This is an important topic, but this post seems like it was written by AI.

I don't know how people get the idea that this type of reckless behavior is anything remotely like what Gwern's essay recommends.

GW deals with this by blocking scrolling and blanking out the page until the relevant anchor tag has loaded.

How do you envision that happening, concretely? It seems to me that elites are elite because they are simply the best at doing whatever it takes to maintain their power, and any replacement elite would have to do similar things or itself be replaced. If it were possible for the majority to govern society for their own benefit from the bottom up, we'd be living in a communist utopia already.

How do you evaluate the cost/benefit of buying more flour than necessary and bringing the wrong wine versus being a slave to your phone at all times?

It pretty much guarantees extinction, but people can have different opinions on how bad that is relative to disempowerment, S-risks, etc.

We don't know of an alignment target that everyone can agree on, so solving alignment pretty much guarantees misuse by at least some people's lights.

I'm still not convinced it's a good idea to get enlightened, but thanks for the detailed explanation.

Of course you're right that there are no perfectly clear bright-line rules that would completely fix these problems, the question is whether there is a clear enough rule that would ameliorate the problems. You would have substituted a judgment call on whether all of Said's comments across the whole site were on net beneficial, with a much easier judgment call on whether a given note is sufficient or not. And whether Said's comments were net beneficial was evidently such a close call that you dithered about this decision for literal years, which would seem to indicate that a relatively small nudge would have tipped his contributions to the positive side.

Also, if the door to Said changing his behavior was so completely closed, I'm really confused about what all those hundreds of hours were spent on.