Politeness/Cooperativeness/Etc

When I first joined the LessWrong team four years ago, I came in with the feeling that politeness and civility were very important and probably standards of those should be upheld on LessWrong. I wrote Combat vs Nurture and felt that LessWrong broadly ought to be a bit more Nurture-y. 

Standard arguments in favor this be nice/friendlier/etc:

  • Most basically, it encourages people to participate more. Most people don't want to feel "attacked" in a way that feels imperson, uncaring, or mean – even if they'd like helpful criticism that feels more clearly rooted in collaborate truthseeking.
  • Many ideas are Butterfly Ideas and an overly critical atmosphere can stifle them

And further many will claim:

  • It's just not that much harder to rephrase criticisms in a nice more constructive-feeling way.

Some counterclaims are:

  • You cannot in fact rephrase things "nicer" without changing the meaning, often in ways that matter.
  • If you require people to put in this effort (and for some it is much more effort), then you are taxing their participation.
  • It is a plus that some people are not worrying about other people's feelings. Worrying about other people's feelings is a liabili
... (read more)
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[-]Ruby
247

I'm reminded of a related point here around banning people. When you ban a person, you do not just have the consequence of:

  • That person is no longer around
  • You discourage the kinds of behavior they engaged in

You also:

  • Sadden everyone who overall valued that person, and alienate them somewhat
  • Make anyone who thinks their own behavior resembles the bans person behavior (even if you the banner, think they're different) feel more afraid
  • Upset the people who particularly cared about what the banned person represented, and make them feel the site doesn't value what they value (even if you think you do, banning an exemplar is scary).

(Which isn't to say these aren't mirrored for not banning someone. That also alienates people who think the potentially banned behavior is bad for them, people who think that's not acceptable in general, etc.

All this to say, let's say there's some behavior that's valuable in moderation, e.g. "being Socratic and poking a bit in a way that's a bit uncomfortable" but is bad if you have too much of it. There's a cost to banning the person who does it too much in that it discourages and threatens many of the people who were doing it a good amount. I think that ought to factor into moderation decisions.

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[-]Caerulea-Lawrence
*110

Hello Ruby, 

I did read some of the other comments here, and also the article you linked about butterflies (which I enjoyed):

Since I am a relatively new member, I have ideas, and not that much experience with regard to LW site, technically or historically. I do have experience from various other communities and social arenas, and maybe something can be applicable here as well. Since I myself experienced getting down-voted and 'attacked' the moment I let out some butterflies here on the community, which even made me leave feeling hurt and disappointed, reading Duncan_Sabiens post Killing Socrates, and also seeing another person writing about MBTI having their butterfly squished, made me realize I wasn't really evaluating my experience clearly, and I decided to re-activate my account and try to engage a bit more.

The situation with Duncan_Sabien and Said, to me, is similar to how people value PvP (Player versus Player) and PvE (Player versus Environment) in games. Both are useful, but opening up for both all the time can be a bit taxing for everyone involved.

Having a dedicated space, where arguments are more sharp and less catering to emotion or other considerations, is very good.... (read more)

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8Said Achmiz
It is interesting that you use this analogy. It so happens that I’ve spent a good deal of time playing World of Warcraft (as I have written about a few times), which, of course, also has PVP as well as PVE elements. And if I were analogizing participation on Less Wrong to aspects of WoW gameplay, I would unhesitatingly say that the sort of patterns of communication and engagement which I prefer (for myself) and admire (in others) are most like the PVE, not the PVP, part of WoW. What I mean by that is the following. World of Warcraft famously includes many different “things you can do” in the game (the better to appeal to a broad player base)—you can do solo questing, you can advance trade skills, you can explore, you can go hunting for exotic pets, you can engage in “world PVP”[1], etc., etc. However, all of that is in some sense peripheral; there are three sorts of activities which I would consider to be “core” to the experience: roleplaying, organized PVP, and dungeons (including, and especially, raids). Dungeons and raids are high-end PVE content, requiring the cooperative participation of anywhere from 5 to 40[2] people. Organized PVP is battlegrounds and arenas—that is, teams of players facing each other on defined battlefields, fighting to achieve some objective (or simply kill everyone on the other team before they do the same to you). And roleplaying is, by its nature, more amorphous and less inherently structured, but in overall form it boils down to using the chat functionality and the character emote features to act out various scenarios (which are defined wholly by the players—think of any text-based roleplay, except with character avatars being portrayed by WoW characters), possibly aided by some aspects of the “actual” game world[3]. Now, the thing about roleplaying in WoW is that there aren’t any “rules” or “game mechanics” that are imposed on it by World of Warcraft, the computer game. The players can, of course, define and follow whatever rules
1Caerulea-Lawrence
Yes, got it. Thanks for taking the time.
4Ruby
Hi Caerulea-Lawrence, Thanks for the suggestion, I think it is one worth giving thought, though tricky to implement in practice. LessWrong (in its first incarnation) had different sections like "Main" and "Discussion", but it didn't work great in the end. People became afraid to post on Main, so everything ended up Discussion. And then, while this might work for a niche community, as LessWrong becomes more and more of a destination (due to the rising popularity of AI), we'd still have to enforce a minimum standard on Discussion/PvE before the quality diluted catastrophically, which means you end up facing the same challenges again (but with more people). I'm interested in solutions here, but it is tricky. Right now I'm interested in Open Threads that have lower bars. Shortform was is also supposed to be more of a Butterfly place, though I'd want to give it more thought before making it a more 101 sanctioned area. But lots of things to explore.
3Caerulea-Lawrence
Hello again Ruby, You are welcome. You answered before I had time to write: Edit: This is just a rough sketch, and I'll be happy to patch it up if prompted.  Yeah, I imagine I am missing a lot of nuances, history of LW and otherwise.  If you want my specific help with anything, let me know. I'm only on the outside looking in, and there is only so much I am able to see from my vantage point.  I do believe I could make my idea work somewhat, and I understand it would have to accommodate a lot of different issues I might not be aware about, but I would be willing to give it a try. With regard to PvE, I do not mean it as a sleeping pillow where anything goes. Or PvP as a free for all. There would be just as strict rules on both sides, but there would be different nuances, and probably different people giving the down-votes and commenting. It is more the separation between typical communication forms and understanding. So, maybe the whole analogue is bad (Blaming you for this Said :) I wish you all the best whatever you choose to do, and hope you find a solution that errs a little bit less - as hoped for. Kindly, Caerulea-Lawrence
3Said Achmiz
Hah. For what it’s worth, I do, actually, agree with the overall thrust of your suggestion. I have made similar suggestions myself, in the past… unfortunately, my understanding is that the LW team basically don’t think that anything like this is workable. I don’t think I agree with their reasoning, but they seem sufficiently firm in their conviction that I’ve mostly given up on trying to convince anyone that this sort of thing is a good idea. (At one time, after the revival of Less Wrong, I hoped that the Personal / Frontpage distinction would serve a function similar to the one you describe. Unfortunately, the LW system design / community norms have been taken in a direction that makes it impossible for things to work that way. I understand that this, too, is a principled decision on the LW team’s part, but I think that it’s an unfortunate one.)
4Raemon
fwiw I think we've considered this sort of idea fairly seriously (I think there are a few nearby ideas clustered together, and it seems like various users have very different opinions on which ones seem "fine" and which ones seem pointed in a horribly wrong direction. I recall Benquo/Zack/Jessicata thinking one version of the idea was bad, although not sure I recall their opinion clearly enough to represent it)
4Said Achmiz
That does seem plausible (and frustrating). I would be very interested to hear from any or all of those people about their opinions on this topic!
4Raemon
I maybe want to specify-in-my-words the version of this I'm most enthusiastic about, to check that you in fact think this version of the thing is fine, rather than a perversion of rationality that should die-in-a-fire and/or not solve any problems you care about: There are two clusters of norms people choose between. Both emphasize truthseeking, but have different standards for some flavor of politeness, how much effort critics are supposed to put in, Combat vs Nurture, etc. Authors pick a default setting but can change setting for individual posts.  Probably even the more-combaty-one has some kind of floor for basic politeness (you probably don't want to be literal 4chan?) but not at a level you'd expect to come up very often on LessWrong.  There might be different moderators for each one. Does that sound basically good to you?
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
174

I think the precious thing lost in the Nurture cluster is not Combat, but tolerance for or even encouragement of unapologetic and uncompromising dissent. This is straightforwardly good if it can be instantiated without regularly spawning infinite threads of back-and-forth arguing (unapologetic and uncompromising).

It should be convenient for people who don't want to participate in that to opt out, and the details of this seem to be the most challenging issue.

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2Said Achmiz
Hmmm. I… do not think that this version of the thing is fine. (I may write more later to elaborate on why I think that. Or maybe this isn’t the ideal place to do that? But I did want to answer your question here, at least.)
2Raemon
Nod. Since it somewhat informs the solution space I'm considering, I think I'll go ahead and ask here what seem not-fine about it. (Or, maybe to resolve a thing I'm actually confused about, what seems different about this phrasing from what Caerulea said?)
1Caerulea-Lawrence
You are taking punches like a true champ. :)  I do believe the piece that is missing is emotions, human weakness, vulnerability and compassion. If that isn't enough, it is time to bring out the megaphone and start screaming "Misanthropy!" in the streets. I'll join you, no worries. We can even wear matching WoW costumes.  NB: (I'm also blaming you for this comment, Said. Have you no shame?)
3Czynski
If the counterargument is that humans are humans... then, well, we must become more. And isn't this the place for that, particularly on the particular axis of truth-seeking?
8RobertM
Yes, of course - while not forgetting that we should not create systems that only function if we have already acheived that future state.  (While also being wary of incentivizing fragility, etc.  As always, best to try to solve for the equilibrium.)
[-]Ruby
143

Technological Solutions

I find myself increasingly in favor of tech solutions to moderation problems. It can be hard for users to change their behavior based on a warning, but perhaps you can do better than just ban them – instead shape their incentives and save them from their own worst impulses. 

Only recently has the team been playing with rate limits as alternative to bans that can be used to strongly encourage users to improve their content (if by no other mechanism to incentivize investing more time into fewer posts and comments). I don't think it should be overly hard to detect nascent Demon Threads and then intervene. Slowing them down both gives the participants times to reflect more and handle emotions that are coming up, and more time for the mod team to react.

In general, I'd like to build better tools for noticing places that would benefit from intervention, and have more ready trigger-action plans for making them go better. In this recent case, we were aware of the exchanges but didn't have a go-to thing to do. Some of this was not being sure of policies regarding certain behaviors and hashing those out is much slower than the thread proceeds. In my ideal world, we'... (read more)

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[-]ShardPhoenix
1412

This whole drama is pretty TL;DR but based on existing vibes I'd rather the rules lean (if a lean is necessary) in favor of overly disagreeable gadflys rather than overly sensitive people who try to manipulate the conversation by acting wounded.

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[-]Dagon
140

[ I don't have strong opinions on the actual individuals or the posts they've made and/or objected to.  I've both enjoyed and been annoyed by things that each of them have said, but nothing has triggered my "bad faith/useless/ignore" bit on either of them.  I understand that I'm more thick-skinned than many, and I care less about this particular avenue of social reinforcement than many, so I will understand if others fall on the "something must be done" side of the line, even though I don't.  I'm mostly going to ask structural questions, rather than exploring communication or behavioral preferences/requirements. ]

Is there anything we can learn from the votes (especially from people who are neither the commenter nor the poster) on the possibly-objectionable threads and posts?  Is this something moderation needs to address, or is voting sufficient (possibly with some tweaks to algorithm)?

Echoing Adam's point, what is the budget that admins have for time spent policing subleties of fairly verbose engagement?  None of the norms under discussion seem automatable, nor even cheap to detect/adjudicate.  This isn't spam, this isn't short, obviously low-value co... (read more)

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[-]Caerulea-Lawrence
137

400 comments... :)

When I read Killing Socrates, I had no idea it alluded to Said in any way. The point I took from it, was that it is important to treat both commentors and authors as responsible for the building process.

My limited point of view on Duncan_Sabien and Said is the following:

I really loved the above post by Duncan_Sabien. It was amazing, and on my comment on that post, they answered this. It felt reassuring and caring, and fitting for my comment,

I did really enjoy my brief interaction with Said as well. I wrote an idea, they answered with a valid, but much more solid critique of a specificity, shooting way above idea-level. Which made me first confused, then irritated, then angry, until I decided to just go for what I truly wanted to answer them, which was:


Yes, got it. Thanks for taking the time.
 

Which, I mean, looks pretty dismissive Said however, answered this:


Hah.

For what it’s worth, I do, actually, agree with the overall thrust of your suggestion. I have made similar suggestions myself, in the past… unfortunately, my understanding is that the LW team basically don’t think that anything like this is workable. I don’t think I agree with their reasoning, but they

... (read more)
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[-]Gentzel
134

My model of the problem boils down to a few basic factors:

  1. Attention competition prompts speed and rewards some degree of imprecision and controversy with more engagement.
  2. It is difficult to comply with many costly norms and to have significant output/win attention competitions.
  3. There is debate over which norms should be enforced, and while getting the norms combination right is positive-sum overall, different norms favor different personalities in competition.
  4. Just purging the norm breakers can create substantial groupthink if the norm breakers disproportionately express neglected ideas or comply with other neglected and costly but valuable norms.
  5. It is costly for 3rd parties to adjudicate and intervene precisely in conflicts involving attention competition, since they are inherently costly to sort out.

General recommendations/thoughts:

  1. Slow the pace of conversation, perhaps through mod rate limits on comment length and frequency or temporary bans. This seems like a proportional response to argument spam and attention competition, and would seem to push toward better engagement incentives without inducing groupthink from overzealous censorship.
  2. If entangled in comment conflict
... (read more)
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[-]DirectedEvolution
137

I think that the problem could be alleviated with the following combination of site capabilities:

  • Duncan should be able to prevent Said's comments and posts from being visible to Duncan's own profile -making Said invisible to Duncan.
  • Duncan should also have the ability to make his reasons for blocking Said from his own posts and invisibling Said's output elsewhere legible. For example, if Said replied to one of Duncan's comments in a third-party post, Duncan should not have to see the comment from Said. Said's comments on Duncan's third-party-post comments could get auto-tagged with a note saying something like "Duncan has set Said to 'invisible' and cannot see this comment."
  • It might be good if users who block or invisible others could provide an explanation in a way that's publicly available but not highly visible. For example, a user interested in knowing why Duncan set Said to invisible could go on Duncan's profile to find out, but the explanation would not get automatically linked to Said's comments replying to Duncan to avoid Duncan having the ability to unilaterally tag all of Said's comments replying to Duncan with Duncan's subjective criticism of Said.

My view is that the leng... (read more)

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[-]Viliam
12-2

My two cents:

I suspect that Said is really bad at predicting which of his comments will be perceived as rude.

If I had to give him a rule of thumb, it would probably be like this: "Those that are very short, only one or two lines, but demand an answer that requires a lot of thinking or writing. That feels like entitlement to make others spend orders of magnitude more effort than you did. Even if from the Spock-rational perspective this makes perfect sense (asking someone to provide specific examples to their theory can benefit everyone who finds the theory interesting; and why write a long comment when a short one says the same thing), the feeling of rudeness is still there, especially if you do this repeatedly enough that people associate this thing with your name. Even if it feels inefficient, try to expand your comments to at least five lines. For example, provide your own best guess, or a counter-example. Showing the effort is the thing that matters, but too short length is a proxy for low effort." This sounds susceptible to Goodharting, but who knows...

When I think about Duncan, my first association is the "punch bug" thing (the article, the discussion on LW, Duncan's complaint... (read more)

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[-]Said Achmiz
2810

I suspect that Said is really bad at predicting which of his comments will be perceived as rude.

If I had to give him a rule of thumb, it would probably be like this: “Those that are very short, only one or two lines, but demand an answer that requires a lot of thinking or writing. That feels like entitlement to make others spend orders of magnitude more effort than you did. Even if from the Spock-rational perspective this makes perfect sense (asking someone to provide specific examples to their theory can benefit everyone who finds the theory interesting; and why write a long comment when a short one says the same thing), the feeling of rudeness is still there, especially if you do this repeatedly enough that people associate this thing with your name. Even if it feels inefficient, try to expand your comments to at least five lines. For example, provide your own best guess, or a counter-example. Showing the effort is the thing that matters, but too short length is a proxy for low effort.” This sounds susceptible to Goodharting, but who knows...

Why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick?

Look, we covered this already. We covered the “effort” part, we covered the “Goodhart... (read more)

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[-]lsusr
*2217

I also tend to write concisely. A trick I often use is writing statements instead of questions. I feel statements are less imposing, since they lack the same level of implicit demand that they be responded to.

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5Said Achmiz
Hmm, it’s an interesting tactic, certainly. I’m not sure that it’s applicable in all cases, but it’s interesting. Perhaps you might point to some examples of how it’s best applied?
[-]lsusr
2316

"Perhaps you might point to some examples of how it’s best applied?" ⇒ "I'd be curious to read some examples of how it’s best applied."

By changing from a question to a statement, the request for information is transferred from a single person [me] to anyone reading the comment thread. This results in a diffusion of responsibility, which reduces the implicit imposition placed on the original parent.

Another advantage of using statements instead of questions is that they tend to direct me toward positive claims, instead of just making demands for rigor. This avoids some of the more annoyingly asymmetric aspects of Socratic dialogue.

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7Said Achmiz
The request can be fulfilled by anyone either way, though. There doesn’t seem to me to be any difference, in that regard. Hmm. I’m afraid I find the linked essay somewhat hard to make sense of. But, in any case, I’ll give your comments some thought, thanks.
[-]Viliam
118

Clearly, we have different preferences for what a good comment should look like. I am curious, is there a website where your preferred style is the norm? I would like to see how it works in practice.

(I realize that my request may not make sense; websites have different styles of comments. But if there is a website that feels more compatible with your preferences, I'd like to update my model.)

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6Said Achmiz
Not completely. Of course some websites approach it, from different directions. Current Less Wrong approaches it from one direction, old Less Wrong from a slightly different direction (and gets closest, I’d say), Data Secrets Lox from another.
9philh
It still seems to me that my "less social-attack-y" rewrite of one of your comments, in that thread, does feel less social-attack-y. You said then that you had no idea why it would be so. If that's still the case - and if you meant something like "I dispute that it is less social-attack-y" rather than "I acknowledge that it is less social-attack-y but I have no idea why" - then I think this lends credence to Villiam's idea that you're bad at perceiving which of your comments will be perceived as rude. (And I think our other exchange from this thread is more evidence. You said a thing would not be perceived as insulting, I said I would perceive it as insulting, and you replied that it shouldn't be perceived that way. But of course what should be and what is are two different things, and it seems to me that you're less capable of tracking that distinction in this domain than in others.) The comment I'm replying to doesn't explicitly say that Villiam's wrong here. It's consistent with you thinking any of * I'm quite capable of predicting it, I just have principled reasons not to take it into account. * I'm indeed bad at predicting it, but that's fine because I have principled reasons not to take it into account anyway. * I have no idea how good I am at predicting it, but that's fine because etc. But it gives the impression, to me, more of the former than the latter two. And (supposing I'm right so far, which I may not be) I don't think it would be surprising, if [your overestimate of your skills] turns out to be a crux as to [your principles generating the kind of comment you write]. That is, if the same principles would generate comments less-perceived-as-rude, if you were indeed better at predicting which of your comments would be perceived as rude. (e: I should say that I wrote this comment before seeing the verdict. Dunno if I'd have written it differently, if I'd seen it.)
[-]ambigram
106

It feels like an argument between a couple where person A says "You don't love me, you never tell me 'I love you' when I say it to you." and the person B responds "What do you mean I don't love you? I make you breakfast every morning even though I hate waking up early!". If both parties insist that their love language is the only valid way of showing love, there is no way for this conflict to be addressed. 

Maybe the person B believes actions speak louder than words and that saying "I love you" is pointless because people can say that even when they don't mean it  And perhaps person B believes that that is the ideal way the world works, where everyone is judged purely based on their actions and 'meaningless' words are omitted, because it removes a layer of obfuscation. But the thing is, the words are meaningless to person B; they are not meaningless to person A. It doesn't matter whether or not the words should be meaningful to person A. Person A as they are right now has a need to hear that verbal affirmation, person A genuinely has a different experience when they hear those words; it's just the way person A (and many people) are wired. 

If you want to have that rela... (read more)

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[-]ambigram
14-2

Still trying to figure out/articulate the differences between the two frames, because it feels like people are talking past each other. Not confident and imprecise, but this is what I have so far:

Said-like frame (truth seeking as a primarily individual endeavor)

  • Each individual is trying to figure out their own beliefs. Society reaches truer beliefs through each individual reaching truer beliefs.
  • Each individual decides how much respect to accord someone, (based on the individual's experiences). The status assigned by society (e.g. titles) are just a data point.
    • e.g. Just because someone is the teacher doesn't mean they are automatically given more respect. (A student who believes an institution has excellent taste in teachers may respect teachers from that institution more because of that belief, but the student would not respect a teacher just because they have the title of "teacher".)
      • If a student believes a teacher is incompetent and is making a pointless request (e.g. assigned a homework exercise that does not accomplish the learning objectives), the student questions the teacher. 
      • A teacher that responds in anger without engaging with the student's concerns is considered to b
... (read more)
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[-]TekhneMakre
92

It seems that Duncan has deactivated his account. https://www.lesswrong.com/users/duncan_sabien?mention=user

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[-]iceman
8-21

I have a very strong bias about the actors involved, so instead I'll say:

Perhaps LessWrong 2.0 was a mistake and the site should have been left to go read only.

My recollection was that the hope was to get a diverse diaspora to post in one spot again. Instead of people posting on their own blogs and tumblrs, the intention was to shove everyone back into one room. But with a diverse diaspora, you can have local norms to a cluster of people. But now when everyone is trying to be crammed into one site, there is an incentive to fight over global norms and attempt to enforce them on others.

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[-]lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
70

Hmm. Looks like I was (inadvertently) one of the actors in this whole thing. Not intended and unforeseen. Three thoughts.

(1) At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I just wanna say thanks again to the moderation team and everyone who participates here. I think oftentimes the "behind the scenes coordination work" doesn't get noticed during all the good times and not enough credit is noticed. I just like to notice it and say it outright. For instance, I went to the Seattle ACX meetup yesterday which I saw on here (LW), since I check ACX less frequentl... (read more)

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5Jasnah Kholin
(3) i didn't watch the movie, nor i plan to watch it, but i read the plot summary in Wikipedia. and I see it as caution against escalation. the people there consistently believe that you should revenge on 1 point offense at 4 points punishment. and this create escalation cycle. while i think most of Duncan's writing is good, the thing when i think he consistently create bad situations, is in unproportional escalations of conflict, and inability to just let things be.  once upon a time if i saw someone did something 1 point bad and someone reacting in 3 point bad thing, i would think the first one is 90% of the problem. with time, i find robustness more and more important, and now i see the second one more problematic. as such. i disagree with your description of the movie. the plot is one people doing something bad, other refuse to punish him, and a lot of people that escalate things, and so, by my standards, doing bad things. LOT of bad things. to call it a chin reaction is to not assign the people that doing bad unproportional escalating things agency over their bad choices. it's strange for me, as i see this agency very clearly. 
[-]Jasnah Kholin
5-1

So this is the fourth time I am trying to write a comment. This comment is far from ideal, but I feel like I did the best as my current skill in writing in English and understanding such situations allow.

 

1. I find 90% of the practical problems to be Drama. as in, long, repetitive, useless arguments. if it was facebook and Duncan blocked Said, and then proceeded to block anyone that was too much out of line by Duncan-standards, it would have solved 90% of Duncan-related problems. if he would have given up already on making LW his kind of garden, it wo... (read more)

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[-]clone of saturn
*4-1

One technical solution that occurs to me is to allow explicitly marking a post as half-baked, and therefore only open to criticism that comes along with substantial effort towards improving the post, or fully-baked and open to any criticism. However, I suspect that Duncan won't like this idea, because [edit: I suspect that] he wants to maintain a motte-and-bailey where his posts are half-baked when someone criticizes them but fully-baked when it's time to apportion status.

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[-]habryka
123

My current model of this is that the right time to really dig into posts is actually the annual review. 

I've been quite sad that Said hasn't been participating much in the annual review, since I do feel like his poking is a pretty good fit for the kind of criticism that I was hoping would come up there, and the whole point of that process is to have a step of "ok, but like, do these ideas actually check out" before something could potentially become canonized.

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[-]Said Achmiz
2511

My apologies! I regret that I’ve mostly not taken part in the annual review. To a large extent this is due to a combination of two things:

  1. The available time I have to comment on Less Wrong (or do anything similar) comes and goes depending on how busy I am with other things; and

  2. The annual review is… rather overwhelming, frankly, since it asks for attention to many posts in a relatively short time.

Also, I don’t have much to say about many (perhaps even most?) posts on Less Wrong. There’s quite a bit of alignment discussion and similar stuff which I simply am not qualified to weigh in on.

Finally, most discussion of a post tends to take place close in time to when it’s first published. To the extent that I tend to find it useful or interesting to comment on any given post, active discussion of it tends to be a major factor in my so finding it. (Indeed, the discussion in the comments is sometimes at least as useful, or even more useful, than the post itself!)

I wish I could promise that I’ll be more active in the annual review process, but that wouldn’t be a fair promise to make. I will say that I hope you don’t intend to shunt all critical discussion into that process; I think that would be quite unfortunate.

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9Ben Pace
(Commenting from recent discussion, also intended as a reply to Gwern) The annual review is an attempt to figure out what were the best contributions with the benefit of a great deal of hindsight, and I think it's prosocial to contribute to it, similar to how it was prosocial to contribute to the LW survey back when Scott ran a big one every year. I am always pleased when people contribute, and sometimes I am sad if there are particular users whose reviews I'd really like to read but don't write any. But I don't think anyone is obligated to write reviews!
0Elizabeth
The fact that you (EDIT: make this argument but) didn't make a single review in 2020, 2021, or 2022 makes me much less charitable towards your reasons or goals in commenting harshly on LW. 
[-]gwern
1815

I didn't make a review then either. Will this be held against me in the future?

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7Elizabeth
Not by me.  My cruxes are:  * There is a general trade off between authors' experience and improving correctness. * Said's claim that he's optimizing for correctness, and doesn't care about author experience. * Habryka believes (and I agree) the trade offs of Said's style are more suited to the review than daily commenting. * Said's response was "that seems less fun to me" rather than "I think the impact on correctness is greater earlier". Perhaps the question should always be "what are the costs and benefits to others?" rather than "what's in Said's heart?", in which case this doesn't matter. But to the extent motivation matters, I do think complete disinterest in the review speaks to motivation. 
[-]Said Achmiz
230

Habryka believes (and I agree) the trade offs of Said’s style are more suited to the review than daily commenting.

I think that this is diametrically wrong.

In the field of usability engineering, there are two kinds of usability evaluations: formative and summative.

Formative evaluations are done as early as possible. Not just “before the product is shipped”, but before it’s in beta, or in alpha, or in pre-alpha; before there’s any code—as soon as there’s anything at all that you can show to users (even paper prototypes), or apply heuristic analysis to, you start doing formative evaluations. Then you keep doing them, on each new prototype, on each new feature, continuously—and the results of these evaluations should inform design and implementation decisions at each step. Sometimes (indeed, often) a formative evaluation will reveal that you’re going down the wrong path, and need to throw out a bunch of work and start over; or the evaluation will reveal some deep conceptual or practical problem, which may require substantial re-thinking and re-planning. That’s the point of doing formative evaluations; you want to find out about these problems as soon as possible, not after you’ve ... (read more)

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[-]DirectedEvolution
*4012

The time for figuring out whether the ideas or claims in a post are even coherent, or falsifiable, or whether readers even agree on what the post is saying, is immediately.

Immediately—before an idea is absorbed into the local culture, before it becomes the foundation of a dozen more posts that build on it as an assumption, before it balloons into a whole “sequence”—when there’s still time to say “oops” with minimal cost, to course-correct, to notice important caveats or important implications, to avoid pitfalls of terminology, or (in some cases) to throw the whole thing out, shrug, and say “ah well, back to the drawing board”.

To only start doing all of this many months later, is way, way too late.

 

We have to distinguish whether comment X is a useful formative evaluation and whether formative evaluations are useful, but I do agree with Said that LessWrong can benefit from improved formative evaluations.

I have written some fairly popular LessWrong reviews, and one of the things I've uncovered is that some of the most memorable and persuasive evidence underpinning key ideas is much weaker and more ambiguous than I thought it was when I originally read the post. At LessWrong, we'r... (read more)

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2Said Achmiz
I agree with most of your comment, and those are good examples / case studies. This, however, assumes that “formative evaluations” must be complete works by single contributors, rather than collaborative efforts contributed to by multiple commenters. That is an unrealistic and unproductive assumption, and will lead to less evaluative work being done overall, not more. This does not seem to me to be necessary or even beneficial, unless the author has already responded to clarify their usage of the word. Certainly it would be a waste of everyone’s time to do it pre-emptively. Those are certainly useful things to do. They are not the only useful things that can be done, nor are they necessary, nor should they be required, nor would the overall effect be positive if we were to limit ourselves to such things only. I agree that some (but not all, as I note above) of these things are praiseworthy. Other things are also praiseworthy, such as the sorts of more granular contributions which we have been discussing.
[-]DirectedEvolution
139

I think the crux of our disagreement is that you seem to think there's this sort of latent potential for people to overcome their feelings of insult and social attack, and that even low-but-nonzero contributions to the discussion have positive value.

My view is this:

  • There is little-no hope of most people overcoming their tendency to feel insulted and attacked, and that when you talk in a way that provokes these feelings, you destroy the opportunity to do a useful formative evaluation, very reliably.
  • What makes a low-but-nonzero-value FE bad is that it's a poor use of time, failing to consider opportunity cost. You are right in saying that there are many ways to contribute to FEs, and what I am saying is that many of the ones you exhibit seem to me to be about on this level of value. It's the epistemic equivalent of making money by looking for loose change dropped on the sidewalk.
  • While ideally, such comments can and would be ignored or blocked by the people who see them as having such low value, it is about has hard to do this as it is to not feel insulted.

I know that you have definitely contributed some comments (and posts too, in the past) where clearly a substantial number of peopl... (read more)

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[-]Said Achmiz
1820

Thank you for the kind words.

However, I’m afraid I disagree with your view. Taking your points in reverse order of importance:

While ideally, such comments can and would be ignored or blocked by the people who see them as having such low value, it is about has hard to do this as it is to not feel insulted.

This I find to be a basically irrelevant point. If someone is so thin-skinned that they can’t bear even to ignore/block things they consider to be of low value, but rather find themselves compelled to read them, and then get angry, then that person should perhaps consider avoiding, like… the Internet. In general. This is simply a pathetic sort of complaint.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: if you (I mean the general “you” here, not you in particular) want to engage with what you see as a low-value comment, because you think that’s a productive view of your time and effort, well, by all means—who am I to tell you otherwise? If you feel that here is a person being WRONG on the Internet, and you simply must explain to them how WRONG they are, so that all and sundry can see that they are unacceptably and shamefully WRONG—godspeed, I say. Such things can be both valuable and entertaining... (read more)

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[-]DirectedEvolution
124

OK, first of all, let me say that this is an example of Said done well - I really like this comment a lot.

I think most of our disagreement flows from fundamentally different perspectives on how bad it is to make people feel insulted or belittled. In my view, it's easy to hurt people's feelings, that outcome is very destructive, and it's natural for people to make suboptimal choices in reacting to those hurt feelings, especially when the other person knows full well that they routinely provoke that response and choose to do it anyway.

Insulting and harsh posts can still be net valuable (as some of yours are, the majority of Eliezer's, and ~all of the harsh critiques of Gwern's that I've read), but they have to be quite substantial in order to overcome the cost of harshness. But there will have to be a high absolute quantity of positive value overall, not just per word, in order to overcome harshness. After all, it's very easy to deliver a huge absolute magnitude of harshness ("f*** you!") in very few words, but much harder to provide an equally large total quantity of value in the same word count.

I know from our previous comment thread that you just don't think about insulting commen... (read more)

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4Said Achmiz
I don’t think that is the crux. Again (and it seems I must emphasize this, because for whatever reason, I cannot seem to get this point across effectively): a comment that says “Examples?” is not “harsh”, it is not “belittling”, it is not “insulting”; it may be perceived as being insulting only if it turns out that the author should have examples, but doesn’t. But in that case, the fault for that is the author’s! If the author didn’t want to feel insulted when someone asked him for examples he didn’t have (and knew that he could not avoid so feeling, despite the fact that such a question is fair and the implied rebuke in the event that no answer is forthcoming is just), then he should not have written such a post in such a way! Who forced him to do that? Nobody! What would you have us do? To sabotage our own ability to understand a post, a claim, an idea, because asking a certain sort of question about it would mean risking the possibility that the post/claim/idea has a glaring flaw in it? Even aside from the obvious desirability of uncovering such a flaw, if one exists, there is the fact that this policy would prevent us from getting use out of posts/ideas/claims that are perfectly well formed, that have no flaws at all!
[-]DirectedEvolution
125

I actually do think it is the crux, because you seem to be rearticulating the point of view that I was ascribing to you.

You think that:

  1. Your comments don't usually provoke feelings of insult in the target.
  2. Or if they are, it's the other person's fault for being thin-skinned or writing a bad post
  3. And anyway, there's a lot of value in calling out flaws with brief remarks, enough to overcome any downsides with being insulting you might want to impute

And I am saying:

  1. Your comments routinely provoke feelings of insult in the target.
  2. Authors are typically not blameworthy for feeling insulted, and their response to you is not very indicative of their correctness or depth of thought
  3. And the value of calling out flaws with brief remarks is small, and not nearly worth it relative to the damage you do by being insulting while you go about it

Sounds pretty cruxy to me.

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[-]Said Achmiz
112

Once again you miss a (the?) key point.

“What are some examples?” does not constitute “calling out a flaw”—unless there should be examples but aren’t. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous question, and a helpful prompt.

“What are some examples?” therefore will not be perceived as insulting—except in precisely those cases where any perceived insult is the author’s fault.

Of course, I also totally disagree with this:

the value of calling out flaws with brief remarks is small

Calling out flaws with brief remarks is not only good (because calling out flaws is good), but (insofar as it’s correct, precise, etc.), it’s much better than calling out flaws with long comments. It is not always possible, mind you! Condensing a cogent criticism into a brief remark is no small feat. But where possible, it ought to be praised and rewarded.

And I want to note a key disagreement with your construal of this part:

Or if they are, it’s the other person’s fault for being thin-skinned being insulting while you go about it

Things would be different if what I were advocating was something like “if a post is bad, in your view, then it’s ok to say ‘as would be obvious to anyone with half a brain, your post is wrong... (read more)

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[-]DirectedEvolution
116

Mm, I still think my original articulation of our crux is fine.

Here, you're mostly making semantic quibbles or just disagreeing with my POV, rather than saying I identified the wrong crux.

However, we established the distinction between an insulting comment (i.e. a comment the target is likely to feel insulted by) from a deliberate insult (i.e. a comment primarily intended to provoke feelings of insult) in a whole separate thread, which most people won't see here. It is "insulting comment" that I meant in the above, and I will update the articulation to make that more clear.

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7Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
A meta point that is outside of the scope of the object level disagreement/is a tangent: ---------------------------------------- I note that the following exchange recently took place: Said: [multiple links to him just saying "Examples?"] Me: [in a style I would not usually use but with content that is not far from my actual belief] I'm sorry, how do any of those (except possibly 4) satisfy any reasonable definition of the word "criticism?" Said: Well, I think that “criticism”, in a context like this topic of discussion, certainly includes something like “pointing to a flaw or lacuna, or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement”. ---------------------------------------- So we have Said a couple of days ago defending "What are some examples?" as definitely being under the umbrella of criticism, further defined as the subset of criticism which is pointing to a flaw or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement. Then we have Said here saying that it is a key point that "What are some examples?" does not constitute calling out a flaw. (The difference between the two situations being (apparently) the entirely subjective/mysterious/unstated property of "whether there should be examples but aren't," noting that Said thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap is not particularly predictive of the median high-karma LWer thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap.) I am reminded again of Said saying that I A'd people due to their B, and I said no, I had not A'd anyone for B'ing, and Said replied ~"I never said you A'd anyone for B'ing; you can go check; I said you'd A'd them due to B'ing." i.e. splitting hairs and swirling words around to create a perpetual motte-and-bailey fog that lets him endlessly nitpick and retreat and say contradictory things at different times using the same words, and pretending to a sort of principle/coherence/consistency that he does not actually evince.
8anonymousaisafety
Yeah, almost like splitting hairs around whether making the public statement "I now categorize Said as a liar" is meaningfully different than "Said is a liar". Or admonishing someone for taking a potshot at you when they said  ...while acting as though somehow that would have been less offensive if they had only added "I suspect" to the latter half of that sentence as well. Raise your hand if you think that "I suspect that you won't like this idea, because I suspect that you have the emotional maturity of a child" is less offensive because it now represents an unambiguously true statement of an opinion rather than being misconstrued as a fact. A reasonable person would say "No, that's obviously intended to be an insult" -- almost as though there can be meaning beyond just the words as written. The problem is that if we believe in your philosophy of constantly looking for the utmost literal interpretation of the written word, you're tricking us into playing a meta-gamed, rules-lawyered, "Sovereign citizen"-esque debate instead of, what's the word -- oh, right, Steelmanning. Assuming charity from the other side. Seeking to find common ground. For example, I can point out that Said clearly used the word "or" in their statement. Since reading comprehension seems to be an issue for a "median high-karma LWer" like yourself, I'll bold it for you.  Is it therefore consistent for "asking for examples" to be contained by that set, while likewise not being pointing to a flaw? Yes, because if we say that a thing is contained by a set of "A or B", it could be "A", or it could be "B". Now that we've done your useless exercise of playing with words, what have we achieved? Absolutely nothing, which is why games like these aren't tolerated in real workplaces, since this is a waste of everyone's time. You are behaving in a seriously insufferable way right now. Sorry, I meant -- "I think that you are behaving in what feels like to me a seriously insufferable way right now, whe
[-]DirectedEvolution
2818

On reflection, I do think both Duncan and Said are demonstrating a significant amount of hair-splitting and less consistent, clear communication than they seem to think. That's not necessarily bad in and of itself - LW can be a place for making fine distinctions and working out unclear thoughts, when there's something important there.

It's really just using them as the basis for a callout and fuel for an endless escalation-spiral when they become problematic.

When I think about this situation from both Duncan and Said's point of views to the best of my ability, I understand why they'd be angry/frustrated/whatever, and how the search for reasons and rebuttals has escalated to the point where the very human and ordinary flaws of inconsistency and hair-splitting can seem like huge failings.

At this point, I really have lost the ability and interest to track the rounds and rounds of prosecutorial hair-splitting across multiple comment threads. It was never fun, it's not enlightening, and I don't think it's really the central issue at stake. It's more of a bitch eating crackers scenario at this point.

I made an effort to understand Said's point of view, and whatever his qualms with how I've... (read more)

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[-]Said Achmiz
108

On reflection, I do think both Duncan and Said are demonstrating a significant amount of hair-splitting and less consistent, clear communication than they seem to think.

Communication is difficult; communication when subtleties must be conveyed, while there is interpersonal conflict taking place, much more difficult.

I don’t imagine that I have, in every comment I’ve written over the past day, or the past week (or month, or year, or decade), succeeded perfectly in getting my point across to all readers. I’ve tried to be clear and precise, as I always do; sometimes I succeed excellently, sometimes less so. If you say “Said, in that there comment you did not make your meaning very clear”, I think that’s a plausible criticism a priori, and certainly a fair one in some actual cases.

This is, to a greater or lesser degree, true of everyone. I think it is true of me less so than is the average—that is, I think that my writing tends to be more clear than most people’s. (Of course anyone is free to disagree; this sort of holistic judgment isn’t easy to operationalize!)

What I think I can’t be accused of, in general, is:

  • failing to provide (at least attempted) clarifications upon request
  • fa
... (read more)
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6DirectedEvolution
  Speaking to our interactions in this post, I do agree with you on all counts. Elsewhere, I think you fall short of my minimum definition of 'cooperative,' but I also understand that you have very different standards for what constitutes cooperative and I see this as a normative crux, one that is unlikely to be resolved through debate. I also think this is true for our interactions here. Elsewhere, I disagree - you frequently are one of two main players in escalation spirals. I understand that, for you, that is typically the other person's fault. The most charitable way I can put my point of view is that, even if it is the other person's fault, I think that you should prioritize figuring out how to cut your rate of being involved in escalation spirals in half. That might involve a choice to reconsider certain comments, to comment differently, or to redirect your attention to people who have demonstrated a higher level of appreciation for your comments in the past. I think another lesson people learn early in life is that you can do whatever you want, but often, you shouldn't, because it has negative effects on others, and they learn to empathically care about other people's wellbeing. Our previous exchanges have convinced me that in important ways, you reject the idea that you ought to care about how your words and actions affect other people as long as they're within the bounds of the law. Again, I think this just brings us back to the crux of our disagreement, over whether and to what extent the feelings of insult you provoke in others is a moral consideration in deciding how to interact. As I have grown quite confident in the nature of our disagreement, as well as its intractability, I am going to commit to signing off of LessWrong entirely for two weeks, because I think it will distract me. I will revisit further comments of yours (or PMs if you prefer) at that time.
[-]Said Achmiz
100

The most charitable way I can put my point of view is that, even if it is the other person’s fault, I think that you should prioritize figuring out how to cut your rate of being involved in escalation spirals in half.

If we’re referring to my participation in Less Wrong specifically (and I must assume that you are), then I have to point out that it would be very easy for me to cut my rate of being involved in what you call “escalation spirals” (regardless of whether I agree with your characterization of the situations in question) not only in half or even tenfold, but to zero. To do this, I would simply stop posting and commenting here.

The question then becomes whether there’s any unilateral action I can take, any unilateral change I can make, whose result would be that I could continue spending time on participation in Less Wrong discussions in such a way that there’s any point or utility in my doing so, while also to any non-trivial degree reducing the incidence of people being insulted (or “insulted”), escalating, etc.

It seems to me that there is not.

Certainly there are actions that other people (such as, say, the moderators of the site) could take, that would have that sort o... (read more)

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8Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
✋ The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distinctions even a little bit. The distance between "I categorize Said as a liar" and "Said is a liar" is easily 10x and quite plausibly 100-1000x the distance between "You blocked people due to criticizing you" and "you blocked people for criticizing you." The latter is two synonymous phrases; the former is not. (I also explicitly acknowledged that Ray's rounding was the right rounding to make, whereas Said was doing the opposite and pretending that swapping "due to" and "for" had somehow changed the meaning in a way that made the paraphrase invalid.) You being like "Stop using phrases that meticulously track uncommon distinctions you've made; we already have perfectly good phrases that ignore those distinctions!" is not the flex you seem to think it is; color blindness is not a virtue.
[-]DirectedEvolution
1712

The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distinctions even a little bit.

In my opinion, the internet has fine-grained distinctions aplenty. In fact, where to split hairs and where to twist braids is sort of basic to each political subculture. What I think makes LessWrong different is that we take a somewhat, maybe not agnostic but more like a liberal/pluralistic view of the categories. We understand them as constructs, "made for man," as Scott put it once, and as largely open to critical investigation and not just enforcement. We try and create the social basis for a critical investigation to happen productively.

When anonymousaisafety complains of hair-splitting, I think they are saying that, while the distinction between "I categorize Said as a liar" and "Said is a liar" is probably actually 100-1000x as important a distinction between "due to" and "for" in your mind, other people also get to weigh in on that question and may not agree with you, at least not in context.

If you really think the difference between these two very similar phrasings is so huge, and you want that to land with other peop... (read more)

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2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Er. I very explicitly did not claim that it was a distinction of tremendous importance. I was just objecting to the anonymous person's putting them in the same bucket.  Endorsed/updated; this is a better summary than the one I gave.
4DirectedEvolution
So are you saying that although the distinction between the two versions of the “liar” phrase is 100-1000x bigger than between the due to/for distinction, it is still not tremendously important?
[-]dxu
1311

As a single point of evidence: it's immediately obvious to me what the difference is between "X is true" and "I think X" (for starters, note that these two sentences have different subjects, with the former's subject being "X" and the latter's being "I"). On the other hand, "you A'd someone due to their B'ing" and "you A'd someone for B'ing" do, actually, sound synonymous to me—and although I'm open to the idea that there's a distinction I'm missing here (just as there might be people to whom the first distinction is invisible), from where I currently stand, the difference between the first pair of sentences looks, not just 10x or 1000x bigger, but infinitely bigger than the difference between the second, because the difference between the second is zero.

(And if you accept that [the difference between the second pair of phrases is zero], then yes, it's quite possible for some other difference to be massively larger than that, and yet not be tremendously important.)

Here, I do think that Duncan is doing something different from even the typical LWer, in that he—so far as I can tell—spends much more time and effort talking about these fine-grained distinctions than do others, in a way... (read more)

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4Said Achmiz
With the caveat that I think this sort of “litigation of minutiae of nuance” is of very limited utility[1], I am curious: would you consider “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” different from both the other two forms? Synonymous with them both? Synonymous with one but not the other? ---------------------------------------- 1. I find that I am increasingly coming around to @Vladimir_Nesov’s stance on nuance. ↩︎
5dxu
Yeah, I think I probably agree. Synonymous as far as I can tell. (If there's an actual distinction in your view, which you're currently trying to lead me to via some kind of roundabout, Socratic pathway, I'd appreciate skipping to the part where you just tell me what you think the distinction is.)
6Said Achmiz
I had no such intention. It’s just that we already know that I think that X and Y seem like different things, and you think X and Y seem like the same thing, and since X and Y are the two forms which actually appeared in the referenced argument, there’s not much further to discuss, except to satisfy curiosity about the difference in our perceptions (which inquiry may involve positing some third thing Z). That’s really all that my question was about. In case you are curious in turn—personally, I’d say that “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” seems to me to be the same as “you A’d someone due to their B’ing”, but different from “you A’d someone for their B’ing”. As far as characterizing the distinction, I can tell you only that the meaning I, personally, was trying to convey was the difference in what sort of rule or principle was being applied. (See, for instance, the difference between “I shot him for breaking into my house” and “I shot him because he broke into my house”. The former implies a punishment imposed as a judgment for a transgression, while the latter can easily include actions taken in self-defense or defense of property, or even unintentional actions.) But, as I said, there is probably little point in pursuing this inquiry further.
4dxu
Gotcha. Thanks for explaining, in any case; I appreciate it.
2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Yeah. One is small, and the other is tiny. The actual comment that the anonymous person is mocking/castigating said:
-17anonymousaisafety
1philh
I expect to perceive a bare "what are some examples?" as mildly insulting even if the author is like "yes absolutely, here you go". And I expect to percieve a bare "examples?" as slightly more insulting.
6Ben Pace
I don't think it's mildly insulting, I think it's ambiguously insulting, in that a person wanting to insult you might do it. But in general I think it's a totally reasonable question in truth-seeking and I'd be sad if people required disclaimers to clarify that it isn't meant insultingly, just to ask for examples of what the person is talking about. (Commenting from Recent Discussion)
4Said Achmiz
Seconding Ben Pace’s answer. This sort of thing is one case of a larger category of questions one might ask. Others include: “Is the raw data available for download/viewing?” (No reason to be insulted, if your answer is “yes”, or if you have a good reason/excuse for not providing the data. Definitely reason to be insulted otherwise—but then you deserve the “insult”. Scare quotes because “insult” is really the wrong word; it’s more like “fairly inflicted disapproval”.) “Could you make the code for your experimental setup available?” (Ditto. There could be good reasons why you can’t or won’t provide this! There’s no insult in that case. But if you don’t provide the code and you have no good reason for not doing so, then you deserve the disapproval.) “Do you have a reference for that?” (Providing references for claims is good, but not always possible. But if you make an unreferenced claim and you have no good reason for doing that, you deserve the disapproval.) In cases like this, there is, or should be, an expectation that people who are communicating and truth-seeking in good faith, with integrity, with honest intention of effectiveness, etc., will offer cooperation to each other and to their potential audience. This cooperation takes the form of—where possible—citing references for claims, providing data, publishing code, providing examples, clarifying usage of terms, etc., etc. Where possible, note! Of course these things cannot always be done. But where they can be done, they should be. These are simply the basic expectations, the basic epistemic courtesies we owe to each other (and to ourselves!). So a question or request like “what are some examples”, “where is the data”, “citation please”—these are nothing more than requests (or reminders, if you like) for those basic elements of cooperation. There is no reason not to fulfill them, if you can. (And plenty of reasons to do so!) Sometimes you can’t, of course; then you say so, explaining why. But why would
2Raemon
(Flagging this as the second of the two comments I said Said could make. I've disabled his ability to comment/post for now. You're welcome to send moderators PMs to continue discussion with us. I'm working on a reply to your other comment addressed more specifically)
5Czynski
Of course there is! People can and do overcome that when it's actually important to them. At work, as part of goals they care about, in relationships they care about. If we care about truth-seeking - and it's literally in the name that we do - then we can and will overcome that.
4dxu
I am curious as to your assessment of the degree of work done by a naked "this seems unclear, please explain"? My own assessment would place the value of this (and nothing else) at fairly close to zero—unless, of course, you are implicitly taking credit for some of the discussion that follows (with the reasoning that, had the initiating comment been absent, the resulting discussion would not counterfactually exist). If so, I find this reasoning unconvincing, but I remain open to hearing reasons you might disagree with me about this—if in fact you do disagree. (And if you don't disagree, then from my perspective that sounds awfully like conceding the point; but perhaps you disagree with that, and if so, I would also like to hear why.)
5Said Achmiz
By “degree of work” do you mean “amount of effort invested” or “magnitude of effect achieved”? If the former, then the answer, of course, is “that is irrelevant”. But it seems like you mean the latter—yes? In which case, the answer, empirically, is “often substantial”. Essentially, yes. And we do not need to imagine counterfactuals, either; we can see this happen, often enough (i.e., some post will be written, and nobody asks for examples, and none are given, and no discussion of particulars ensues). Individual cases differ in details, of course, but the pattern is clear. Although I wouldn’t phrase it quite in terms of “taking credit” for the ensuing discussion. That’s not the point. The point is that the effect be achieved, and that actions which lead to the effect being achieved, be encouraged. If I write a comment like this one, and someone (as an aside, note, that in this case it was not the OP!) responds with comments like this one and this one, then of course it would be silly of me to say “I deserve the credit for those replies!”—no, the author of those replies deserves the credit for those replies. But insofar as they wouldn’t’ve have existed if I hadn’t posted my comment, then I deserve credit for having posted my comment. You are welcome to say “but you deserve less credit, maybe even almost no credit”; that’s fine. (Although, as I’ve noted before, the degree to which such prompts are appreciated and rewarded ought to scale with the likelihood of their counterfactual absence, i.e., if I hadn’t written that comment, would someone else have? But that’s a secondary point.) It’s fine if you want to assign me only epsilon credit. What’s not fine is if, instead, you debit me for that comment. That would be completely backwards, and fundamentally confused about what sorts of contributions are valuable, and indeed about what the point of this website even is. Why?
[-]dxu
1619

If so, I find this reasoning unconvincing

Why?

I mostly don't agree that "the pattern is clear"—which is to say, I do take issue with saying "we do not need to imagine counterfactuals". Here is (to my mind) a salient example of a top-level comment which provides an example illustrating the point of the OP, without the need for prompting.

I think this is mostly what happens, in the absence of such prompting: if someone thinks of a useful example, they can provide it in the comments (and accrue social credit/karma for their contribution, if indeed other users found said contribution useful). Conversely, if no examples come to mind, then a mere request from some other user ("Examples?") generally will not cause sudden examples to spring into mind (and to the extent that it does, the examples in question are likely to be ad hoc, generated in a somewhat defensive frame of mind, and accordingly less useful).

And, of course, the crucial observation here is that in neither case was the request for examples useful; in the former case, the request was unnecessary, as the examples would have been provided in any case, and in the latter case, the request was useless, as it failed to elicit... (read more)

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6Said Achmiz
Yep, indeed, that is an example, and a good one. But I linked a case of exactly the thing you just said won’t happen! I linked it in the comment you just responded to! Here is another example. Here are more examples: one two three (and a bonus particularly interesting sort-of-example) This is a weak response given that I am pointing to a pattern. A very suspicious reply, in the general case. Not always false, of course! But suspicious. If such a condition obtains, it ought to be pointed out explicitly, and defended. It is quite improper, and lacking in intellectual integrity, to simply rely on social censure against requests for examples to shield you from having to explain why in this case it so happens that you don’t need to point to any extensions for your proffered intensions. I agree that Duncan’s complaint includes this. I just think that he’s wrong about this. (And wrong in such a way that he should know that he’s wrong.) The burden is (a) not just on the author, but also on the reader (including the one who requested the examples!), and (b) not undue, but in fact quite the opposite. First, on the subject of “accompanying interpretive effort”: I think that such effort not only doesn’t reduce the cost to authors of responding, it can easily increase the cost. (See my previous commentary on the subject of “interpretive effort” for much expansion of this point.) Second, on the subject of “cost to the author of responding”: that cost should not be very high, since the author should, ideally, already have examples in mind. (As an aside, I wonder at the fact that you, and others here, seem so consistently to ignore this point: if an author makes a strong claim, and has no examples ready, and can’t easily come up with such, and also has no good case for why examples are inapplicable / unhelpful / irrelevant / whatever, that is a bad sign. There is a good chance that the author should not have written the post at all, in such a case!) Third, on the subject
[-]Said Achmiz
186

Said’s response was “that seems less fun to me”

It was not.

I did not say anything like this, nor is this my reason for not participating, nor is this a reasonable summary of what I described as my reasons.

(I have another comment on another one of your listed cruxes, but I just wanted to very clearly object to this one.)

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3DirectedEvolution
Gwern, harsh as you can sometimes be, your critical comments are consistently well-researched, cited, and dense with information. I'm not always qualified to figure out if you're right or wrong, but your comments always seem substantive to me. This is the piece that I perceive as missing with so many of Said's comments - they lack the substance that you contribute, while being harsh and insulting in tone.
4Vladimir_Nesov
The question is validity of the argument about non-participation in annual review, not direction of your conclusion in particular cases, which is influenced by many reasons besides this argument. If you like gwern's comments for those other reasons, that doesn't inform the question of whether non-participation in annual review should make you (or someone else) less charitable towards someone's "reasons or goals in commenting harshly on LW" (in whatever instances that occurs).
[-]Said Achmiz
139

Uh… I’m not quite sure that I follow. Is writing reviews… obligatory? Or even, in any sense, expected? I… wasn’t aware that I had been shirking any sort of duty, by not writing reviews. Is this a new site policy, or one which I missed? Otherwise, this seems like somewhat of an odd comment…

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[-]clone of saturn
1210

I'll go along with whatever rules you decide on, but that seems like an extremely long time to wait for basic clarifications like "what did you mean by this word" or "can you give a real-world example".

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2habryka
Yep, I think genuine questions for clarification seems quite reasonable. Asking for additional clarifying examples is also pretty good.  I think doing an extended socratic dialogue where the end goal is to show some contradiction within the premise of the original post in a way that tries to question the frame of the post at a pretty deep level is I think the kind of thing that can often make sense to wait until people had time to contextualize a post, though I am not confident here and it's plausible it should also happen almost immediately. 
6clone of saturn
I see. If the issue here is only with extended socratic dialogues, rather than any criticism which is perceived as low-effort, that wasn't clear to me. I wouldn't be nearly as opposed to banning the former, if that could be operationalized in a reasonable way.
4Said Achmiz
See this comment for my thoughts on the matter.
3Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
This is false and uncharitable and I would like moderator clarification on whether this highly-upvoted [EDIT: at the time] comment is representative of the site leaders' vision of what LW should be.
[-]anonymousaisafety
4735

@Duncan_Sabien I didn't actually upvote @clone of saturn's post, but when I read it, I found myself agreeing with it.

I've read a lot of your posts over the past few days because of this disagreement. My most charitable description of what I've read would be "spirited" and "passionate".

You strongly believe in a particular set of norms and want to teach everyone else. You welcome the feedback from your peers and excitedly embrace it, insofar as the dot product between a high-dimensional vector describing your norms and a similar vector describing the criticism is positive.

However, I've noticed that when someone actually disagrees with you -- and I mean disagreement in the sense of "I believe that this claim rests on incorrect priors and is therefore false." -- I have been shocked by the level of animosity you've shown in your writing.

Full disclosure: I originally messaged the moderators in private about your behavior, but I'm now writing this in public because in part because of your continued statements on this thread that you've done nothing wrong.

I think that your responses over the past few days have been needlessly escalatory in a way that Said's weren't. If we go with the Socra... (read more)

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2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
This is literally false; it is objectively the case that no such statement exists. Here are all the comments I've left on this thread up to this point, none of which says or strongly implies "I've done nothing wrong." Some of them note that behavior that might seem disproportionate has additional causes upstream of it, that other people seem to me to be discounting, but that's not the same as me saying "I've done nothing wrong." This is part of the problem. The actual words matter. The actual facts matter. If you inject into someone's words whatever you feel like, regardless of whether it's there or not, you can believe all sorts of things about e.g. their intentions or character. LessWrong is becoming a place where people don't care to attend to stuff like "what was actually said," and that is something I find alienating, and am trying to pump against. (My actual problem is less "this stuff appears in comments," which it always has, and more "it feels like it gets upvoted to the top more frequently these days," i.e. like the median user cares less than the median user of days past. I don't feel threatened by random strawmanning or random uncharitableness; I feel threatened when it's popular.)
[-]Vladimir_Nesov
1915

The actual facts matter.

But escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, robustness to some fuzziness on the facts and their descriptions is crucial. When particular distinctions matter, it's worth highlighting. Highlighting consumes a limited resource, the economy of allocating importance to particular distinctions.

The threat of pointing to many distinction as something that had to be attended imposes a minimum cost on all such distinctions, it's costs across the board.

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4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I agree that escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, and that you can and should only highlight the relevant and necessary distinctions. I think "someone just outright said I'd repeatedly said stuff I hadn't" falls above the line, though.
-2anonymousaisafety
Yes, I have read your posts.  I note that in none of them did you take any part of the responsibility for escalating the disagreement to its current level of toxicity.  You have instead pointed out Said's actions, and Said's behavior, and the moderators lack of action, and how people "skim social points off the top", etc.
[-]DirectedEvolution
1124

Anonymousaisafety, with respect, and acknowledging there's a bit of the pot calling the kettle black intrinsic in my comment here, I think your comments in this thread are also functioning to escalate the conflict, as was clone of saturn's top-level comment.

The things your comments are doing that seem to me escalatory include making an initially inaccurate criticism of Duncan ("your continued statements on this thread that you've done nothing wrong"), followed by a renewed criticism of Duncan that doesn't contain even a brief acknowledgement or apology for the original inaccuracy. Those are small relational skills that can be immensely helpful in dealing with a conflict smoothly.

None of that has any bearing on the truth-value of your critical claims - it just bears on the manner and context in which you're expressing them.

I think it is possible and desirable to address this conflict in a net-de-escalatory manner. The people best positioned to do so are the people who don't feel themselves to be embroiled in a conflict with Duncan or Said, or who can take genuine emotional distance from any such conflict.

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2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
*shrug You're an anonymous commenter who's been here for a year sniping from the sidelines who has shown that they're willing to misrepresent comments that are literally visible on this same page, and then, when I point that out, ignore it completely and reiterate your beef. I think Ray wants me to say "strong downvote and I won't engage any further."
[-]habryka
146

Ray is owning stuff, so this is just me chiming in with some quick takes, but I think it is genuinely important for people to be able to raise hypotheses like "this person is trying to maintain a motte-and-bailey", and to tell people if that is their current model. 

I don't currently think the above comment violated any moderation norms I would enforce, though navigating this part of conversational space is super hard and it's quite possible there are some really important norms in the space that are super important and should be enforced, that I am missing. I have a model of a lot of norms in the space already, however the above comment does not violate any of them right now (mostly because it does prefix the statement with a "I suspect X", and does not claim any broader social consensus beyond that). 

I also think it's good for you to chime in and say that it's false (you are also correct in that it is uncharitable, but assuming that everyone is well-intentioned is IMO not true and not a required part of good discourse, so it not being charitable seems true but also not obviously bad and I am not sure what you pointing it out means. I think we should create justified knowledge of good intentions wherever possible, I just don't think LW comment threads, especially threads about moderation, are a space where achieving such common knowledge is remotely feasible). 

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2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
This did not raise the hypothesis that I want to maintain a motte-and-bailey. It asserted that I do, as if fact.
[-]habryka
161

It asserted that I do, as if fact

I am quite confused. The comment clearly says "I suspect"? That seems like one of the clearest prefixes I know for raising something as a hypothesis, and very clearly signals that something is not being asserted as a fact. Am I missing something?

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2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
The "I suspect" is attached to the "Duncan won't like this idea."  I would bet $10 that if you polled 100 readers on whether it was meant to include "I suspect that Duncan wants, etc." a majority would say no, the second part was taken as given. It's of the form "I suspect X, because Y." Not "I suspect X because I suspect Y."
5habryka
Oh, sure, I would be happy to take that bet. I agree there is some linguistic ambiguity here, but I think my interpretation is more natural. In any case, @clone of saturn can clarify here. I would currently bet this is just a sad case of linguistic ambiguity, not actually someone making a confident statement about you having ill-intent.
8clone of saturn
I can't read Duncan's mind and have no direct access to facts about his ultimate motivations. I can be much more confident that a person who is currently getting away with doing X has reason to dislike a rule that would prevent X. So the "I suspect" was much more about the second clause than the first. I find this so obvious that it never occurred to me that it could be read another way. I don't accept Duncan's stand-in sentence "I suspect that Eric won't like the zoo, because he wants to stay out of the sun." as being properly analogous, because staying out of the sun is not something people typically need to hide or deny. To be honest, I think I have to take this exchange as further evidence that Duncan is operating in bad faith. (Within this particular conflict, not necessarily in general.)
[-]Vaniver
1210

I would've preferred if you had proposed another alternative wording, so that poll could be run as well, instead of just identifying the feature you think is disanalogous. (If you supply the wording, after all, Duncan can't have twisted it, and your interpretation gets fairly tested.)

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5clone of saturn
Why not just use the original sentence, with only the name changed? I don't see what is supposed to be accomplished by the other substitutions.
8RobertM
Unfortunately, I don't have quite the reach that Duncan has, but I think the result is still suggestive.  (Subtract one from each vote, since I left one of each to start, as is usual.)
2clone of saturn
Ok, I edited the comment.
3Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Does that influence  in any way? Four days' later edit: guess not. :/
2Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Oliver proposed an alternative wording and I affirmed that I'd still bet on his wording.  I was figuring I shouldn't try to run a second poll myself because of priming/poisoning the well but I'm happy for someone else to go and get data.  
4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
The poll is here for people to watch results trickle in, though I ask that no one present in this subthread vote so the numbers can be more raw.
1Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
(It's early yet, but so far it is unanimously in favor of my interpretation, with twenty reactions one way and zero the other, and one comment in between the two choices I gave but writing out that the epistemic status on the second clause seems stronger than "I suspect".) (Somewhat ironically, this makes me marginally more likely to interpret "well, I meant the more epistemically reserved thing" as being a fallback to a motte, if such a statement ever appears.)
[-]tslarm
30

Why do LW users need the ability to ban other users from commenting on their posts? 

If user X could choose to:

  • make all comments by user Y invisible to user X; and, optionally, 
  • enable a public notice on all of Y's replies to X that "Y is on X's ignore list",

what desirable thing would be missing?

The optional public notice would ensure that X's non-response to Y would not be taken to imply anything like tacit agreement; it would also let other users know that their comments downstream of a Y comment would not be seen by X.

('All comments' in the firs... (read more)

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9Raemon
Then there'd be a whole discussion happening on an author's post that the author can't see, which produces weird affects where not everyone can be quite sure which things everyone has seen, the author will be aware enough of it to know something is happening, but operating blind. My experience with this style of blocking on FB is that it's pretty terrible.
3tslarm
Wouldn't the 'public notice' in my second point remove that ambiguity? And I'm not playing dumb here, I just don't use Facebook: does it have something like that public notice?
6Raemon
The public notice is an innovation over facebook, but you'd still see a bunch of people referring to one conversation thread that you can't see. The problem is the lack of common knowledge of what's actually going on.
4tslarm
Fair enough, but it still seems like an okay situation to me, with something pretty close to common knowledge of what's going on: everyone but X knows exactly what is visible to whom, and X knows everything except the content (edit: and actual existence, but not potential existence) of a well-defined set of comments that they have chosen to opt out of. So nobody but Y will have any trouble communicating with X; I guess occasionally someone will unthinkingly refer to something from a Y subthread, but any resulting confusion will be easy to resolve. (And there could be a norm/rule against anything akin to bypassing X's ignore list by reposting Y's comments.) Not absolutely perfect, sure -- but the existing system certainly isn't either.
2Raemon
This mostly just doesn't actually solve the sort of problem that I think most authors have with hosting discussions they don't want on their post. (But, it's cruxy for me that I don't expect people to want it. If some authors I respected did want it I'd be open to it)
[-]tslarm
1210

I guess an unstated part of my position is that there's a limit to how much control a LW user can reasonably expect to have over other users' commenting, and that if they want more control than my suggested system allows them then they should probably post to their own blog rather than LW. But I get that you (and at least some others) disagree with me, and/or are aware of users who do want more control and are sufficiently valuable to LW to justify catering to their needs in this way. I won't push the point; thanks for engaging.

(FWIW, my biggest issue with the current system is that it's not obvious to most readers when people are banned from commenting on a post, and thus some posts could appear to have an exaggerated level of support/absence of good counterarguments from the LW community.)

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[-]Raemon
20

Update: Ruby and I have posted moderator notices for Duncan and Said in this thread. This was a set of fairly difficult moderation calls on established users and it seems good for the LessWrong userbase to have the opportunity to evaluate it and respond. I'm stickying this post for a day-or-so.

@Duncan_Sabien's commenting privileges are restored, with a warning. @Said Achmiz is currently under a rate limit (see details).

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[-]Shmi
-2-7

I have no horse in this race, but from my very much outside perspective it feels like the one who was drama-queening came out on top. Not a great look, but an important lesson. It would make much more sense to me if the consequences were equal or at least obviously commensurable. 

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[-]habryka
1111

Ray is owning this decision, so he can say more if he wants, but as I understand the judgements here are at least trying to be pretty independent of the most recent conflict and are both predominantly rooted in data gathered over many years of complaints, past comment threads, and user interviews. 

It feels like it would be quite surprising if based on that, consequences should be equal or obviously commensurable, given that these things hugely differ for different users (including in this case).

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8philh
I feel like "drama queen" is kind of a weird accusation to make here. Like it has connotations to me of "making a fuss out of a triviality", but it seems clear that the mods did not think it was a triviality. My sense is that the mods wish Duncan had handled this situation differently, but do also think the thing he was reacting to was actually quite bad and worth-reacting-to. Maybe you just disagree with the mods, but... I guess, can you clarify whether you mean something like * "I have not looked closely at this situation, but from a glance it seems to me that Duncan is making a fuss out of a triviality"? (If this is the case, do you really think you can draw important lessons from your glance?) * "I have looked closely at this situation, and it seems to me that Duncan is making a fuss out of a triviality"? * Neither of those is a good fit?
-5Shmi
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