You may know me as the guy who posts a lot of controversial stuff about LW and MIRI. I don't enjoy doing this and do not want to continue with it. One reason being that the debate is turning into a flame war. Another reason is that I noticed that it does affect my health negatively (e.g. my high blood pressure (I actually had a single-sided hearing loss over this xkcd comic on Friday)).
This all started in 2010 when I encountered something I perceived to be wrong. But the specifics are irrelevant for this post. The problem is that ever since that time there have been various reasons that made me feel forced to continue the controversy. Sometimes it was the urge to clarify what I wrote, other times I thought it was necessary to respond to a reply I got. What matters is that I couldn't stop. But I believe that this is now possible, given my health concerns.
One problem is that I don't want to leave possible misrepresentations behind. And there very likely exist misrepresentations. There are many reasons for this, but I can assure you that I never deliberately lied and that I never deliberately tried to misrepresent anyone. The main reason might be that I feel very easily overwhelmed and never had the ability to force myself to invest the time that is necessary to do something correctly if I don't really enjoy doing it (for the same reason I probably failed school). Which means that most comments and posts are written in a tearing hurry, akin to a reflexive retraction from the painful stimulus.
<tldr>
I hate this fight and want to end it once and for all. I don't expect you to take my word for it. So instead, here is an offer:
I am willing to post counterstatements, endorsed by MIRI, of any length and content[1] at the top of any of my blog posts. You can either post them in the comments below or send me an email (da [at] kruel.co).
</tldr>
I have no idea if MIRI believes this to be worthwhile. But I couldn't think of a better way to solve this dilemma in a way that everyone can live with happily. But I am open to suggestions that don't stress me too much (also about how to prove that I am trying to be honest).
You obviously don't need to read all my posts. It can also be a general statement.
I am also aware that LW and MIRI are bothered by RationalWiki. As you can easily check from the fossil record, I have at points tried to correct specific problems. But, for the reasons given above, I have problems investing the time to go through every sentence to find possible errors and attempt to correct it in such a way that the edit is not reverted and that people who feel offended are satisfied.
[1] There are obviously some caveats regarding the content, such as no nude photos of Yudkowsky ;-)
I think the thing to remember is that, when you've run into contexts where you feel like someone might not care that they're setting you up to be judged unfairly, you've been too overwhelmed to keep track of whether or not your self-defense involves doing things that you'd normally be able to see would set them up to be judged unfairly.
You've been trying to defend a truth about a question -- about what actions you could reasonably be expected to have been sure you should have taken, after having been exposed to existential-risk arguments -- that's made up of many complex implicit emotional and social associations, like the sort of "is X vs. Y the side everyone should be on?" that Scott Alexander discusses in "Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments". But you've never really developed the necessary emotional perspective to fully realize that the only language you've had access to, to do that with, is a different language: that of explicit factual truths. If you try to state truths in one language using the other without accounting for the difference, blinded by pain and driven by the intuitive impulse escape the pain, you're going to say false things. It only makes sense that you would have screwed up.
Try to progress to having a conscious awareness of your desperation, I mean a conscious understanding of how the desperation works and what it's tied to emotionally. Once you've done that, you should be able to consciously keep in mind better the other ways that the idea of "justice" might also relate to your situation, and so do a lot less unjust damage. (Contrariwise, if you do choose to do damage, a significantly greater fraction of it will be just.)
It might also help to have a stronger deontological proscription against misrepresenting anyone in a way that would cause them to be judged unfairly. That proscription would put you under more pressure to develop this kind of emotional perspective and conscious awareness, although it would do this at the cost of adding extra deontological hoops you have to jump through to escape the pain when it comes. If this leaves you too bound-up to say anything, you can usually go meta and explain how you're too bound-up, at least once you have enough practice at explaining things like that.
I'm sorry. I claim to have some idea what it's like.
(Also, on reflection, I should admit that mostly I'm saying this because I'm afraid of third parties keeping mistakenly unfavorable impressions about your motives; so it's slightly dishonest of me to word some of the above comments as simply directed to you, the way I have. And in the process I've converted an emotional truth, "I think it's important for other people not to believe as-bad things about your motives, because I can see how that amount of badness is likely mistaken", into a factual claim, "your better-looking motives are exactly X".)