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 commenting includes a mix of “subtly enforcing norms that aren’t actual LW site norms (see below)”, “being pretty costly to interact with, in a way feels particularly ‘like a trap'”, and “in at least some domains, being consistently not-very-correct in his implied criticisms”. I think each of those things are at least a little bad in isolation (though not necessarily moderation-worthy). But I think they become worse than the sum-of-their-parts. If he was consistently doing the entire pattern, I would either ban him, or invent new tools to either alleviate-the-cost or tax-the-behavior in a less heavyhanded way.
• Not sufficient corresponding upside
  • I’d be a lot less wary of the previous pattern if I felt like Said was also contributing significantly more value to LessWrong. [Edit: I do, to be clear, think Said has contributed significant value, both in terms of keeping the spirit of the sequences alive in the world ala readthesequences.com, and through being a voice with a relatively rare (these days) perspective that keeps us honest in important ways. But I think the costs are, in fact, really high, and I think the object level value isn't enough to fully counterbalance it]
• Prior discussion and warnings. 
  • We’ve had numerous discussions with Said about this (I think we’ve easily spent 100+ hours of moderator-time on it, and probably more like 200), including an explicit moderation warning.
• Few recent problematic pattern instances. 
  • That all said, prior to this ~month’s conflict with Duncan, I don’t have a confident belief that Said has recently strongly embodied the pattern I’m worried about. I think it was more common ~5 years ago. I cut Said some slack for the convo with Duncan because I think Duncan is kind of frustrating to argue with. 
  • THAT said, I think it’s crept up at least somewhat occasionally in the past 3 years, and having to evaluate whether it’s creeping up to an unacceptable level is fairly costly. 
    • THAT THAT said, I do appreciate that the first time we gave him an explicit moderation notice, I don’t think we had any problems for ~3 years afterwards.
• Strong(ish) statement of intent
  • Said’s made a number of comments that make me think he would still be doing a pattern I consider problematic if the opportunity arose. I think he’ll follow the letter of the law if we give it to him, but it’s difficult to specify a letter-of-the-law that does the thing I care about.

A thing that is quite important to me is that users feel comfortable ignoring Said if they don’t think he’s productive to engage with. (See below for more thoughts on this). One reason this is difficult is that it’s hard to establish common knowledge about it among authors. Another reason is that I think Said’s conversational patterns have the effect of making authors and other commenters feel obliged to engage with him (but, this is pretty hard to judge in a clear-cut way)

For now, after a bunch of discussion with other moderators, reading the thread-so-far, and talking with various advisors – my current call is giving Said a rate limit of 3-comments-per-post-per-week. See this post on the general philosophy of rate limiting as a moderation tool we’re experimenting with. I think there’s a decent chance we’ll ship some new features soon that make this actually a bit more lenient, but don’t want to promise that at the moment.

I am not very confident in this call, and am open to more counterarguments here, from Said or others. I’ll talk more about some of the reasoning here at the end of this comment. But I want to start by laying out some more background reasoning for the entire moderation decision.

In particular, if either Said makes a case that he can obey the spirit of “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with his comments”; or, someone suggests a letter-of-the-law that actually accomplishes the thing I’m aiming at in a more clear-cut way, I’d feel fairly good about revoking the rate-limit.

(Note: one counterproposal I’ve seen is to develop a rate-limit based entirely on karma rather than moderator judgment, and that it is better to do this than to have moderators make individual judgment calls about specific users. I do think this idea has merit, although it’s hard to build. I have more to say about it at the end)

Said Patterns

3 years ago Habryka summarized a pattern we’d seen a lot:

The usual pattern of Said's comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify): 

• Said makes a highly upvoted comment asking a question, usually implicitly pointing out something that is unclear to many in the post
• Author makes a reasonably highly upvoted reply
• Said says that the explanation was basically completely useless to him, this often gets some upvotes, but drastically less than the top-level question
• Author tries to clarify some more, this gets much fewer upvotes than the original reply
• Said expresses more confusion, this usually gets very few upvotes
• More explanations from the author, almost no upvotes
• Said expresses more confusion, often being downvoted and the author and others expressing frustration

I think the most central of this is in this thread on circling, where AFAICT Said asked for examples of some situations where social manipulation is “good.” Qiaochu and Sarah Constantin offer some examples. Said responds to both of them by questioning their examples and doubting their experience in a way that is pretty frustrating to respond to (and in the Sarah case seemed to me like a central example of Said missing the point, and the evo-psych argument not even making sense in context, which makes me distrust his taste on these matters). [1, 2] 

I don’t actually remember more examples of that pattern offhand. I might be persuaded that I overupdated on some early examples. But after thinking a few days, I think a cruxy piece of evidence on how I think it makes sense to moderate Said is this comment from ~3 years ago:

There is always an obligation by any author to respond to anyone’s comment along these lines*.  If no response is provided to (what ought rightly to be) simple requests for clarification (such as requests to, at least roughly, define or explain an ambiguous or questionable term, or requests for examples of some purported phenomenon), the author should be interpreted as ignorant. These are not artifacts of my particular commenting style, nor are they unfortunate-but-erroneous implications—they are normatively correct general principles.

*where I think “these lines” means “asking for examples”, “asking people to define terms,” etc.

For completeness, Said later elaborates:

Where does that obligation come from?

I should clarify, first of all, that the obligation by the author to respond to the comment is not legalistically specific. By this I mean that it can be satisfied in any of a number of ways; a literal reply-to-comment is just one of them. Others include:

• Mentioning the comment in a subsequent post (“In the comments on yesterday’s post, reader so-and-so asked such-and-such a question. And I now reply thus: …”).
• Linking to one’s post or comment elsewhere which constitutes an answer to the question.
• Someone else linking to a post or comment elsewhere (by the OP) which constitutes an answer to the question.
• Someone else answering the question in the OP’s stead (and the OP giving some indication that this answer is endorsed).
• Answering an identical, or very similar, question elsewhere (and someone providing a link or citation).

In short, I’m not saying that there’s a specific obligation for a post author to post a reply comment, using the Less Wrong forum software, directly to any given comment along the lines I describe. 

Habryka and Said discussed it at length at the time.

I want to reiterate that I think asking for examples is fine (and would say the same thing for questions like “what do you mean by ‘spirituality’?” or whatnot). I agree that a) authors generally should try to provide examples in the first place, b) if they don’t respond to questions about examples, that’s bayesian evidence about whether their idea will ground out into something real. I’m fairly happy with clone of saturn's variation on Said’s statement, that if the author can’t provide examples, “the post should be regarded as less trustworthy” (as opposed to “author should be interpreted as ignorant”), and gwern’s note that if they can’t, they should forthrightly admit “Oh, I don’t have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV”.

The thing I object fairly strongly to is “there is an obligation on the part of the author to respond.” 

I definitely don’t think there’s a social obligation, and I don’t think most LessWrongers think that. (I’m not sure if Said meant to imply that). Insofar as he means there’s a bayesian obligation-in-the-laws-of-observation/inference, I weakly agree but think he overstates it: there’s a lot of reasons an author might not respond (“belief that a given conversation won’t be productive,” “volume of such comments,” “trying to have a 202 conversation and not being interested in 101 objections,” and simple opportunity cost). 

From a practical ‘things that the LessWrong culture should socially encourage people to do’, I liked Vladimir's point that:

My guess is that people should be rewarded for ignoring criticism they want to ignore, it should be convenient for them to do so. [...] 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 criticized thing (instead of getting pushed to be published elsewhere).

i.e. I want there to be good criticism on LW, and think that people feeling free to ignore criticism encourages more good criticism, in part by encouraging more posts and engagement.

It’s been a few years and I don’t know that Said still endorses the obligation phrasing, but much of my objection to Said’s individual commenting stylistic choices has a lot to do with reinforcing this feeling of obligation. I also think (less confidently) that they get an impression that Said thinks if an author hasn’t answered a question to his satisfaction (as an example of a reasonable median LW user), they should feel an [social] obligation to succeed at that. 

Whether he intends this or not, I think it's an impression that comes across, and which exerts social pressure, and I think this has a significant negative effect on the site. 

I’m a bit confused about how to think about “prescribed norms” vs “good ideas that get selected on organically.” In a previous post Vladmir_Nesov argues that prescribing norms generally doesn’t make sense. Habryka had a similar take yesterday when I spoke with him. I’m not sure I agree (and some of my previous language here has probably assumed a somewhat more prescriptivist/top-down approach to moderating LessWrong that I may end up disendorsing after chatting more with Habryka)

But even in a more organic approach to moderation, I, Habryka and Ruby think it’s pretty reasonable for moderators to take action to prevent Said from implying that there’s some kind of norm here and exerting pressure around it on other people’s comment sections, when, AFAICT, there is no consensus of such a norm. I predict a majority of LessWrong members would not agree with that norm, either on normative-Bayesian terms nor consequentialist social-norm-design terms. (To be clear I think many people just haven’t thought about it at all, but expect them to at least weakly disagree when exposed to the arguments. “What is the actual collective endorsed position of the LW commentariat” is somewhat cruxy for me here)

Rate-limit decision reasoning

If this was our first (or second or third) argument with Said over this, I’d think stating this clearly and giving him a warning would be a reasonable next action. Given that we’ve been intermittently been arguing about this for 5 years, spending a hundred+ hours of mod time discussing it with him, it feels more reasonable to move to an ultimatum of “somehow, Said needs to stop exerting this pressure in other people’s comment threads, or moderators will take some kind of significant action to either limit the damage or impose a tax on it.”

If we were limited to our existing moderator tools, I would think it reasonable to ban him. But we are in the middle of setting up a variety of rate limiting tools to generally give mods more flexibility, and avoid being heavier-handed than we need to be.

I’m fairly open to a variety of options here. FWIW, I am interested in what Said actually prefers here. (I expect it is not a very fun conversation to be asked by the people-in-power “which way of constraining you from doing the thing you think is right seems least-bad to you?”, but, insofar as Said or others have an opinion on that I am interested)

I am interested in building a automated tool that detects demon threads and rate limits people based on voting patterns.. I most likely want to try to build such a tool regardless of what call we make on Said, and if I had a working version of such a tool I might be pretty satisfied with using it instead. My primary cruxes are 

a) I think it’s a lot harder to build and I’m not sure we can succeed, 
b) I do just think it’s okay for moderators to make judgment calls about individual users based on longterm trends. That’s sort of what mods are for. (I do think for established users it’s important for this process to be fairly costly and subjected to public scrutiny)

But for now, after chatting with Oli and Ruby and Robert, I’m implementing the 3-comments-per-post-per-week rule for Said. If we end up having time to build/validate an organic karma-based rate limit that solves the problem I’m worried about here, I might switch to that. Meanwhile some additional features I haven’t shipped yet, which I can’t make promises about, but which I personally think would be god to ship soon include:

• There’s at least a boolean flag for individual posts so authors can allow “rate limited people can comment freely”, and probably also a user-setting for this. Another possibility is a user-specific whitelist, but that’s a bit more complicated and I’m not sure if there’s anyone who would want that who wouldn’t want the simpler option.
  • I’d ideally have this flag set on this post, and probably on other moderation posts written by admins.
• Rate-limited users in a given comment section have a small icon that lets you know they’re rate-limited, so you have reasonable expectations of when they can reply.
• Updating the /moderation page to list rate limited users, ideally with some kind of reason / moderation-warning.
• Updating rate limits to ensure that users can comment as much as they want on their own posts (we made a PR for this change a week ago and haven’t shipped it yet largely because this moderation decision took a lot of time)

Some reasons for this-specific-rate-limit rather than alternatives are:

• 3 comments within a week is enough for an initial back-and-forth where Said asks questions or makes a critique, the author responds, Said responds-to-the-response. (i.e. allowing the 4 layers of intellectual conversation, and getting the parts of Said comments that most people agree are valuable)
• It caps the conversation out before it can spiral into unproductive escalatory thread.
• It signals culturally that the problem here isn’t about initial requests for examples or criticisms, it’s about the pattern that tends to play out deeper in threads. I think it’s useful for this to be legible both to authors engaging with Said, and other comments inferring site norms (i.e. some amount of Socrates is good, too much can cause problems)
• If 3 comments isn’t enough to fully resolve a conversation, it’s still possible to follow up eventually.
• Said can still write top level posts arguing for norms that he thinks would be better, or arguing about specific posts that he thinks are problematic. 

That all said, the idea of using rate-limits as a mod-tool is pretty new, I’m not actually sure how it’ll play out. Again, I’m open to alternatives. (And again, see this post for more thoughts on rate limiting)

Feel free to argue with this decision. And again, in particular, if Said makes a case that he either can obey the spirit of “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with your comments”, or someone can suggest a letter-of-the-law that actually accomplishes the thing I’m aiming at in a more clear-cut way that Said thinks he can follow, I’d feel fairly good about revoking the rate-limit.