[-]Richard_Ngo2mo169208

Thank you Habryka (and the rest of the mod team) for the effort and thoughtfulness you put into making LessWrong good.

I personally have had few problems with Said, but this seems like an extremely reasonable decision. I'm leaving this comment in part to help make you feel empowered to make similar decisions in the future when you think it necessary (and ideally, at a much lower cost of your time).

-57M. Y. Zuo1mo

[-]abstractapplic2mo10273

I hereby voice strong approval of the meta-level approaches on display (being willing to do unpopular and awkward things to curate our walled garden, noticing that this particular decision is worth justifying in detail, spending several thousand words explaining everything out in the open, taking individual responsibility for making the call, and actively encouraging (!) anyone who leaves LW in protest or frustration to do so loudly), coupled with weak disapproval of the object-level action (all the complicating and extenuating factors still don't make me comfortable with "we banned this person from the rationality forum for being annoyingly critical").

[-]David Hornbein1mo9667

If I were a moderator, I would have banned Jesus Christ Himself if He required me to spend one hundred hours moderating His posts on multiple occasions. Given your description here I am surprised you did not do this a long time ago. I admire your restraint, if not necessarily your wisdom.

[-]SpectrumDT1mo1410

I know what you mean, of course, but it is funny that you use Jesus as an example of someone unlikely to be banned when, historically, Jesus was in fact "banned". :)

[-]Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel1mo83-2

Fwiw I've found Said's comments to be clear, crisp and valuable. I don't recall being ever annoyed by his comments and found him a most useful bloodhound for bad epistemic practices and rhetorics. Many cases that Said's comment is the only good, clear, and crisp critic of vagueposting and applauselighting.

The examples in this post don't seem compelling at all. One of the primary examples seems to be Duncan who comes off [from a distance] as thin-skinned and obscurantist, emotionally blowing up at very fair criticism.

Despite my disagreement I endorse Habryka unilaterally taking these kinds of decisions and approve of his transparency and conduct in this matter.

Farewell, lesswrong gadfly. You will be missed.

[-]Wei Dai1mo395

One of the primary examples seems to be Duncan who comes off [from a distance] as thin-skinned and obscurantist, emotionally blowing up at very fair criticism.

This is my view too. I remember once trying (I think on Facebook) to gently talk him out of being really angry at someone for making what I thought was a reasonable criticism, and he ended up getting mad at me too.

[-]habryka1mo*1911

One of the primary examples seems to be Duncan who comes off [from a distance] as thin-skinned and obscurantist, emotionally blowing up at very fair criticism.

I don't think I link to a single Duncan/Said interaction in any of the core narratives of the post. I do link the moderation judgement of the previous Said/Duncan thread, but it's not the bulk of this post.

Like none of these comments:

link to any threads between Said and Duncan.

And the moderation judgement in the Said/Duncan also didn't really have much to do with Said's conduct in that thread, but with his conduct on the site in general.

You might still not find the examples compelling, but there is basically no engagement with Duncan that played any kind of substantial role in any of this.

[-]interstice1mo120

As another outside observer I also got the impression that the Duncan conflict was the most significant of the ones leading up to the ban, since he wrote a giant post advocating for banning Said, left the site in a huff shortly thereafter, and seems to be the main example of a top contributor by your lights who said they didn't post due to Said.

[-]habryka1mo409

Nah, you can see in the moderation history that we threatened Said with bans and moderation actions for many years before then. My honest best guess is that we would have banned Said somewhat earlier if not for the Duncan thread, though that we also wouldn't have given him a rate-limit around that time, but it's of course hard to tell.

My experience was that Said's behavior in the Duncan thread was among the most understandable cases of him behaving badly (because I too have found myself ending up drawn into conflicts with Duncan that end up quite aggressive and at least tempt me to behave badly). That's part why I don't link to any comments of his in the thread above (I might somewhere in there, but if so it's not intended as a particularly load-bearing part of the case).

[-]Vaniver1mo*613

I should comment publicly on this; I've talked with various people about it extensively in private. In case you just want my conclusion before my reasoning, I am sad but weakly supportive. An outline of six points, which I will maybe expand on if people ask questions:

I should link some previous writing of mine that wasn't about Said:
- When discussing the death of Socrates, I think it's plausible that Socrates 'had it coming' because he was attacking the status-allocation methods of Athens, which were instrumental in keeping the city alive. That is, the 'corrupting the youth' charge might have been real and the sort of thing that it makes sense to watch out for.
- In response to Zack's post Lack of Social Grace is an Epistemic Virtue, I responded that the Royal Society didn't think so. It seems somewhat telling to me that academic culture--the one I call "scholarly pedantic argumentative culture", predates good science by a long time, and is clearly not sufficient to produce science. You need something more, and when I read about the Royal Society or the Republic of Letters I get a sense that they took worldly considerations seriously. They were trying to balance epistemic and instrument

... (read more)

[-]xpym1mo152

I’m still not sure what Zack or Said think of the Royal Society example; Zack talks about it a bit in another comment on that page but not in a way that feels connected to the question of how to balance virtues against each other, and what virtues cultures should strive towards. (Said, in an email, strongly rejects my claim that there’s a difference between his culture of commenting and the Royal Society culture of commenting that I describe.)

This seems to be by far the most important crux, nothing else could've substantially changed attitudes on either side. Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism, and to what degree its presence/absence is a load-bearing part? This question also looks pretty important on its own, and the apparent lack of interest/attention is confusing.

8Duncan Sabien (Inactive)1mo

To the best of my ability to detect, the answer is clearly and obviously "no" — there's an important property of people not-bullshitting and not doing the LinkedIn thing, but you can actually do clear and honest and constructively critical communication without assholery (and it seems to me that the people who lump the two together have a skill issue and some sort of color-blindness; because they don't know how to get the good parts of candor and criticism while not unduly hurting feelings, they assume that it can't be done).

4the gears to ascension1mo

probably buried in noise, maybe write a question post about it?

4SpectrumDT1mo

Upvoted for this link, which I found valuable.

[-]Wei Dai1mo57-8

Criticism is a pretty thankless job. People mostly do it for the status reward, but consider if you detect some potentially fatal flaw in an average post (not written by someone very high status), but you're not sure because maybe the author has a good explanation or defense, or you misunderstood something. What's your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments? If you're right, both the post and your efforts to debunk it are quickly forgotten, but if you're wrong, then the post remains standing/popular/upvoted and your embarrassing comment is left for everyone to see. Writing up a quick "clarifying" question makes more sense from a status/strategic perspective, but I rarely do even that nowadays because I have so little to gain from it, and a lot to lose including my time (including expected time to handle any back and forth) and personal relations with the author (if I didn't word my comment carefully enough). (And this was before today's decision, which of course disincentivizes such low-effort criticism even more.)

A few more quick thoughts as I'm not very motivated to get into a long discussion given the likely irreversible nature of the decision:

If you ge

... (read more)

[-]habryka1mo*4730

I think in some sense both making top-level posts and criticism are thankless jobs. What is your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments in top-level post form in the first place? I feel like all the things you list as making things unrewarding apply to top-level posts just as much as writing critical comments (especially in as much as you are writing on a topic, or on a forum, where people treat any reasoning error or mistake with grave disdain and threats of social punishment).

If you get rid of people like Said or otherwise discourage low-effort criticism, you'll just get less criticism not better criticism.

I don't buy this. I am much more likely to want to comment on LessWrong (and other forums) if I don't end up needing to deal with comment-sections that follow the patterns outlined in the OP, and I am generally someone who does lots of criticism and writes lots of critical comments. Many other commenters who I think write plenty of critique have reported similar.

Much of LessWrong has a pretty great reward-landscape for critique. I know that if I comment on a post by Steven Byrnes, or Buck, or Ryan Greenblatt or you, or Scott Alexander or many others, wit... (read more)

[-]Wei Dai1mo164

Top-level posts are not self-limiting (from a status perspective) in the way I described for a critical comment. If you come up with a great new idea, it can become a popular post read and reread by many over the years and you can become known for being its author. But if you come up with a great critical comment that debunks a post, the post will be downvoted and forgotten, and very few people will remember your role in debunking it.

[-]habryka1mo145

I agree this is largely true for comments (largely by necessity of how comment visibility works)^[1]. Indeed one thing I frequently encourage good commenters to do is to try to generalize their comments more and post them as top-level posts.

And as far as I can tell this is an enormously successful mechanism for getting highly-upvoted posts on LessWrong. Indeed, I would classify the current second most-upvoted post of all time on LessWrong as a post of this kind: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer

Dialogues were also another attempt at making it so that critique is less self-limiting, by making it so that a more conversation can happen at the same level as a post. I don't think that plan succeeded amazingly well (largely because dialogues ended up hard to read, and hard to coordinate between authors), but it is a thing I care a lot about and expect to do more work on.

The popular comments section on the frontpage has also changed this situation a non-trivial amount. It is now the case that if you write a very good critique that causes a post to be downvoted, that this will still result in your comment getting a lo... (read more)

[-]MinusGix1mo115

I disagree. Posts seem to have an outsized effect and will often be read a bunch before any solid criticisms appear. Then are spread even given high quality rebuttals... if those ever materialize.
I also think you're referring to a group of people who write high quality posts typically and handle criticism well, while others don't handle criticism well. Despite liking many of his posts, Duncan is an example of this.

As for Said specifically, I've been annoyed at reading his argumentation a few times, but then also find him saying something obvious and insightful that no one else pointed out anywhere in the comments. Losing that is unfortunate. I don't think there's enough "this seems wrong or questionable, why do you believe this?"
Said is definitely more rough than I'd like, but I also do think there's a hole there that people are hesitant to fill.

So I do agree with Wei that you'll just get less criticism, especially since I do feel like LessWrong has been growing implicitly less favorable towards quality critiques and more favorable towards vibey critiques. That is, another dangerous attractor is the Twitter/X attractor, wherein arguments do exist but they matter to the overall di... (read more)

[-]Thomas Kwa1mo*3513

FWIW I feel like I get sufficient status reward for criticism and this moderation decision basically won't affect my behavior

This defended a paper where I was lead author, which got 8 million views on Twitter and was possibly the most important research output by my current employer, against criticism that it was p-hacking
This got me a bounty of $700 or so (which I think I declined or forgot about?) and citation in a follow-up post
This ratioed the OP by 3:1 and induced a thoughtful response by OP that helped me learn some nontrivial stats facts
This got 73 karma and was the most important counterpoint to what I still think are mostly wrong and overrated views on nanotech
This got 70 karma and only took about an hour to write, and could have been 5 minutes if I were a better writer

Now it's true that most of these comments are super long and high effort. But it's possible to get status reward for lower effort comments too, e.g. this, though it feels more like springing a "gotcha". Many of the examples of Said's critiques in the post at least seemed either deliberately inflammatory or unhelpful or targeted at some procedural point that isn't maximally relevant.

As for risking being wrong... (read more)

9DirectedEvolution1mo

If you didn't have the motivation to write your arguments, why did you waste your time reading the post? If you debunk the author's post, they're unlikely to forget it. If you debunk numerous posts, then you may acquire a reputation. If you debunk a popular post, then many people see the debunking. You've also spared yourself the labor of debunking future posts based on the initial flawed idea. The reward for delivering valid and empathetic criticism is cultivating a community of truth seekers in which you and others may be willing and able to participate. Do you lack that vision? Do you have that outled elsewhere? Do you not care about developing community? Do you simply have better things to do and want to freeload on the community that others build? You took the time to read the post, but you won't write a "quick" clarifying question because you're worried about wasting your time, and you think you have little to gain by understanding the content, so you're depending on commenters like Said to do the job? If you have the time for just the initial question but not the back and forth, just write the first question and read the response. It takes little more time to put a brief friendly signal at the top of the comment than to leave it out. One may also practice writing in a non-contemptuous manner until it comes naturally, learn to skim posts and read only those clearly likely to be worth responding to. It is possible to deliver low-effort criticism without being a flagrant asshole about it. How do you know? Have you gathered data on this topic? Have you moderated a community? Have you observed the course of a substantial number of comparable moderation decisions in the past? What exactly is your model of the overall community reaction to such moderation decisions that leads you to this conclusion? A signal of what? Important to whom? Are you really interested in what a low-effort troll would have to say in response to what you happen to write and post online?

4dirk1mo

If you're right, the author and those who read the comments gain a better understanding; if you're wrong, you do. I think framing criticism as a status contest hurts your motivation to comment more than it helps, here.

[-]Wei Dai1mo128

I think these status motivations/dynamics are active whether or not you consciously think of them, because your subconscious is already constantly making status calculations. It's possible consciously framing things this way makes it even worse, "hurts your motivation to comment" even more, but it seems unavoidable if we want to explicitly discuss these dynamics. (Sometimes I do deliberately avoid bringing up status in a discussion due to such effects, but here the OP already talked about status a bunch, and it seems like an unavoidable issue anyway.)

7dirk1mo

Making status calculations at all times is a choice you have the right to make, but in my opinion it's a bad one.

4Vladimir_Nesov1mo

It's more useful to frame this in terms of particular norms, because different contexts activate different norms. It's possible to deliberatively cultivate or suppress specific norms in specific contexts (including those that take the form of status calculations, which is not all of them), shaping them in the long run rather than passively acknowledging their influence. This is very indirect and so the feedback loops are terrible, it seems that usually you'd need to intervene at the background dynamics that would encourage/discourage the norms on their own (such as prevailing framings and terminology, making different actions or incentives more salient), not even intervening by encouraging/discouraging the norms directly.

4Wei Dai1mo

I'm skeptical that it's possible to use norms to suppress status calculations, and even more skeptical that it's possible without huge cost/effort, beyond what typical LW members would be willing to pay. It's hard for me to think of any groups or communities whose members have managed to suppress their status motivations/calculations. (It seems a lot more feasible/productive to exploit or redirect such motivations in various ways.) But if you have more to say about this, I'd be very curious to hear you out.

5Vladimir_Nesov1mo

Not suppress status calculations of course, my point is about uses of being specific about particular norms that contribute to such status calculations (as well as norms that are not about status calculations). This should enable some agency in shaping incentives (by influencing specific norms according to their expected effects), rather than settling to cynically pointing out that status calculations are an immutable part of human nature, at least for most people. That is, the content of the status calculations is not immutable. Probably you are thinking about a particular application of norm-shaping that wouldn't work, while I was responding to what I perceived as a framing suggesting a general dismissal of norm-shaping as a useful thing to consider. This parenthetical sure seems to thicken the plot. (Maybe you are somehow intending the same point, in a way I'm not seeing, while also being skeptical of me making the same point, meaning that you are not seeing that I'm making the same point, possibly because it wouldn't be a good response to your own intended point that I'm misunderstanding...)

4Wei Dai1mo

Ok, I think we're not disagreeing, I just misunderstood your comment. Thanks for clarifying.

3the gears to ascension1mo

Social motivations seem unavoidable, but I don't see why those social motivations would be unavoidably in terms of a single-dimensional "global status" score. Some of my earliest posts on lesswrong are my attempt to guess at plausible mechanisms of social motivation and I continue to not be convinced that this single dimensional status view is obligatory, rather than merely socially self-reinforcing.

4Wei Dai1mo

I think the standard 2-dimensional dominance/prestige model of social status (which can be simplified into just prestige here since dominance mostly doesn't apply to LW) has a lot going for it, and balances well between complexity and realism/explanatory power. But I would be happy to consider a more complex and realistic model if the situation calls for it (i.e., the simpler model misses something important in the current situation). Can you explain more what you think it's missing here, if anything? (I did skim your post but nothing jumped out at me as adding a lot of value here.)

2the gears to ascension1mo

I buy that prestige is a meaningful and common first PCA dimension in communities where it's already common, which does seem likely to be most groups. I don't mean to convey anything beyond ongoing irritation at people assuming the mental parts are fundamentally unable to be reconfigured for something less trapped than a type that collapses to a single global ordering. One basic change would be having a per-relationship personal rating of "your prestige with me", or even " your prestige with me on a topic". But also, I find it frustrating that a single status dimension is still common parlance when prestige/dominance is available. I'm not saying anything immediately relevant, I'm complaining that you said people are always making status calculations, and that that seems oversimplified and overconfident. Moreover if you're correct, I see it as a problem to be fixed.

5Wei Dai1mo

I used "status" instead of "prestige/dominance" because it's shorter and I think most people on LW already know the prestige/dominance model of status and will understand that I'm not referring to a scalar quantity by "status". People use single words to refer to quantities that are more complex than scalars all the time. For example when I say "he's really artistic" I obviously don't mean to suggest that there's just a single dimension of artistry. To try to guess at why you made this complaint, maybe you're thinking that a lot of people do have an over-simplified single-dimensional model of status, and by using "status" I'm feeding into or failing to help correct this mistake. If so, can you point to some clear evidence of such mistakes, i.e., beyond just people using the word "status"?

2the gears to ascension1mo

the latter seems right, I don't have a handy link, but I'll be on the lookout for concrete examples and come back to this, eta 2 weeks, / or * 2

-15Shankar Sivarajan1mo

[-]lc1mo5238

I have not read this post yet (I assume it's about more than just Said), but just to be clear: I personally trust you guys to ban people that are worth banning without writing thousands of words about it.

[-]Rafael Harth1mo2022

(Have read the post.) I disagree. I think overall habryka has gone through much greater pains than I think he should have to, but I don't think this post is a part he should have skimped on. I would feel pretty negative about it if habryka had banned Said without an extensive explanation for why (modulo past discussions already kinda providing an explanation). I'd expect less transparency/effort for banning less important users.

3maia1mo

I disagree-- I trust them, but I still think the process is important. If you don't want to read the words, you don't have to, but I feel better that they're there.

[-]Matt Goldenberg1mo*4930

My experience of Said has been mostly as described, a strong sense of sneer on mine and others posts that I find unpleasant.

I think there's a large swathe of experience/understanding that Said doesn't have, and which no amount of his socratic questioning will ever actually create that understanding- and it's not designed for Said to try to understand, but to punish others for not making sense in Said's worldview.

Thank you for this decision.

[-]Duncan Sabien (Inactive)1mo1920

But I think a lot of Said's confusions would actually make more sense to Said if he came to the realization that he's odd, actually, and that the way he uses words is quite nonstandard, and that many of the things which baffle and confuse him are not, in fact, fundamentally baffling or confusing but rather make sense to many non-Said people.

(My own writing, from here.)

6cubefox1mo

I also have noticed in the past his sometimes unusually hostile/gaslighting/uncharitable/unproductive war-of-attrition discussion style when he disagrees with someone, described here in detail by habryka. Including his aggressive/escalating voting behavior in simple one-to-one disagreements, also mentioned by habryka. (I also wondered whether sock puppet accounts or specific "voting friends" are involved, but as far as I see habryka didn't mention these exist, which is some evidence that they don't.) I have not seen anyone else act like that, so I don't think this is a case of just "banning people who voice criticism". There are countless people posting outspoken criticisms without remotely employing an unconstructive style like that. Reading now that this has been going on for many years, including temporary bans, I believe this is a psychological property of his personality, and likely not something he can really control. Similar to how some people have a natural tendency to voice disagreements in friendly and productive manner, but the other way round.

[-][anonymous]1mo49-30

As I have said before, on the object-level topic of Said Achmiz, I have written all I care about here, and I shall not pollute this thread further by digressing into that again. My thoughts on this topic are well-documented at those links, if anyone is interested.

It's an understatement to say I think this is the wrong decision by the moderators. I disagree with it completely and I think it represents a critical step backwards for this site, not just in isolation but also more broadly because of what it illustrates about how moderators on this site view their powers and responsibilities and what proper norms of user behavior are. This isn't the first time I have disagreed with moderators (in particular, Habryka) about matters I view as essential to this site's continued epistemic success,^[1] but it will be the last.

I have written words about why I view Said and Said-like contributions as critical. But words are wind, in this case. Perhaps actions speak louder. I will be deactivating my account^[2] and permanently quitting this site, in protest of this decision.

It doesn't make me happy to do so, as I've had some great interactions on here that have helped me learn and ... (read more)

[-]the gears to ascension1mo5440

This seems like not a useful move. Your contributions, in my view, consistently avoid the thing that makes Said's a problem. Your criticisms will be missed.

[-]plex1mo148

Seconded, I consistently find your comments both much more valuable and ~zero sneer. I would be dismayed by moderation actions towards you, while supporting those against Said. You might not have a sense of how his are different, but you automatically avoid the costly things he brings.

[-]Wei Dai1mo2932

I think you shouldn't leave, and Habryka shouldn't have so prominently talked about leaving LW as something one should consider doing in response to this post. LW is the best place by far to discuss certain topics, and nowhere else provides comparable utility if one was interested in these topics. It's technically true but misleading to say "There are many other places on the internet to read interesting ideas, to discuss with others, to participate in a community." This underplays not only the immense value that LW provides to its members but also the value that a member could provide to LW and potentially to the world by influencing its discourse.

For your part, I think "quitting in protest" is unlikely to accomplish anything positive, and I'd much rather have your voice around than the (seemingly tiny) chance that your leaving causes Habryka to change his mind.

5habryka1mo

I definitely didn't intend to communicate that it should be considered cheap to leave LessWrong (that's why the next sentence says "I think LessWrong is worth a lot to a lot of people"). I just meant to communicate that in terms of something like "basic needs" that a person might experience, LessWrong is very rarely a necessary component of getting those filled (which is an important threshold as there exist threats that people face that do threaten your basic needs more, and which hence make sense to be engaged with differently).

0the gears to ascension1mo

Then edit it

7habryka1mo

Sorry, I mean, my next sentence is literally saying "I think LessWrong is worth a lot to a lot of people", which seems sufficient to pre-empt that misunderstanding. I think that section as written is communicating the thing I want to communicate. Of course I could do a general editing pass to make it clearer, but I am not like, seeing anything particularly wrong with what I have written.

[-]Veedrac1mo*152

My first reaction is that this is bad decision theory.

It makes sense to actualize on strikes when the party it's against would not otherwise be aware of or willing to act on the preferences of people whose product they're utilizing. It can also make sense if you believe the other party is vulnerable to coercion and you want to extort them. If you do want fair trade and credibly believe the other party is knowing and willing, the meta strategy is to simply threaten your quorum, and never actually have to strike.

We don't seem to be in the case where an early strike makes sense. The major reaction to this post is not of an unheard or silenced opposition, but various flavours of support. In order for the moderators to cede to your demand, they have to explicitly overrule a greater weight of other people's preferences on the basis that those people will be less mean about it. But we're on LessWrong, people here are not broadly open to coercion.

Additively, we also don't seem to be in a world where your preferences have been marginalized beyond the degree that they're the minority preference. The moderators clearly spent a huge personal cost and took a huge time delay precisely because pr... (read more)

1Jasnah Kholin15d

I disagree about the decision theory. the move i see is "create incentive to not do thing i consider bad" and it's just... fine. extorting people doesn't make sense, timelessly, people should ignore such treads. but act in a way that incentivize good things and disincentivized bad things is just good. it sounds that you refer to threads that exist only if the other side concede to them as the way to go, but this is not thing that ideal agents would do. and yet. it's decision theory you start you comment with. generally, I'm just confused, and can even locate this confusion.

[-]gjm1mo101

Let me join the chorus: please do not leave in protest; your comments here do some of the same positive things that Said's comments do, and your leaving would have a bunch of the negative consequences of Said's banning without the positive ones (because, at least so it seems to me, you are much less annoying than Said).

(For the avoidance of doubt, I find you a net-positive commenter here for reasons other than that you do some of the useful things Said has done, but that particular aspect seems the most relevant on this occasion.)

9niplav1mo

I join the choir of people pronouncing they are sad to see you go.

9Mo Putera1mo

Will you be writing elsewhere? I've benefited a lot from some of your comments, and would be bummed to see you leave.

8Algon1mo

I will be sad to see you go.

4Ebenezer Dukakis1mo

Before you quit, maybe we can create a wiki page of people who left, with contact information, to open the door for a refugee forum at some point in the future?

-14Ben Pace1mo

[-]the gears to ascension1mo4612

I read the whole post and appreciated the detail and the decision. I have had discussions with Said that were valuable, and I am sad to see that he didn't change what I consider to be a bad pattern in order to continue the version of it that's good. I've mostly just been impressed with sunwillrise's version of it lately, for example. I also try to do a version of this occasionally, and it's not clear to me my contributions are uniformly good. Input welcome. But I sometimes go through and try to find posts with no comments, see if I have anything to say about them, and try to both try to describe something I found positive and ask about something that confused me. Hopefully that's been helpful.

[-]DrShiny1mo4510

Many years ago I lurked on LessWrong, making a very occasional comment but finding the ideas and discussion fascinating and appealing. I believe I am not as smart as the average commenter here, and I am certainly less formally educated. I eventually drifted away to follow other of my interests and did not put in the work to learn enough to feel like I could contribute meaningfully. I specifically recall Said Achmiz as being a commenter I was afraid of and did not want to engage with. I didn't leave entirely because of Said, it was more about the effort of learning all the concepts, but maybe 1/8 of my decision was based on him. I imagine his attitude towards this will be, if I'm too much of a coward to risk an unknown internet commenter saying possibly bad things about my own comments, then I really don't belong here anyway. Which, maybe it's true. I don't know if I will try again in the upcoming 3 years, but I'm more likely to than before Said was banned.

Context: I much more recently gravitated to the Duncansphere, as it were, and am kinda on the fringes of that these days (I missed the Duncan/Said thing, and only know about it from comments on this post). I was encouraged there to come here and post this anecdote.

5Alex Vermillion1mo

Thank you for the information! It seems good to get accounts like this from actual literal people. It also seems a little bad that someone is encouraging people who haven't interacted with Said [edited: on LessWrong.com] to come comment on his ban post. That seems like it could lead to bad dynamics.

[-]Duncan Sabien (Inactive)1mo200

(It was me, and in the place where I encouraged DrShiny to come here and repeat what they'd already said unprompted, I also offered $5 to anybody who disagreed with the Said ban to please come and leave that comment as well.)

1Alex Vermillion1mo

Appreciated and information received

8philh1mo

Well, this is someone who hasn't interacted with Said in the sense of exchanging words. They have interacted with him in the sense that Said's comments have marginally changed the trajectory of thir life. (So maybe we say they haven't interacted with Said but Said has interacted with them? But that seems like the more important direction here.) Like, some rando who never heard of LW or Said Achmiz chiming in to say "I would have found Said unpleasant if I'd been here" would feel a bit weird to me. Not off topic but also not very meaningful, and I'd be worried about selection effects. (Which I take to be the bad dynamics you're thinking of. "We don't get an unbiased sample of randos, so it's hard to tell what randos-in-aggregate think.") But here... sure, there's still some chance of selection effects, and it's good to keep them in mind, which Duncan did.[1] But there's also selection effects that come from "people somewhat driven away by Said are less likely to be here than people nonewhat driven away by him", and encouraging DrShiny to comment is a way of counteracting those. So like, I think it's good to notice the thing that you noticed, we should indeed be paying attention to such things, but ultimately I don't think it was bad. 1. ^ Granted, his attempt to fight against them presumably wasn't 100% successful in expectation. Duncan's discord members are probably somewhat selected in the direction of disliking Said, though I think less than a lot of people would guess. Another thing that seems relevant: I claim the members are also somewhat selected for "people who would be a good fit for LW if they feel like being here", and I haven't spoken to DrShiny much but from what I have I believe they are such a person.

1Alex Vermillion1mo

I meant to write "on LessWrong" and screwed up, aaargh! Thank you for noticing Edit: That doesn't answer your comment directly. Yeah, I'm still not super comfortable with the brigading-y dynamics, but am okay with them existing in a called-out form.

[-]Alicorn1mo41-3

I am disappointed and dismayed.

This post contains what feels to me like an awful lot of psychoanalysis of the LW readership, assertions like "it is clear to most authors and readers", and a second-person narrative about what it is like to post here:

After all of this you are left questioning your own sanity, try a bit to respond more on the object-level, and ultimately give up feeling dejected and like a lot of people on LessWrong hate you. You probably don't post again.

And like, man, is that true? Did you conduct a poll? I didn't get a survey. You pay some attention to Zack's perspective on Said, maybe because it'd be kind of laughable to pretend you hadn't heard about it; but I'm one of the less-strident people Zack commiserates with about Said's travails, and you had access to my opinion on the matter if you were willing to listen to a wheel that only squeaked a little bit. My comment is toplevel and has lots of votes and netted positive on both karma and agreement and most of the nested remarks are about whether it was polite of me to compare a non-Said person to a weird bug.

This post spends so much time talking about the complaints you've gotten, the exp... (read more)

[-]habryka1mo276

I am sorry you didn't like the post! I do think if you were still more active here, I would have probably reached out in some form (I am aware of that one comment you left a while ago, and disagreed with it).

I generally respect you and wish you participated more on the site and also do think of you as someone whose opinion I would be interested in on this and other topics.

After all of this you are left questioning your own sanity, try a bit to respond more on the object-level, and ultimately give up feeling dejected and like a lot of people on LessWrong hate you. You probably don't post again.
And like, man, is that true? Did you conduct a poll?

I think the narrative above pretty accurately describes the experiences of a bunch of authors. I only ran it by like 2-3 non-LW team members since this post already took an enormous amount of time to write. I am of course not intending to capture some kind of universal experience on LessWrong, and of course definitely wouldn't be aiming for that section to represent your experience on LessWrong, since I don't think you ever had any of the relevant interactions with Said, at least since I've been running LW.

This post contains what feels

... (read more)

2Alicorn1mo

You disagreed with it? What about it? I just read it over again and it doesn't make a lot of claims I could imagine you disagreeing with - for one thing I talk about my personal experience of Said, not his objective properties. Okay, but... why. Why do you think that. Is there a reason you think that, which other people could inspect your reasoning on, which is more viewable than unenumerated "complaints"? Again, I believe the complaints exist. How many, order of magnitude? Were they all from unique complainants? I believe you that you have spent many many hours on this matter: what did you spend them doing? Like I said in the comment linked in the grandparent, Said is on a very short list of people who I have a persistent impression of at all - without my ever having met him in person or talked to him on another website, even - and has left a consistently positive impression. Maybe I missed all his egregious comments, but I clicked some of the handpicked examples in your post and they just don't seem that bad? Perhaps he is equipped with a whistle that emits vibes at a frequency I cannot hear. I can't rule that out. It just has not been demonstrated to me by any metric other than you not liking moderating him. To be clear: I think it would in fact be valid to run your moderation decisions on you not liking moderating him. If you have a mod team, and everybody on the mod team is like "I am sick and tired of being called in to deal with Said-related things", and you announce, "we don't seem to employ anyone who is willing to deal with Said-related things and we don't have the budget to hire a new moderator who'll have that as an explicit part of their job description, so bye Said", that would be in my view perfectly licit. If you want to appeal solely to it being time-consuming and unpleasant to moderate a guy, you can, and I wouldn't object much to that no matter how much I like the guy, I'd just be puzzled about how polarizing he manages to be. Th

[-]habryka1mo2817

Okay, but... why. Why do you think that.

I mean, I really tried to explain a lot of my models for what I think the underlying generators of this are. That's why the post is 15,000 words long.

Is there a reason you think that, which other people could inspect your reasoning on, which is more viewable than unenumerated "complaints"?

To be clear, LessWrong is not a democracy, and while I think the complaints are important, I don't consider them to be the central part of this post. I tried to explain in more mechanistic terms what I think is going wrong in conversations with Said, and those mechanistic terms are where my cruxes for this decision are located. If I changed my mind on those, I would make different decisions. If all the complaints disappeared, but I still had the same opinions on the underlying mechanics, then I would still make the same decision.

Again, I believe the complaints exist. How many, order of magnitude? Were they all from unique complainants?

I link to something like 5-15 comment threads in the post above. Many of the complaints are on those comments threads and so are public. See for example the Benquo ones that I have quot... (read more)

3Alicorn1mo

You spend a lot of words trying very hard to explain a thing that is not the same thing that I wanted to know. Perhaps lots of other people wanted to know it? I can only speak for myself. Yeah, I know. I provided an example of a way you could have chosen to openly run it as an oligarchy ("anyone the entire mod team is sick of for any reason is banned because we have no one to moderate them") and that I would have respected. Let us call this proposed oligarchical model something fun like "Modularity" - once no mod(ule)s are compatible with somebody, that somebody can't be on the site. You are doing a thing other than that with more moving parts. These moving parts in particular. If you were implementing Modularity, it wouldn't matter what was going wrong. Your bare word is more than sufficient to convince me that something is going wrong, and "something is going wrong" would be enough for you to refuse responsibility for further dealing with Said where Things Go Wrong All The Time for whatever reason. No troubleshooting burden would exist, no explanatory burden would be called for. You could just not like his face, and get the same result. But you're not doing Modularity. You're doing something where you write thousands of words about why you think his face is objectively bad. Thank you for the numbers! I know! I can tell you tried. You did not communicate all the things I wanted to know, though you have here ameliorated that somewhat; I am agnostic about whether this is because you were originally trying to communicate some other thing (perhaps to some other audience) or because communication is just hard and even trying to communicate the correct thing sometimes does not work. No, not particularly. You're not implementing Modularity, you're doing this complicated model-backed thing and you want to explain your complicated model-backed thing. I think that if you were doing Modularity that would be a) respectable and b) require very little digital

[-]habryka1mo*5829

Cool, I think this clarified a bunch. Summarizing roughly where I think you are at:

In moderation space, there is one way to run things that feels pretty straightforward to you, which you here for convenience called "modularity", where you treat moderation as a pragmatic thing for which "I don't have the resources to deal with this kind of person" without much explanation or elaboration is par for the course. You are both confused, and at least somewhat concerned about what I am trying to do in the OP, which is clearly not that thing.

There are at least two dimensions on which you feel concerned/confused about what is going on:

What is the thing I am trying to do here? Am I trying to make some universally compelling argument for badness? Am I trying to rally up a mob to hate on Said so that I can maintain legitimacy? Am I trying to do some complicated legal system thing with precedent and laws?
What do I actually think is going wrong in conversations with Said? Like, where are the supposed terrible comments of his, or things that feel like they are supposed to be compelling to someone like you by whatever standard by system of moderation is trying to achieve? There ar

... (read more)

[-]Alicorn1mo123

I think your model of me as represented in this comment is pretty good and not worth further refining in detail.

I read something into those comments - I might even possibly call it "disdain", but - "disdain (neutral)", not "disdain (derogatory)". It just... doesn't bother me, that he writes in a way that communicates that feeling. It certainly bothers me less than when (for example) Eliezer Yudkowsky communicates disdain, purely as a stylistic matter. If I thought Said would want to be on my Discord server I would invite him and expect this to be fine. (Eliezer is on my Discord server, which is also usually fine.)

It bothers you. I'm not trying to argue you out of being bothered. I'm not trying to argue the complainants out of being bothered. It bothering you would, under the Modularity regime, be sufficient.

But you're not doing that. You're trying to make the case that you are objectively right to feel that way, that you have succeeded at a Sense Motive check to detect a pattern of emotions and intentions that are really there. I don't agree with you, about that.

But I don't have to. I don't have your job. (I wouldn't want it.)

[-]philh1mo2315

But you’re not doing that. You’re trying to make the case that you are objectively right to feel that way, that you have succeeded at a Sense Motive check to detect a pattern of emotions and intentions that are really there. I don’t agree with you, about that.

I think the claim I'd make is not necessarily that Oli's Sense Motive check has succeeded, but that Oli's Sense Motive check correlates much better with other people's Sense Motive checks than yours does, and that ultimately that's what ends up mattering for the effects on discourse.

Like, in the sense that someone's motives approximately only affect LessWrong by affecting the words that they write. So when we know the words they write, knowing their motives doesn't give us any more information about how they're going to affect LessWrong. For some people, there's something like... "okay, if this person actually felt disdain then the words they write in future are likely to be _, and if not they're likely to be _ instead; and we can probably even shift the distribution if we ask them hey we detect disdain from your comment, is that intended?". But we don't really have that uncertainty with Said. We know how he's going to write, whether he feels disdain or not.

I am somewhat interested in his True Motives, but I don't think they should be relevant to LW moderation.

(This is not intended to say "Said's comments are just fine except that people detect disdain".)

6habryka1mo

Makes sense. I think I probably could, with many more hours of examples and walking you through things, convince you of that. Maybe that's worth it. Or maybe I'll be a better writer in a few years and can get it across more easily. (Of course, you disagree, for if you did agree with that, you would probably agree with me now, conservation of expected evidence and all that) Not planning to give it another try for now, though if you want me to try, I would do it. Just doesn't seem, on the margin, the best use of either of our time.

7lc1mo

I hate to be indelicate, but are you insane? It's a goddamn web forum, not the ICC. The mods got complaints about a users' behavior and they banned him. They can't run a focus group to see how everybody feels about the situation first.

[-]habryka1mo185

I mean, to be clear, I did have like 20+ hours of conversation with many authors and contributors who had very strong feelings on this topic just as part of writing this post^[1], with many different disagreeing viewpoints, so I think we did a lot more than "run a focus group".

^{^}
Not to mention the many more conversations I've had over the last decade about this

7MinusGix1mo

Because Said is an important user who provides criticism/commentary across many years. This is not about some random new user, which is why there is a long post in the first place rather than him being silently banned. Alicorn is raising a legitimate point. That it is easy to get complaints about a user who is critical of others, that we don't have much information about the magnitude, and that it is far harder to get information about users who think his posts are useful. LessWrong isn't a democracy, but these are legitimate questions to ask because they are about what kind of culture (as Habryka talks about) LW is trying to create.

9Vladimir_Nesov1mo

Said is a sufficiently mixed case that arguing with moderators on object level seems like a lost cause. My impression is that Said feeds both good and bad (but not terrible) norms, while making some positive object level contributions in a way that strongly annoys some people for essentially superficial reasons. And he's being either persistently oblivious or illegibly principled in how that keeps happening, in ways that seem eminently avoidable by adjusting how he's talking at a superficial level, without impacting any substantive points he's making. (This is apart from the purely positive and important LW-related infrastructure contributions.) So the decision feels somewhat unjust, but not legibly unjust, and illegibly-possibly-unjust decisions must remain legitimate for practical reasons, so that the site admin retains steering superpowers. In the Said/Duncan debacle, Duncan was making significant positive object level contributions while also feeding some catastrophically terrible norms (in my subjective opinion that's hard to make legible; I applaud Zack for making some progress at the time, though that also didn't gain much traction). So in terms of long term impact, the Said/Duncan case seemed much clearer to me, than the case of Said on his own, but also in both cases it's not black and white and hard to argue. Another salient example of a different kind is the whole class of cases of borderline domestic abuse (at sufficiently low levels of terribleness where it's hard to make any calls, including the cases where the damage is purely psychological), where similarly there are often two kinds of impact with opposite signs that can't be meaningfully directly compared to each other. (I'm bringing this up as a well-known example that illustrates the inherent complexities of any legible/illegible good/bad impact mixture, rather than as suggesting any further analogousness.) And also anything about norms is not particularly legible in general, for example my int

[-]Alicorn1mo225

Funnily enough I think I kind of feel about Duncan the same way Oli feels about Said. I detect a sinister and disquieting pattern in his writing that I cannot prove in a court of law or anything that is slightly larping as one. But I'm not trying to moderate any space he's in.

3Vladimir_Nesov1mo

(Maybe you misread what I intended about the Said/Duncan conflict? The wording in your comment seems a bit incongruous under the reading where you didn't, sorry if I'm overthinking this. My point was that the outcome where Duncan mostly left was favorable in its longer term impact, at least so far, due to the norm influence that's not necessarily even intended by Duncan himself, and so would be hard to argue or even know how to correctly attribute responsibility for. This is the largely illegible thing where Zack made a bit of a headway elucidating some aspects of it. But the impact of Said leaving seems unclear either way, while at the same time any issues seem more like the kind of thing he should've been able to fix and that's therefore easier to attribute to his own decisions...)

2Musclyneck1mo

(I appreciated Said's comments on early woo stuff on this site, and I also appreciated the push back along the lines of, if you daily require a newly opened restaurant to show you a profit, you won't ever see a profit.) Reading through the litigation, I think the egregoric issue is the Voice of the People play. Public figures with public mandates get semi-possessed by what they imagine to be the shared soul of the movement, even as the "shared soul" seems to value, above all, inability to be possessed. People get "manipulated", by this person's persistent and assertive and emotive comments, into defensive engagement-- to the point that they are (not completely legibly) worried that this person's judgment is internalized as a VOTP judgment. ("Statusing"). A very assertive and emotive (honest-emotive, not woo-emotive) person is always a candidate to being a VOTP, so people can get themselves manipulated by Schrodinger's VOTP. In parallel, the issues this comment describes about the OP. The rhetoric of the OP begins with a historic reference to a mandate (archive vs lw2). A mandate of course lays claim to a person's time, energy, and identity, so there's really no way to not be bound by it. At the same time I don't think the "laudatory" point was really a joke. This person has had a lot built onto and out of his contributions. People will imitate a person's writing style and not realize who they got it from or how significant that is. Yeah there's a strange blend in the OP behind the imperative tone (this is what the future holds) and the greater good tone. Imperative tone is more decisive. Maybe the OP believes the disdainful-critic-forward society is a local maximum that an actual democratic poll would vote for, against their own greater good. It seems to me (in other cases) that this imperative tone often comes out when a mandate-holding VOTP is actually not sure, but (rightfully) appreciates that not being decisive will lead to being taken advantage of, with

-10lc1mo

[-]Jiro1mo367

Crimes that are harder to catch should be more harshly punished

Please, don't do this.

Your reasoning amounts to "we need to increase the punishment to compensate for all the false negatives".

If the only kind of error that existed was false negatives, you might have a point. But it isn't. False positives exist too. And crimes that are harder to catch are probably going to have more false positives. Harsher punishments also create bigger incentives for either false positives, or for standards that make everyone guilty of serious crimes all the time, thus letting anyone be punished at the whim of the moderators while pretending that they are not.

[-]habryka1mo146

Agree that you need to account for false positives (and the above math didn't do that)!

Sometimes crimes are harder to catch, but you can still prove they happened without much risk of false positives. I do sure agree that the kind of misbehavior discussed in this post is at risk of false positives, so taking that into account is quite important for finding the right punishment threshold. Generally appreciate the reminder of that.

7Richard Korzekwa1mo

Sometimes what makes a crime "harder to catch" is the risk of false positives. If you don't consider someone to have "been caught" unless your confidence that they did the crime is very high, then, so long as you're calibrated, your false positive rate is very low. But holding off on punishment in cases where you do not have very high confidence might mean that, for most instances where someone commits the crime, they are not punished.

[-]habryka1mo341

Heads-up: I am nearing the limit of the roughly 10 hours I set aside for engaging on this, so I'll probably stop responding to things soon (and also if someone otherwise wants to open up this topic again in e.g. a top-level post, I'll probably just link back to the discussion that has been had here, and not engage further).

[-]habryka1mo221

Ok, I think that's a wrap for me. Thanks all for the discussion so far. I am now hoping to get back to all the other work I am terribly behind on.

[-]cousin_it1mo3216

My two cents. There's a certain kind of posts on LW that to me feel almost painfully anti-rational. I don't want to name names, but such posts often get highly upvoted. Said was one of very few people willing to vocally disagree with such posts. As such, he was a voice for a larger and less vocal set of people, including me. Essentially, from now on it will be harder to disagree with bullshit on LW - because the example is gone, and you know that if you disagree too hard, you might become another example. So I'm not happy to see him kicked out, at all.

[-]Wei Dai1mo209

My thoughts are similar to yours although I'm more willing to tolerate posts that you call "almost painfully anti-rational" (while still wishing Said was around to push back hard on them). I think in the early stages of genuine intellectual progress, it may be hard to distinguish real progress from "bullshit". I would say that people (e.g. authors of such posts) are overly confident about their own favorite ideas, rather than that the posts are clearly bullshit and should not have appeared. My sense is that it would be a bad idea to get rid of such overconfidence completely because intellectual progress is a public good and it would be harder to motivate people to work on some approach if they weren't irrationally optimistic about it, but equally bad or worse if there was little harsh or sustained criticism to make clear that at least some people think there are serious problems with their ideas.

[-]gjm1mo111

FWIW my personal intention -- only time will tell whether I actually stick to it -- is to be a little more vigorous in disagreeing with things that I think likely to be anti-rational, precisely because Said will no longer be doing it.

4Ben Pace1mo

(Just a brief note that I accidentally left a thumbs-down react on this comment of gjm's for some period in the last hour. I had no intention to, I like/support gjm's intention, I have been working on the reacts code lately so that probably led me to accidentally leave one on the live site.)

[-]rsaarelm1mo28-16

Bad call. You don't exactly have an unlimited supply of people who have a solid handle on the formative LW mindset and principles from 15 years ago and who are still actively participating on the forums, and latter-day LessWrong doesn't have as much of a coherent and valuable identity to stand firmly on its own.

A key idea in the mindset that started LessWrong is that people can be wrong. Being wrong can exist as an abstract thing to begin with, it's not just an euphemism for poor political positioning. And people in positions of authority can be wrong. Kind, well-meaning, likable people can be wrong. People who have considerate friendly conversations that are a joy to moderate can be wrong. It's not always easy to figure out right and wrong, but it is possible, and it's not always socially harmonious to point it out loud, but it used to be considered virtuous still.

A forum that has principles in its culture is going to have cases where moderation is annoying around something or someone who doggedly sticks to those principles. It's then a decision for the moderators whether they want to work to keep the forum's principles alive or to have a slightly easier time moderating in the future.

7the gears to ascension1mo

the supply sure has a lot more people who still exist and don't come here much anymore, and I'm hopeful we'll see some coming back now. Hey Duncan, (edit: although, if duncan does come back, I won't go easy on his ideas, I'll just try to respect his time about it. "I think you're wrong, here's why, (if true) I appreciate your effort sharing the claims, (if true) I won't go many rounds unless it seems to be leading us to an insight"

[-]rsaarelm1mo123

I'm pretty sure people drifted away because of a more complex set of dynamics and incentives than "Said might comment on their posts" and I don't expect to see much of a reversal.

8FeepingCreature1mo

I think in my whole life I have once seen a person come back because another person left, and they didn't stay long anyway. Broadly speaking I don't think this ever works.

[-]romeostevensit1mo2415

Fwiw, my interaction with lw and more broadly the rationalist scene in the Bay area was most of what formed my current stance that communities that I want to participate in operate on white lists, not black lists. This is such a fundamental shift that it affects everything about how I socialize, and made my life much better. Banning someone requiring a post of this effort level predicts that lots and lots of other good things aren't happening, and that is mostly invisible.

5Ben Pace1mo

FWIW I don't think of LW as a 'community' in any strong sense. Most people here won't be at your wedding or your funeral or pick you up from the airport if you're traveling.

2romeostevensit1mo

The connection is in the deciding whether or not to regularly participate. Said didn't affect my decision here that much, but I'm way way above average in ability to dismiss criticism that I feel is non central.

[-]moridinamael1mo2310

Good work.

The hardest part of moderation is the need to take action in cases where someone is consistently doing something that imposes a disproportionate burden on the community and the moderators, but which is difficult to explain to a third party unambiguously.

Moderators have to be empowered to make such decisions, even if they can’t perfectly justify them. The alternative is a moderation structure captured by proceduralism, which is predictably exploitable by bad actors.

That said — this is Less Wrong, so there will always be a nitpick — I do think people need to grow a thicker skin. I have so many friends who have valuable things to say, but never post on LW due to a feeling of intimidation. The cure for this is, IMO, not moderating the level of meanness of the commentariat, but encouraging people to learn to regulate their emotions in response to criticism. However, at the margins, clipping off the most uncharitable commenters is doubtless valuable.

[-]philh1mo224

Like seemingly many others, I found Said a mix of "frequently incredibly annoying, seemingly blind to things that are clear to others, poorly calibrated with the confidence level he expresses things, occasionally saying obviously false things^[1]" and "occasionally pointing out the-Emperor-has-no-clothes in ways that are valuable and few other people seem to do".

(I had banned him from my personal posts, but not from my frontpaged posts.)

And I wish we could get the good without the bad. It sure seems like that should be possible. But in practice it doesn't seem to exist much?

I have occasionally noticed in myself that I want to give some criticism; I could choose to put little effort in but then it would be adversarial in a way I dislike, or I could choose to put a bunch of effort in to make a better-by-my-lights comment, or I could just say nothing; and I say nothing.

I think this is less of a loss than I think Said thinks it is. (At least as a pattern. I don't know if Said has much opinion about my comments in specific.) But I do think it's a bit of a loss. I think it's plausible that a version of me who was more willing to be disagreeable and adversarial would have left some valuabl... (read more)

[-]River2mo22-4

I don't spend enough time in the LW comments to have any idea who Said is or to be very invested in the decision here. I think I agree with the broad picture here, and certainly with the idea that an author is under no obligation to respond to comments, whether because the author finds the comments unhelpful or overly time consuming or for whatever other reason. That said, I am mostly commenting here to register my disagreement with the idea of giving post authors any kind of moderating privileges on their posts. That just seems like an obviously terrible idea from an epistemic perspective. Just because a post author doesn't find a comment productive doesn't mean someone else won't get something out of it, and allowing an author to censor comments therefor destroys value. LW is the last site I would have expected to allow such a thing.

[-]habryka2mo2319

I think ultimately someone needs to do the job of moderation, and in as much as we want to allow for something like an archipelago of cultures, the LW moderation team really can't do all the moderation necessary to make such things possible.

Note that there are a bunch of restrictions on author moderation:

The threshold for getting the ability to moderate frontpage posts is quite high (2,000 karma)
The /moderation page allows you to find any deleted comments, or users banned from other's posts
We watch author moderation quite closely and would both change the rules, and limit the ability of an individual to moderate their posts if they abuse it

In general, I am not a huge fan of calling all deletion censorship. You are always welcome to make a new top-level post or shortform with your critique or comments. The general thing to avoid is to not always force everyone into the same room, so to speak.

I do think an alternative is for the LW team to do a lot more moderation, and more opinionated moderation, but I think this is overall worse (both because it's a huge amount of work, and because it centralizes the risk so that if we end up messing up or being really dumb about ... (read more)

[-]habryka2mo*22-1

This is the mentioned comment thread under which Said can comment for the next two weeks. Anyone can ask questions here if you want Said to have the ability to respond.

Said, feel free to ask questions of commenters or of me here (and if you want to send me some statement of less than 3,000 words, I can add it to the body of the post, and link to it from the top).

(I will personally try to limit my engagement with the comments of this post to less than 10 hours, so please forgive if I stop engaging at some point, I just really have a lot of stuff to get to)

Edit: And the two weeks are over.^[1]

^{^}
I decided to not actually check the "ban" flag on Said's account, on account of trusting him to not post and vote under his account, and this allowing him to keep accessing any drafts he has on his account, and other things that might benefit from being able to stay logged in.

[-]Said Achmiz2mo15-4

I am, of course, ambivalent about harshly criticizing a post which is so laudatory toward me.^[1] Nevertheless, I must say that, judging by the standards according to which LessWrong posts are (or, at any rate, ought to be) judged, this post is not a very good one.

The post is very long. The length may be justified by the subject matter; unfortunately, it also helps to hide the post’s shortcomings, as there is a tendency among readers to skim, and while skimming to assume that the skimmed-over parts say basically what they seem to, argue coherently for what they promise to argue for, do not commit any egregious offenses against good epistemics, etc. Regrettably, those assumptions fail to hold for many parts of the post, which contains a great deal of sloppy argumentation, tendentious characterizations, attempts to sneak in connotations via word choice and phrasing, and many other improprieties.

The problems begin in the very first paragraph:

For roughly [7 years] have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.

This phrasing assumes that there’s something to “understand” (... (read more)

[-]habryka1mo106

(After all, I too can say: “For roughly 7 years, I have spent many hours trying to get Oliver Habryka to understand and learn how to run a discussion forum properly by my lights.” Would this not sound absurd? Would he not object to this formulation? And rightly so…)

FWIW, this seems to me like a totally fine sentence. The "by my lights" at the end is indeed communicating the exact thing you are asking for here, trying to distinguish between a claim of obvious correctness, and a personal judgement.

Feel free to summarize things like this in the future, I would not object.

Of course, the truth of this claim hinges on how many is “few”. Less than 10? Less than 100?

It of course depends on how active someone on LessWrong is (you are not as widely known as Eliezer or Scott, of course). My modal guess would be that you would be around place 20 in how people would bring up your name. I think this would be an underestimate of your effect on the culture. If someone else thinks this is implausible, I would be happy to operationalize, find someone to arbitrate, and then bet on it.

To which Said responded by trying to rally up a group of people attacking anyone who dared to use moderati

... (read more)

4Said Achmiz1mo

Already edited by the time you posted the comment.

8habryka1mo

Quickly responding to this: The OP directly links to 2 authors who have made statements to this effect on LessWrong itself, and one author who while saying it wasn't a major reason for leaving, still was obviously pretty upset (Benquo)[1]. I wouldn't consider Gordon a "top author" but would consider Duncan and Benquo to be ones. There are more, though I have fewer links handy. I wasn't able to find an easily extractable quote from Duncan, though I am sure he would be happy to provide affirmation of his position on this when he reads this, and readers can form their own judgement reading this thread. We also have someone like DirectedEvolution saying this: I also don't have a public quote by EVN handy, though I am sure she would also be happy to attest to something close to this. I don't have as many receipts as I would like to be able to share here, but saying there are "zero examples" is just really straightforwardly false. You were even involved in a big moderation dispute with one of them! 1. ^ While you link to a comment where he says some more positive things about you 7 years ago, I quote from his most recent overall summary in the OP, where to be clear, he was not overall in favor of banning you, though really did not have a positive impression.

1Said Achmiz1mo

Who is “EVN”…?

3habryka1mo

Elizabeth (Van Nostrand).

-4Said Achmiz1mo

I… actually can’t figure out what you’re referring to, here. Could you quote the part of the OP which you have in mind?

4habryka1mo

Duncan and Gordon.

-10Said Achmiz1mo

4Vaniver1mo

This is also my sense of things. To me, this reads like a claim that it would be meritorious to respond in such a way, because it embodies some virtue or achieves some consequence. (Elsewhere, I claimed that I had no personal problem with Said's comments and someone privately replied to me "shouldn't you, if you believe he's burning the commons?". I'm still considering it, but I suspect "keep your identity small" reasons will end up dominating.) What's the virtue or consequence that you're focused on, here?

3Said Achmiz1mo

A longer quote, for context and easier readability: The virtue is simply that one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view. These things are bad, and objecting to them is good.

[-]Duncan Sabien (Inactive)1mo1816

Just noting that

one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view

is a strong argument for objecting to the median and modal Said comment.

-7Said Achmiz1mo

[-]Vaniver1mo172

I think this reply is rotated from the thing that I'm interested in--describing vice instead of virtue, and describing the rule that is being broken instead of the value from rule-following. As an analogy, consider Alice complaining about 'lateness' and Bob asking why Alice cares; Alice could describe the benefits of punctuality in enabling better coordination. If Alice instead just says "well it's disrespectful to be late", this is more like justifying the rule by the fact that it is a rule than it is explaining why the rule exists.

But my guess at what you would say, in the format I'm interested in, is something like "when we speak narrowly about true things, conversations can flow more smoothly because they have fewer interruptions." Instead of tussling about whether the framing unfairly favors one side, we can focus on the object level. (I was tempted to write "irrelevant controversies", but part of the issue here is that the controversies are about relevant features. If we accept the framing that habryka knows something that you don't, that's relevant to which side the audience should take in a disagreement about principles.)

That said, let us replace the symbol with the s... (read more)

1Jasnah Kholin16d

Not Said, but i agree with him this paragraph wasn't good, and want to explain why. I actually think what Habryka originally wrote contained implicit claims that your rephrasing does not, and those claims are true and important. it is unfortunate those claim was made implicitly, as it make it harder to notice and discuss it. in my model of the world, there are, indeed, things that Said does not able to see or understand and other people do. and the important disagreement is about the realness of the things. the virtue in claiming things explicitly and not implicitly is it make it easier to understand the structure of the disagreement, to notice cruxes, to model the world, and each other different maps, and what can change one's mind. in my model of the world, people who disagree with Said often understand 90%+ of his claims, while he understand 60%- of theirs, and it is not the full reason of why i believe he wrong here, but it is strong heuristic, with casual path to being right or wrong about things, and maybe third of my reasons. It possible I'm projecting here implications that are not actually there, or that derived from the history of Said's interactions in LW. but if i indeed erred that way, it's too reason to avoid this ambiguity.

-5Said Achmiz1mo

[-]Said Achmiz1mo12-3

A commenter writes:

If I were a moderator, I would have banned Jesus Christ Himself if He required me to spend one hundred hours moderating His posts on multiple occasions. Given your description here I am surprised you did not do this a long time ago. I admire your restraint, if not necessarily your wisdom.

This strikes me as either deeply confused, or else deliberately… let’s say “manipulative”^[1].

Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.

Alright, but still, can’t such a claim be true? To some degree, yes; for example, suppose that someone constantly lodges complaints, makes accusations against others, etc., requiring an investigation each time. (On the other hand, if the complaints are valid and the accusations true, then it seems odd to say that it’s the compla... (read more)

7habryka1mo

Yep, I agree with this as a common and IMO very perverse dynamic. I don't think someone being "difficult to moderate" is almost ever an appropriate justification for banning someone. At the very least they must also have some property that requires interfacing with them as a subject of moderation that isn't located solely in the choice of the moderators. Otherwise this becomes a catch-22 with no grounding in reality.

7Said Achmiz1mo

In response to a comment by @clone of saturn, @habryka writes: This is a thoroughly disingenuous response—so misleading as to be indistinguishable from a lie. Consider the comment of mine to which Habryka refers. Here is its text in its entirety: Why did I write this comment? Because the post began by asking: In other words, the OP asked a question. And I answered it. Note that: 1. I explicitly marked my answer to the OP as “my take”, said that Double Crux “seems like” a certain thing, that there “does not seem to be” a reason to pay attention to it, and that it not getting uptake is the default outcome “that I would expect”. Even my parenthetical about CFAR was explicitly and repeatedly noted to be my personal opinion. There are all the disclaimers that people keep saying I should add! And yet, somehow, this turns out to make no difference at all, and still incurred a visit from the “Sunshine Regiment”. 1. My comment does not criticize the post at all. There is nothing in the comment that is at all critical of the post itself, or of its author (@Raemon) for writing it. On the contrary, I take the post at face value, and provide a good faith answer directly to the central question which the post asks. In other words, this comment is the most cooperative possible engagement with the post, precisely as the post itself requests (“discussion-prompt”). And yet, despite all that, it was heavily downvoted, and incurred a moderator warning. I can conclude only that when the moderators talk about what behavior they would like to see, what is rewarded, and what is punished, they are simply lying.

6Said Achmiz1mo

Note, in particular, that @Elizabeth’s “Note from the Sunshine Regiment” (i.e., the moderator judgment on the linked comment) says: This despite the fact that the comment in question was in fact filled with precisely such disclaimers—which the mods simply ignored, writing the moderator judgment as though no such disclaimers were there at all!

[-]Wei Dai1mo116

The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that Elizabeth meant you should have added “I think that...” or ”...for me” specifically to the line "Also, it comes from CFAR, which is an anti-endorsement."

But regardless, it seems crazy that your comment was downvoted to -17 (-16 now, someone just upvoted it by 1) and got a negative mod judgment for this.

7Said Achmiz1mo

Crazy indeed. And—as in several other of these example cases—I will note that the author of the post himself evidently had no problem with my comment, and had no difficulty writing a perfectly reasonable reply, which resulted in an entirely civil and productive discussion. Which makes this yet another example of the pattern where, if the mods had simply left it alone, it would’ve been fine. (Even better would’ve been for them to write something like “yes of course it’s ok to write polite, clearly cooperative, mildly critical comments like this, don’t be silly”, but we can’t expect miracles…)

6Said Achmiz1mo

Commenter @Gordon Seidoh Worley writes: While of course you should not trust my self-report on this, I will nonetheless note for the record that I have made no special attempt to alter my commenting style or approach, recently or (to my recollection) ever.[1] I am glad to hear that you’ve found my comments to be useful (assuming that this is what you meant by “positive”). ---------------------------------------- 1. Excepting, of course, specific adjustments to conform to specific new rules, etc. ↩︎

5Adam Zerner1mo

I have a question for you, Said. If I understand correctly, a big part of the problem is that people perceive your comments as having a certain hostile-flavored subtext. You deny that this subtext is actually present and fault them for inferring things that you hadn't stated explicitly. I strongly suspect that you are capable of writing in such a way where people don't perceive this hostile-flavored subtext. A softer, gentler type of writing. Assuming that you are in fact capable of this type of writing, my question is why you choose to not write in this manner.

-9Said Achmiz1mo

4Said Achmiz1mo

In another comment thread, you write: This is quite deceptive, as in this very post, you cite something I wrote on my own Shortform as contributing to your decision to ban me.

5habryka1mo

I was talking about making top-level posts or shortforms with object-level objections. Calling an author a "coward" for banning you from their post, is of course not what I was talking about as something that is fine to do on your shortform. Your conduct on the site matters, and the conduct you displayed in that thread seemed bad, independently of where it occurred. I didn't mean to imply that just because something is a top-level post or shortform that it's OK to write whatever you want there, we still have standards here. But it's the site-moderators job to enforce those standards, not the original post author's, which is what this whole post is about. Or to state it a different way: No, there is nothing deceptive here. The fact that you can make a shortform or top-level post does indeed help lower the cost of authors deleting comments from their posts. It doesn't change what we do in terms of site-wide moderation.

[-]Said Achmiz1mo183

Calling an author a “coward” for banning you from their post

FYI, that link goes to a very weird URL, which I doubt is what you intended.

The link you had in mind, I am sure, is to this thread. And your description of that thread, in this comment and in the OP, is quite dishonest. You wrote:

Said took to his own shortform where (amongst other things) he and others called that author a coward for banning him

Calling an author a “coward” for banning you from their post

In ordinary conversation between normal people, I wouldn’t hesitate to call this a lie. Here on LessWrong, of course, we like to have long, nuanced discussions about how something can be not technically a lie, what even is “lying”, etc., so—maybe this is a “lie” and maybe not. But here’s the truth: the first use of the word “coward” in that thread was on Gordon’s part. He wrote:^[1]

I didn’t have to say anything. I could have just banned you. But I’m not a coward and I’ll own my action. I think it’s the right one, even if I pay some reputational cost for it.

And I replied:

I’m not a coward

Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but now that you’ve denied it explicitly—sorry, no, I have to disagree. Banning critics fr

... (read more)

[-]AprilSR1mo178

That’s the picture that someone would come away with, after reading your characterization. And, of course, it would be completely inaccurate.

I'm not sure the more accurate picture is flawless behavior or anything, but I do think I definitely had an inaccurate picture in the way Said describes.

8habryka1mo

That... is an unfortunate application of the auto rate-limiting system. I'll see whether I can disable it easily for you. I'll figure out something in the next few hours, but it might require shipping some new code and disentangling the surrounding systems a bit. Sorry about that. Definitely not intended.

7Raemon1mo

I just enabled "ignore rate limits" for this post (which I assumed we'd want for this post to avoid this issue but I think I'm the only one that remembered that feature existed)

2habryka1mo

Yep, I did indeed not remember that feature. Thank you!

6habryka1mo

Ooops, sorry, fixed. I agree that the context is helpful and importantly makes the "coward" aspect more understandable. I also omitted other context that I think makes the thing I intended to communicate with "you called him a coward" a more reasonable summary[1]. I think I am sold that it would have been better for me to give a bit more context and to summarize things a bit differently. I don't overall agree that it was substantially misleading, but I agree I could have done better. 1. ^ For example this paragraph: Which I also consider to follow the same unhelpful patterns described in the OP.

2Said Achmiz1mo

In response to a comment, moderator @Ben Pace describes me as: I consider this to be a libelous characterization. To say that it is false is an understatement. Ben Pace should either support this accusation with cited quotes from me (which he will be unable to do, of course), or else retract it and apologize.

-27Ben Pace1mo

2Said Achmiz1mo

Commenter @Lukas_Gloor writes: This impression is mistaken. I have no such “distaste”. On the contrary, my comments are often aimed at helping to “pin down” those bits. Asking probing questions, asking for examples, asking authors to explain how they are using certain words, etc., is precisely the correct way to do such “pinning down”. @Lukas_Gloor continues by saying: The unacknowledged possibility here, for any given post in this category, is that the post had no coherent point, and was in fact confused, nonsensical, simply wrong, or some combination thereof. In such a case, it is entirely correct that I should not “get closer to seeing the point”, and anyone who did “get closer to seeing the point” of such a post would be making a mistake—becoming more wrong instead of less wrong. In other words: if “there is no there there”, then “getting there” is wrong, and “not getting there” is correct. The way that we can distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that there is something there but it’s difficult to verbalize or to characterize coherently, is precisely via discussion, conceptual analysis, examination of intent behind word choices, examination of examples (or trying to think of examples), etc. And if we find “something there”, the same methods are the means by which we can develop and refine it.

5Vladimir_Nesov1mo

It's not worth making most posts where implied central points are not coherently understood by the author. But some things that look similarly are gesturing at fruitful puzzles, which are too difficult for the author to solve by the time they've written the post, or possibly ever. This shouldn't of course involve the author claiming to have a coherent picture already. The incentives should carve out a niche for this kind of communication, acknowledging practical impossibility to distinguish. The difficulty to distinguish from worthless nonsense is already too much of a punishment, so any incentives should actually want to point the other way, possibly on orthogonal or correlated considerations that can actually be resolved in practice.

1Said Achmiz1mo

Of course. I wholly agree with this. Empirically, this is clearly false. The track record of LW in the past ~8 years makes this very clear.

3Vladimir_Nesov1mo

That seems hard to judge from anything empirical, you'd need to compare with the counterfactual where there is little difficulty in distinguishing and so good tentative takes don't need to live in squalor among piles of worthless nonsense (especially well-presented "high effort" worthless nonsense). So I don't see how it can possibly be clearly false, and similarly I don't see how it can possibly be clearly true, since it has to rely on low-legibility intuitive takes about unobservable counterfactuals. Also, the problems from the difficulty to distinguish are both on the side of the authors (in the form of incentives) and on the side of the readers (in the form of low availability of good content of this type, and having to endure the worthless nonsense without even being able to know if it actually is worthless nonsense).

0Said Achmiz1mo

Commenter @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel writes: @habryka replies: This seems to me to be spectacularly disingenuous, given the discussion in this subthread, where @habryka writes: (See the linked subthread for more details.)

4habryka1mo

My guess is this is clear to most readers, but to clarify, I said "but there is basically no engagement [of Said] with Duncan that played any kind of substantial role in any of this". I.e. I don't think your comments in any threads with Duncan played much into this decision. Duncan's complaints about you also preceded his direct conflict with you, as far as I can remember. The quote I dug up for you just happened to have been made in that context (which shouldn't be very surprising, as people rarely publicly complain about other users on LessWrong in the precise way you were asking about).

-9Said Achmiz1mo

-2Said Achmiz1mo

Commenter @alkjash writes: This would seem to be a highly dubious claim, at best. I have looked through the entirety of @alkjash’s posting/commenting history and used the site search feature, and have found only the following interactions involving the two of us: 1. Discussion of a “multiple agent” model, in comments on post “Internal Double Crux” Obviously nothing day-ruining or even unpleasant here. 1. Brief discussion of input device effectiveness, in comments on post “Design 2” Ditto. 1. A couple of interactions in comments on post “New moderation tools and moderation guidelines” (concerning UX of records/traces of moderation actions) Not really “criticism of writing”, but rather a discussion of costs/benefits of certain aspects of site design. 1. Comment (just one; no discussion) on dialogue “Originality vs. Correctness” Technically “criticism”, I guess, but more like “agreeing with part of what was said, disagreeing with another part”. Nothing unpleasant here either. These four cases seem to be the totality of all my interactions with @alkjash, throughout the entirety of my tenure here on Less Wrong. So where are these “unpleasant interactions” that “ruined [your] day”…?

[-]alkjash1mo239

I am surprised there are so few - perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn't directly participate in.

Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so - while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).

It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.

I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you - this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.

I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].

9mesaoptimizer1mo

Some of them look positively cooperative to me, and do not look like Said thought ill of you in any way, nor that it would look bad if you replied or didn't reply to those messages. Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least? That is at least how I feel when I try to simulate why I'd feel the way you claim to have felt. And I empathize with that feeling.

9alkjash1mo

This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don't think it's really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them. One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things. 1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that's a little too cold for me. In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror. 2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be host

7Raemon1mo

Well I would say the whole reason LW mods are banning Said is that we do, in fact, want LW to operate this way. (Or, directionally similarly to this). I do also want wrong ideas to get noticed and discarded, and I do want "good taste in generating ideas" (there are people who aren't skilled enough at casual idea generation for me to feel excited about them generating such conversation on LW). But I think it's an essential part of any real generative intellectual tradition.

4Wei Dai1mo

I really appreciate your introspection on this, but suggest that status consciousness is probably still a large part of what's going on, because if you weren't worried about looking bad in front of an audience (i.e., looking like you didn't have an answer to one of Said's questions/objections), you could simply ignore or stop replying to him if you thought his style of conversation was too extreme for your tastes, instead of feeling like his "entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency".

9Raemon1mo

I wanna flag, your use of the word "simply" here is... like, idk, false. I do think it's good for people to learn the skill of not caring what other people think and being able to think out loud even when someone is being annoying. But, this is a pretty difficult skill for lots of people. I think it's pretty common for people who are attempting to learn it to instead end up contorting their original thought process around what the anticipated social punishment. I think it's a coherent position to want LessWrong "price of entry" to be gaining that skill. I don't think it's a reasonable position to call it "simply...". It's asking for like 10-200 hours of pretty scary, painful work.

7alkjash1mo

The way I feel about this reply is "I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer"? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at "this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying." Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.

0the gears to ascension1mo

sure, the prestige challenge seems to be relevant, but I feel like the problem is that said also makes dominance threats and those suck. (I feel like there's something going on where a big enough prestige challenge spills into dominance, or something? stated in the spirit of exploratory ramblings that may or may not have an insight somewhere downstream of them) edit: actually I don't want to deal with this right now, bye. I resisted my urge to delete this comment's contents

-2Said Achmiz1mo

What in the world is this about…?

1Said Achmiz1mo

Your model of my view bears very little resemblance to my actual view.

3Said Achmiz1mo

I have two questions: 1. If you found the discussion fruitful in the end, why is that not the bottom line? (Especially if this fruitfulness involved “reasonable conclusions” being reached?) (Here I am talking about “the bottom line” only with respect to your interaction with me directly, ignoring any effects like the benefit of a comment exchange to other commenters or to readers, etc.) 1. You say that you “had the feeling that to interact with [me] at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”. But as we can see from the linked examples, there generally was not, in fact, any “vortex of fact-checking and quibbling”.[1] So it would seem that the “feeling” you had was false-to-fact. Do you agree with this evaluation? ---------------------------------------- 1. Indeed, in the exchange at the first link, the putative roles were reversed—you were questioning me about what I believe, etc. Of course, I have no objection to this! But it hardly serves as an example of me drawing anyone into any vortices of quibbling… ↩︎

5Sherrinford1mo

This is another comment where I do not understand the downvoting.

[-]papetoast1mo2118

I spent ~2 hours reading the comments, and I just want to say I regret it. The comments are painful to evaluate in an unbiased way (very combative) and overall doesn't really matter.

[-]clone of saturn1mo199

What you're doing here is conflating contempt based on group membership with contempt based on specific behaviors. Sneer-clubbers will sneer at anyone they identify as a Rationalist simply for being a Rationalist. Said Achmiz, in contrast, expresses some amount of contempt for people who do fairly specific and circumscribed things like write posts that are vague or self-contradictory or that promote religion or woo. Furthermore, if authors had been willing to put a disclaimer at the top of their posts along the lines of "This is just a hypothesis I'm considering. Please help me develop it further rather than criticizing it, because it's not ready for serious scrutiny yet." my impression is that Said would have been completely willing to cooperate. But possible norms like that were never seriously considered because, in my opinion, LW's issue is not not the "LinkedIn attractor" but the "luminary attractor". I think certain authors here see how Eliezer Yudkowsky is treated by his fans and want some of that sweet acclamation for themselves, but without legitimately earning it. They want to make a show of encouraging criticism, but only in a kayfabe, neutered form that allows them to smoothly answer in a way that only reinforces their status. And Oliver Habryka and the other mods apparently approve of this behavior, or at least are unwilling to take any effective steps to curb it, which I find very disappointing.

[-]habryka1mo130

You say:

Furthermore, if authors had been willing to put a disclaimer at the top of their posts along the lines of "This is just a hypothesis I'm considering. Please help me develop it further rather than criticizing it, because it's not ready for serious scrutiny yet." my impression is that Said would have been completely willing to cooperate.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the first post that Said received a moderation warning for, which is this Ray's post on 'Musings on Double Crux (and "Productive Disagreement")'. You might notice the very first line of that post:

Epistemic Status: Thinking out loud, not necessarily endorsed, more of a brainstorm and hopefully discussion-prompt.

It's not the exact kind of disclaimer you proposed here (it importantly doesn't say that readers shouldn't criticize it) but it also clearly isn't claiming some kind of authority or fully worked-out theory, and is very explicit about the draft status of it. This didn't change anything about Said's behavior as far as I can tell, resulting in a heavily-downvoted comment with a resulting moderator warning.

There are also multiple other threads (which I don't have the time to dig up) in which Said ma... (read more)

0clone of saturn1mo

That's fair enough, but it only demonstrates that he wasn't willing to unilaterally and proactively do this, not that he wouldn't have cooperated if you had imposed it on him. It's baffling to me that you spent hundreds of hours on this issue without (apparently) even attempting to impose a compromise that would have brought out the best in both Said and his detractors.

[-]habryka1mo105

That's not true! Did you read the very first moderation conversation that we had with Said that is quoted in the OP?

After the comment above, we reached out to Said privately and Elizabeth had something like an hour long chat conversation with him asking him what we need to do to get him to change his behavior, to which his response was:

Buuuut what's going on here is that - and this is imo unfortunate - the website you guys have built is such that posting or commenting on it provides me with a fairly low amount of value
This is something I really do find disappointing, but it is what it is (for now? things change, of course)
So again it's not that I disagree with you about anything you've said
But the sort of care / attention / effort w.r.t. tone and wording and tact and so on, that you're asking, raises the cost of participation for me above the benefit
(Another aspect of this is that if I have to NOT say what I actually think, even on e.g. the CFAR thing w.r.t. Double Crux, well, again, what then is the point)
(I can say things I don't really believe anywhere)
[...]
If the takeaway here is that I have to learn things or change my behavior, well - I'm not averse in principle to doing that

... (read more)

1clone of saturn1mo

This is a response to asking him to be, in full generality, more tactful or "prosocial," not to asking him to follow a clear bright-line rule. I'll grant that Said may not be willing or able to be tactful enough in all situations, yet there seems to be rough consensus that his comments have a lot of value in other situations, so my suggestion would be to try to delineate those situations.

[-]kuudes1mo101

Random thought: maybe there could have been disproportional gains got by getting Said to involve more humor in his messaging and branding him the official Fool of Lesswrong.com?

It seems the community indeed gets service out of Said shooting down low quality communication, and limiting that form of communication socially to his specific role maybe would have insulated the wider social implications, so that most value would have been preserved each way, maybe?

7Vaniver1mo

My model of Said would have been offended by being asked to take on a Jester role as a condition of staying on LessWrong, but perhaps he would have been interested? I do think the background culture that we're in is one that doesn't really have this role anymore, because comedians are sometimes major public figures whose opinions are treated with respect; people don't dismiss what they say just because they're frivolous.

6Ben Pace1mo

I think it still sounds intriguing to try it out sometime. (With a different user who is funnier than Said.)

2Duncan Sabien (Inactive)1mo

I volunteer as tribute

4habryka1mo

Unfortunately I do not think there are clear bright-line rules that would fix these problems, as clear bright-line rules are close to non-existent in social situations like this (what is the clear and ambiguous bright line rule that would delineate a sufficient note at the top?). The closest that I found was to allow authors to moderate their own post, which we did implement and Said has been vehemently opposed to in ways I talk about in the OP. Beyond that, I also don't think your characterization that this was in response to a fully-general request to be more tactful or "prosocial" is accurate. The question Elizabeth asked just before most of the quote above is:[1] To which Said responded with most of the quoted section above. Like, yeah, Elizabeth didn't propose a specific clear line rule, but this exchange to me does not leave the door open for suggesting such clear rules, or suggesting further compromises. 1. ^ If Said and Elizabeth both agree I could share the full transcript, but don't want to do so unilaterally.

2clone of saturn1mo

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.

[-]habryka1mo116

which would seem to indicate that a relatively small nudge would have tipped his contributions to the positive side.

Just to be clear, this overall does not strike me as a close call. The situation seems to me more related to the section on "Crimes that are harder to catch should be more socially punished" plus some other dynamics. My epistemic state changed a lot over the years, but not in a way that would result in thin margins, but in a way where some important consideration, or some part of my model would shift, and this would switch things from "in expectation this is extremely costly" to "in expectation what Said is doing is quite important".

Something being a difficult call to make does not generally mean that it also needed to be a close call.

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.

I mean, we tried anyways, but I do think it was overall a mistake and a reasonable thing to do at the time would have been to respond with "well, sorry, if you as a commenter are already pre-empting that you are not willing to change basically at all based on moderator feedback, then yeah, goodbye, farewell, goodluck, we really need more cooperation than that". Elizabeth advocated for this IIRC, and I instead tried to make things work out. I think Elizabeth was ultimately right here.

[-]Lukas_Gloor1mo104

I think the people who talk as though the contested issue here is Said's disagreeableness combined with him having high standards are missing the point.

Said Achmiz, in contrast, expresses some amount of contempt for people who do fairly specific and circumscribed things like write posts that are vague or self-contradictory or that promote religion or woo.

If it was just that (and if by "posts that are vague" you mean "posts that are so vague that they are bad, or posts that are vague in ways that defeat the point of the post"), I'd be sympathetic to your take. However, my impression is that a lot more posts would trigger Said's "questioning mode." (Personally I'm hesitant to use the word "contempt," but it's fair to say it made engaging more difficult for authors and they did involve what I think of as "sneer tone" sometimes.)

The way I see it, there are posts that might be a bit vague in some ways but they're still good and valuable. This could even be because the post was gesturing at a phenomeon with nuances where it would require a lot of writing (and disentanglement work) to make it completely concise and comprehensive, or it could be because an author wanted to share an i... (read more)

[-]Wei Dai1mo110

I feel like Said not only has a personal distaste of that sort of “post that contains bits that aren’t pinned down,” but it also seemed like he wouldn’t get any closer to seeing the point of those posts or comments when it was explained in additional detail.

If a post starts off vague and exploratory, on a topic that isn't very easy to think/write about, it would make sense that it usually couldn't be clarified enough to meet Said's standards within a few back-and-forth comments.

That’s pretty frustrating to deal with for authors and other commenters.

Yes, but I think that's in part because of the nature of intellectual progress, and in part because there are so few people like Said who is incentivized (by his own personality) to push back hard and persistently on this kind of post (so people are not used to it). I think it's also in part due to the tone that he typically employs, which he theoretically could change, but that seems connected with his personality in a way that we seemingly couldn't get one without the other.

5clone of saturn1mo

Sure, I don't mean to imply that Said is beyond reproach, or that all his comments were necessarily good. Just that I think insofar as this post was an attempt to address the reasons Said-defenders felt he needed so much defending, it has failed.

[-]Thrasymachus1mo19-7

As a tenured (albeit perhaps now 'emeritus') member of the "generally critical commentator crew", I think this is the wrong decision (cf.). As the OP largely anticipates the reasons I would offer against it, I think the disagreement is a matter of degrees among the various reasons pro and con. For a low resolution sketch of why I prefer my prices of 'pro tanto' to the moderators:

I don't think Said's commenting, in aggregate, strays that close to the sneer attractor. "Pointed questions with an undercurrent of disdain" may not be ideal, but I have seen similar-to-worse antics^[1] (e.g. writing posts which are thinly veiled/naked attacks on other users, routine abuse of subtext then 'going meta' to mire any objection to this game with interminable rules-lawyering) from others on this site who have prosecuted 'campaigns' against ideologies/people they dislike.^[2]
The principal virtue of Said doing this for LW is calling bullshit on things which are, in fact, bullshit. I think there remains too much (e.g.) 'post'-'rationalist' woo on LW, and it warrants robustly challenging/treating with the disdain it deserves. I don't see many others volunteering for duty.
The principal cost is when

... (read more)

5habryka1mo

(Said doesn't have much lower vote-power than me, I think he currently has a strong-vote strength of 8 or 9, and I have a strong-vote strength of 10) I also didn't strong-downvote most of his comments in that thread/on this post, though I have strong-downvoted a few. I do stand behind those votes, as they are the result of reading each of his comments in detail, and only voting so when I do really think they are quite bad. Even invoking standards in which one should justify one's votes publicly, which I don't generally ascribe to, I have just written a 15,000 word post about why I think Said's comments are deserving of downvotes. I also upvoted some of Said's comments in these discussions. I can see a somewhat weak case why in this discussion I should not vote, but I really don't buy it overall. These are bad comments. The resulting discussion has produced little value, much frustration, and in a fitting way for this post has I think resembled many of the worst things that go wrong in discussions with Said. Feel free to upvote them if you do like them, two users of your karma should be enough to cancel them out, so it doesn't take that much (though I would encourage you to only do that if you actually think they are good[1]). It wouldn't make sense for the perceived balance of votes to end up skewed away from the usual voting patterns on the side, on this post of all places, and in as much as voting is trying to measure something like net-approval on the site (which to be clear it is at most an extremely noisy approximation of) it would be pretty distortive of that for me to not vote in these threads.[2] I don't think Ben intended to score points, though I agree his comment was not written in a way that made that clear (and also gave me a mildly bad taste). Separately a user deleting and undeleting their account is public knowledge and can be derived from e.g. archive.org archives of any pages where they commented, there is no site-admin info necessary to derive

[-]Wei Dai1mo163

I think it would be a good norm to never strong-downvote someone you're debating, no matter how carefully you've read them, because it's just too easy to be biased in such situations, and it makes people suspicious/resentful/angry (due to thinking that the vote is biased/unfair, and having no recourse or ability to hold anyone accountable), which is not conducive to having calm and productive discussions. Rather surprised that you don't support or follow this.

[-]habryka1mo103

I somewhat agree and apply a substantially higher bar to downvoting people I am debating, especially on non-moderation discussions (in the threads on this post, I abstained from voting for a lot of his replies to me, though less on his replies to others, e.g. the Vaniver thread).

As a site-moderator my job is often more messy and I think allows less of this principle than it does for others. In many cases where I would encourage other people to just "downvote and move on", I often do not have that choice, as the role of actually explaining the norms of the space, or justifying a moderation decisions, or explaining how the site works, falls on me. In many cases, if I didn't vote on those comments, the author would not get the appropriate feedback at all.

Another thing that I think is important is to have gradual escalation. It is indeed better for someone to be downvoted before they are banned. As a moderator, voting is the first step of moderation. Moderators should vote a lot, and pay attention to voting patterns, and how voting goes wrong, because it's a noisy measure and the moderators are generally in the best position to remove the most distortions. Most moderation s... (read more)

4kave1mo

(Remember that, IIRC, we still have the misfeature that you can't strong upvote your own comments. Perhaps you mention this, I haven't read much of your comment or these threads)

1habryka1mo

I haven't mentioned it, and I do hate it as a feature, and we should change it. Having the default outcome of two people being angry at each other being that everyone is somewhere in the super negatives does seem pretty dumb.

[-]Garrett Baker1mo2016

Its not obvious this is dumb to me. If two people are super angry at each other, that conversation seems likely to create more heat than light.

[-]Celarix1mo196

I'm not a regular user of LW, but I wanted to weigh in anyway. The style of endless asymmetric-effort criticism can be very wearing on people with perfectionist or OCD-like tendencies. I am, sadly, one of those people. In my head is a multi-faced voice of rage and criticism that constantly second guesses my decisions and thoughts and says many of the same things about anyone else's work or life or decisions. This kind of thing is one of the faces, able to find fault in anything and treat it all with importance both high and invariant over any sort of context. I think the voice is something like an IFS firefighter. In fact, here he is now:

wow. You come to LessWrong (stop abbreviating) and you can't even be bothered to put five seconds into reading Kaj's Unlocking the Emotional Brain summary to see if it really is a firefighter and not a protector?

It's exhausting and demoralizing. This is far from the only component, to be fair, and I actually don't doubt that Said is honestly trying to make the world a better place... but this particular flavor of criticism is not making things better. It can be done well, but this isn't it. This makes people, over time and without really notici... (read more)

[-]FeepingCreature1mo136

I'm very good friends with someone who is persistently critical and it has imo largely improved my mental health, fwiw, by forcing me to construct a functioning and well-maintained ego which I didn't really have before.

6Celarix1mo

Okay, this is definitely true, too. I also do enjoy a more consistent ability to justify my actions and beliefs, which is far from nothing and not worth writing off. I guess, for me, the missing ingredient is that the other person gets it once I make a logical and reasonable justification; if that happens, I think it's fine to be friends with a very critical person.

[-]plex1mo180

I feel vaguely good about this decision. I've only had one relatively brief round of Said commenting, but it's not free.

If Said returns, I'd like him to have something like a "you can only post things which Claude with this specific prompt says it expects to not cause <issues>" rule, and maybe a LLM would have the patience needed to show him some of the implications and consequences of how he presents himself.

[-]Adele Lopez1mo198

I also feel vaguely good about it, but I feel decisively bad about this suggestion!

I've been investigating LLM-induced psychosis cases, and in the process have spent dozens of hours reading through hundreds if not thousands of possible cases on reddit. And nothing has made me appreciate Said's mode of communication (which I have a natural distaste towards) more than wading through all that sycophantic nonsense slop!

In particular, it has made it more clear to me what the epistemic function of disagreeableness is, and why getting rid of it completely would be very bad. (I'm distinguishing 'disagreeableness' here from 'criticism', which I believe can almost always be done in an agreeable way.) Not something I really would have disagreed with before (ha), but it helps me to see a visceral failure mode of my natural inclination to really drive the point home.

4plex1mo

I think there's a happy medium between these two bad extremes, and the vast majority of LWers sit in it generally.

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley1mo170

FWIW, no need to anonymize if this was an attempt to lightly protect me, this was me:

Last month, a user banned Said from commenting on his posts. Said took to his own shortform where (amongst other things) he and others called that author a coward for banning him.

Also FWIW, I've had some genuinely positive interactions with Said in the last couple weeks. I was surprised as anyone. I don't know if it's because he was trying to be on his best behavior or what, but if that was how Said commented on everything, I'd be very happy to see him unbanned (I had even had the idea that if we continued to have positive interactions I would unban him after whatever felt like enough time for me to believe in the new pattern).

[-]eggsyntax1mo166

Now, one might think that it seems weird for one person to be able to derail a comment thread.

This does not seem weird to me at all. LW is a scary place for many newcomers, and many posts get 0–1 comments, and one comment that makes someone feel dumb seems likely to result in their never posting again.

I strongly agree that it's important to avoid the LinkedIn attractor; I simultaneously think that we should value newcomers and err at least a little bit on the side of being gentle with them.

[-]Shmi1mo166

From my very much outside view, extending the rate limiting to 3 comments a week indefinitely would have solved most of the stated issues.

[-]Martin Randall1mo*140

I have two feature requests in response to this class of concerns.

Problem statement: authors feel pressure to respond to comments even if they think responding is low value. Meanwhile, readers hesitate to comment because they do not wish to impose costs (response costs or social costs) on the author.

Solution: authors can use emoji be able to tag a comment to indicate why they are choosing not to respond. LessWrong already has this via emoji responses, and I have used them for this purpose (as a comment author). A beneficial side-effect is that emojis can't be karma-voted, further reducing social pressure. My feature requests aim to improve this avenue.

Tiny: remove emoji question marks. For example, the emoji that says "Seems offtopic?" can just be "Offtopic", like "Soldier Mindset". This would make the emoji better express something like "I am not responding because this is (in my opinion) offtopic" rather than "This might be offtopic but I am not sure, l am not responding because I can't be bothered to find out". This suggestion also applies to:

Too Combative? -> Too Combative
Misunderstands Position? -> Misunderstands Position
"Not worth getting into? (I'm guessing it's pr

... (read more)

8Ben Pace1mo

Relatedly, I have a draft of a "Bowing out of this thread" react with a bowing monopoly-man, that I think is a more polite ending to a thread than "Not worth getting into".

3MinusGix1mo

Anecdotally, I would perceive "Bowing out of this thread" as a more negative response because it encapsulates both topic as well as the quality of my response or behavior of myself. While "not worth getting into" is mostly about the worth of the object level matter. (Though remarking on behavior of the person you're arguing with is a reasonable thing to do, I'm not sure that interpretation is what you intend)

2Martin Randall1mo

I think a more generic react/emoji like that could be a good addition for cases where none of the existing emoji fit, and for people who don't want to be specific about why they are not responding further, for whatever reason. Thanks for working on that. I don't think "Not worth getting into" is impolite in any way. Replying to a comment consumes time, and it will frequently be the case that someone's time is better spent on other activities. Since there is no obligation on the author to respond (per habryka's post), they can't be considered impolite for not responding further.

5Alex Vermillion1mo

I believe you are outright incorrect about how many people will receive this, then! Many people will, in fact, receive that statement as hostile, which will lead to it being underused by people who are concerned with politeness, which will lead to it correctly being perceived as statistically rude.

5Martin Randall1mo

I intend to say that "Not worth getting into" is not rude on LessWrong, as a normative statement, rather than a descriptive statement about what LW readers will think. Partly it is a normative statement about what (I think) LW culture is, and partly it is a normative statement about what (I think) LW culture should be. Arguments for what LW culture is When an activity gives an explicit affordance for something, using it is not rude by default. Destroying someone's base is rude in a game of Legos, but not rude in a game of Starcraft. Since LW has a "Not worth getting into?" react, using it is not rude by default. If the LW react changed to "Not worth getting into", that would also be not rude by default. The reacts are therefore a surprising tool for shaping LW culture. Also, as I mentioned above, there is no obligation on the author to respond, per habryka's post. Any response, even a react, is supererogatory. By reacting the author has given the commenter (and other readers) strictly more information than they are obliged to, at no cost. It is a free gift. Since we don't believe in Copenhagen Ethics we can't fault an author for not doing more just because they did something instead of nothing. Arguments for what LW culture should be This is partly covered by The LinkedIn attractor in habryka's post: It's not even bad that someone should occasionally say something that is not worth responding to. Threads have to end at some point. There are many things that are worth saying but are not worth responding to. If a culture is at the point where pointing out a not-even-bad thing about a single comment is considered impolite and/or hostile, that culture is deep into The LinkedIn Attractor, and doomed as a rationalist endeavor. Also, I go back to my problem statement above. It's valuable for authors to have easy ways to gracefully indicate why they are not responding. LW culture should support authors in choosing how much time to spend responding to comments. Failur

3Martin Randall1mo

Clarification re "emojis can't be upvoted or downvoted", which @the gears to ascension and @mruwnik would bet is false. I mean that if I give an emoji react to a post saying "not worth getting into", I can't get karma votes on that emoji, whereas if I give a text reply to a post saying the same thing, it can get karma votes and replies from people who think it is getting into. Since I don't want to get into meta-discussions about whether a comment is worth replying to, or have such choices judged by others, that is a feature. I'm interested if I'm missing something here.

6habryka1mo

I think the reactions are just because de-facto you can vote on reacts: That's what the vote button in the bottom right corners are for. You can downvote a react, and if net votes go to zero, it disappears.

3Martin Randall1mo

Good point. I further feature-suggest that if the author replies "Offtopic" and someone downvotes that it is ontopic, I still want to see the author's react. Maybe that could be "📌 Habryka -1".

3habryka1mo

That is literally what happens! Hidden reacts show up in a small menu in the bottom right corner, and when you hover over that you can see both "upvotes" and "downvotes" on the react:

2Martin Randall1mo

I wasn't clear (I should have made a mockup, sorry). I don't think the author's react should be in hover-text, I think it should be inline text visible by default without the reader needing to hover anywhere. At least on desktop, anyway. Currently just the react and the number is visible by default.

[-]Taran1mo14-12

I started posting to Less Wrong in 2011, under the name Fezziwig. I lost the password, so I made this account for LW2.0. I quit reading after the dustup in 2022, because I didn't like how the mods treated Said. I started up again this summer; I guess I came back at the wrong time.

Object-level I think Said was right most of the time, and doing an important job that almost no one else around here is willing to do. A few times I thought of trying to do the same thing more kindly; I'm a more graceful writer than he is, so I thought I had a good shot. But I never did it, because I don't believe Said's tone was ever really the issue: what upset people, what tended to produce those long ugly subthreads, was when he made a good point that couldn't be persuasively answered, and didn't get distracted by evasions. There isn't, actually, a kind way to ask for examples from someone who doesn't have any.

That's not to say all his comments were like that; some really were just bad. But the bad ones didn't tend to spawn demon threads. People didn't have to reply, because they knew that he was wrong, instead of just wishing it.

Also, I think that if "..... (read more)

5Alex Vermillion1mo

For the record, I personally found the way Said engaged to be annoying at points because I would have preferred to make the same complaint about the post with more tact so that the author might actually fix the issue within 24 hours instead of taking that long to figure out what it was. Since he had made the comment, it was often difficult to add mine (since the author was busy in another thread!). I don't really expect any decline in quality on LessWrong because I think the job Said was doing is ~fungible (though I hope everyone reading this comment could have guessed that I know that people are not).

[-]Kaj_Sotala1mo14-1

Thank you for your hard work! Neither the decision itself nor the work of justifying it and discussing it is particularly easy, as I can say from experience. I appreciate you putting so much effort into trying to keep the site healthy.

This post has comments from some people who agree and from some people who disagree with the decision. It seems worth making explicit that this discussion may underrepresent the amount of people who agree, because some of the people with the strongest agreement would be the ones who've already left the site because of Said.

[-][anonymous]1mo1711

I don't think this sort of abstract analysis is valid. For instance, you could argue that it may underrepresent the people who disagree, because it's become increasingly clear that Said-style criticism is unwelcome on LW in the past few months, as the conflict has escalated.

Think it's just really hard to know without doing a lot of work.

[-]Kaj_Sotala1mo*105

I think it'd be more accurate to say that "there's this other factor too" rather than "this analysis is not valid"?

There are a number of comments expressing disagreement that have gotten a fair number of upvotes, so it doesn't look to me like expressing disagreement would be unwelcome.

Edited to add: I should also mention that I don't think this comment came out of "abstract analysis". It came from the fact that back when I banned Eugine Nier, I then reached out to a user who had left the site because of him to let them know their harasser was banned. The user's response was basically, "glad to hear, but I still don't feel like coming back". So at least in one previous case, users who had left because of a now-banned user were actually permanently out of the resulting discussion.

4Daniel V1mo

I agree, the meta-point of selection bias is valid but the direction of bias is unclear.

[-]Kabir Kumar1mo133

My best guess is that the usual ratio of "time it takes to write a critical comment" to "time it takes to respond to it to a level that will broadly be accepted well" is about 5x. This isn't in itself a problem in an environment with lots of mutual trust and trade, but in an adversarial context it means that it's easily possible to run a DDOS attack on basically any author whose contributions you do not like by just asking lots of questions, insinuating holes or potential missing considerations, and demanding a response, approximately independently of the quality of their writing.
For related musings see the Scott Alexander classic Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor.

Not strictly related to this post, but I'm glad you know this and it makes me more confident in the future health of Lesswrong as a discussion place.

[-]alkjash1mo122

It's been many years since I've been active on LW, but while I was, Said was the source of a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site. Many other commenters leveraged serious criticisms of my writing, but only Said consistently ruined my day while doing so.

I cannot say whether this decision was right in the end, but will attest that seeing this post made me happy.

[-]bohaska1mo123

Tangential feature request: allow people to embed other comments in posts natively. This article uses screenshots of LessWrong to display conversations, but this does not responsively size them for mobile users and makes it harder to copy-paste stuff from this post, which a native implementation could fix.

2habryka1mo

Yeah, I think better content embedding is a thing that would be useful for a few reasons.

[-]Richard_Kennaway1mo114

FWIW, I am sad both that Said has been banned, and that Duncan left.

[-]Noosphere891mo93

I'd also like to say that a lot of Duncan's conflict-oriented nature in the Duncan/Said moderation post and comments, as well as other posts where they interact was precisely because of the issues described in the section But why ban someone, can't people just ignore Said?, in that it's much less easy to ignore comments than a lot of people realize.

While it doesn't explain all of the conflict, I do think it explains a non-trivial amount of the reason why Duncan has the tendency to get into conflict with Said, because there's a social norm that criticism ha... (read more)

[-]DanielFilan1mo90

And if the stakes are even higher, you can ultimately try to get me fired from this job. The exact social process for who can fire me is not as clear to me as I would like, but you can convince Eliezer to give head-moderatorship to someone else, or convince the board of Lightcone Infrastructure to replace me as CEO, if you really desperately want LessWrong to be different than it is.

I don't plan on doing this, but who is on the board of Lightcone Infrastructure? This doesn't seem to be on your website.

6habryka1mo

Daniel Kokotajlo, Vaniver and me! (We should update our website sometime)

[-]Adam Zerner1mo97

This outcome makes me a little sad. I have a sense that more is possible.

How would this situation play out in a world like dath ilan? A world where The Art has progressed to something much more formidable.

Is there some fundamental incompatibility here that can't be bridged? Possibly. I have a hunch that this isn't the case though. My hunch is that there is a lot of soldier mindsetting going on and that once The Art figures out the right Jedi mind tricks to jolt people out of that mindset and into something more scout-like, these sorts of conflicts will oft... (read more)

[-]Ben Pace1mo138

Is there some fundamental incompatibility here that can't be bridged? Possibly. I have a hunch that this isn't the case though.

I don't believe Said is having very contingent bad interactions with tons of commenters and the mod team, but rather that this is a result of a principled commitment to a certain kind of forum commenting behavior that involves things like any commenter being able to demand answers to questions at the risk of the post-author's status, holding extreme disdain and disrespect for interlocutors while being committed to never saying anything explicitly or even denying that it is the case, and other things discussed in the OP, that in combination are extremely good at sucking energy out of people with little intellectual productivity as a result. My guess is that if we played the history of LW 2.0 over like 10 more times making lots of changes to lots of variables that seem promising or relevant to you, the outcome would've eventually been the same basically each time.

To take your proposal, I think it's likely that Said has literally written a disdainful comment about NVC — yep, I looked a little, Said writes "It has been my experience that NVC is used exclusively... (read more)

3Adam Zerner1mo

Yeah, I hear ya. I don't see any low hanging fruit here such as attempting to apply NVC. What I mean is that I think there are solutions out there that we haven't discovered yet. And not in the distant sense of "have nanobots rewire Said's brain"; I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren't super distant or high-tech.

2jimmy1mo

I notice that you're reaching for it too. It's promising that despite Said's criticisms of NVC, and that you're doing exactly what you described as the thing "something like" NVC, it's going quite well so far. That's a harder test, but when you get the principles right, things work regardless. It doesn't matter if Said's stance is "NVC is about status plays" because you aren't doing status plays, and it shows. Respect.

[-]homosapien971mo82

I have some suggestions for mechanistic improvements to the LW website that may help alleviate some of the issues presented here.

RE: Comment threads with wild swings in upvotes/downvotes due to participation from few users with large vote-weights; a capping/scaling factor on either total comment karma or individual vote-weights could solve this issue. An example total-karma-capping mechanism would be limiting the absolute value of the displayed karma for a comment to twice its parent's karma. An example vote-weight-capping mechanism would be limiting vote ... (read more)

3habryka1mo

This is a good place! There isn't a super central repository for this. You can take a look at the Site Meta and LW Moderation tags to find other posts in the same reference class.

3Adele Lopez1mo

I'd like you to consider removing votes entirely, to be subsumed entirely by reacts. These allow more nuance and are importantly not anonymous. I believe this is importantly more similar to how humans in the ancestral environment would think about and judge community contributions, in ways that are conducive to good epistemics and incentives. (There are also failure modes that would be important to think about, such as a 'seal of approval' dynamic.) Aggregating this well for the purposes of sorting and raising to attention would be tricky, but seems plausibly doable and worth it to me. However, I expect that this is already something you have thought about a lot more than I have and have apparently not decided to do, so I am also curious to hear why not.

8Zach Stein-Perlman1mo

Many people would be much less inclined to vote if it was fully public, so you would lose a lot of signal.

4the gears to ascension1mo

would the signal to (noise + adversarial signal) improve? edit: thinking about it more, I'm unsure, seems plausible the answer is no. (react was added before edit)

[-]Noosphere891mo72

I have an information question about the 3 year ban, in that I'd like to ask why you chose a temporary ban over a indefinite ban?

In particular, given the history of Said Achmiz here, including the case where he did the same behavior he was rate-limited before, I am a bit confused on what you are hoping to do by simply performing a temporary ban in lieu of an indefinite ban:

To which we responded by telling Said to please let authors moderate as they desire and to not do that again, and gave him a 3 month rate-limit
After the rate-limit he seemed to behave be

... (read more)

[-]habryka1mo1315

3 years is long enough that LessWrong might be a very different place by then, or Said might have changed quite a bit, or maybe things will have actually sunk in in 3 years. I think it's likely for the threshold for rebanning to be pretty low in 3 years, but it seemed to me potentially worth it to leave some door open in the more distant future.

[-]jdp1mo6-3

Now, I do recommend that if you stop using the site, you do so by loudly giving up, not quietly fading. Leave a comment or make a top-level post saying you are leaving. I care about knowing about it, and it might help other people understand the state of social legitimacy LessWrong has in the broader world and within the extended rationality/AI-Safety community.

Sure. I think this is a good decision because it:

Makes LessWrong worse in ways that will accelerate its overall decline and the downstream harms of it, MIRI, et al's existence.
Alienates a hard

... (read more)

[-]Algon1mo60

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.

Free Hearing, Not Speech seems like a better approach to me. Give users the affordances to automatically see the kinds of comments they want to interact with, or the conversations they want to have. Users don't have to see what they believe is bad-faith, l... (read more)

7plex1mo

If you put a bunch of work into a post, knowing that most other people are seeing a low-quality but very forceful/sneer-y criticism which you haven't replied to is a lot of discouragement.

2Algon1mo

Auto-mute posts replying to the posts you don't like.

2Raemon1mo

How does that help?

4Algon1mo

Low priors on this happening + out of sight, out of mind basically resolve the discouragement issue IMO. Like, this works well enough on Twitter. There are all sorts of people saying stupid stuff that I know would enrage or discourage me. But I've muted enough nonsense that I don't have to see it, and I've got no interest in seeking it out. Why not do that here, but better?

9Vaniver1mo

I think one of the core problems here is authors not believing in "out of sight, out of mind". If people reasonably believe that the author not responding to a comment is evidence that the author can't respond to that comment, the visibility of that comment for readers but not the author still generates reader-impressions that the author doesn't want. Of course the flip side of this is also problematic--if people reasonably believe that the absence of critical comments is a sign of quality, the invisibility of criticism generates reader-impressions that the readers don't want. And so moderation involves judging which of those is more important.

7Algon1mo

Yeah, you're right.[1] Your point holds strong bc. on LW because you're trying to reach the entirety of the LW user base with your posts, competing with other posters for the singular front-page/popular comments/recent discussion sections. That's an important disanalogy to e.g. Twitter or Mastodon. (Another is lack of emphasis on followers/following.) Kinda reminds me of an agora? I'm guessing that's the sense in which Said compared LW to a public forum. But @habryka's kinda giving me the sense that he doesn't want LW to be like an agora. Honestly, I'm not sure what he wants LW to be. IIRC, sometimes he mentions LW like being a university, sometimes like an archipelago of cultures. But those are more decentralized than LW is. Like, you've got all these feeds which give everyone the same reading materials. Which is trying to expose everyone's work to the whole LW reader base by default. Which is more like a public forum in my mind. So yeah, mixed vibes. Habryka, if you're reading this, I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on what sort of social system LW is and should be, and how that differs from the examples I gave above. Returning to my proposal, I still think a lot of the costs people bear when replying to low-effort/disdainful criticism can be addressed by various forms of muting. But definitely not all the costs, and perhaps not even most. 1. ^ @plex, if you were pointing at the same thing Vaniver was pointing at, then you were right, too.

9habryka1mo

I of course have lots of thoughts! My current tentative take is that ideally I would like LessWrong to be a hierarchy of communities with their own streams and norms, which when they produce particularly good output, feed into a shared agora-like space (and potentially multiple levels of this). Reddit is kind of structured like this. Subreddits each have their own culture, but the Reddit frontpage and people's individual feeds are the result of the most upvoted content in each Subreddit bubbling up to a broader audience. I think Reddit is lacking a bunch of other infrastructure to do this properly for the things I care about, and I would like a stronger universal culture than Reddit currently has, but it's a decent pointer for one structure that seems promising to me (LessWrong is far away from this for a bunch of different reasons that I could go into, but would take time, so I am going to keep it at this for now).

2Algon1mo

Thank you for the answer! I do share the sense that LW is far from where Reddit is at, and (separately?) from where you tentatively want it to be. If you're considering writing this up in more detail, then I'd be glad to read it.

6Raemon1mo

The difference between twitter and lesswrong is that the twitter is more like a random chaos maelstrom, and LessWrong is more like a community. Some random guy saying something obnoxious on twitter is different from someone who's going to have a lot of repeat interactions and is affecting your reputation in a shared social circle. (Also, plex's argument was basically specifically arguing why this strategy didn't reliably work, and IMO your comment just sort of restated your original argument without engaging with his additional argument)

[-]Isha Yiras Hashem1mo54

Completely omitted my post about Said, and my response to your responses on that post.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SQ8BrC5MJ9jo9n83i/said-achmiz-helps-me-learn , cross posted at Data secrets lox.

I'll have to follow his comments elsewhere.

[-]Said Achmiz1mo41

My philosophy is no more “totalizing” than that which is described in, say… the Sequences. (Or, indeed, basically any other normative view on almost any intellectual topic.) Do you consider Eliezer to have constantly been “making dominance threats” in all of his posts?

EDIT: Uh… not sure what happened here. The parent comment was deleted, and now this comment is in the middle of nowhere…?

[-]ChristianKl1mo4-7

Man, posting on LessWrong seems really unrewarding. You show up, you put a ton of effort into a post, and at the end the comment section will tear apart some random thing that isn't load bearing for your argument, isn't something you consider particularly important, and whose discussion doesn't illuminate what you are trying to communicate, all the while implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas.

You could run an LLM every time someone tries to post a comment. If a top level reply tries to nitpick something t... (read more)

[-]Vladimir_Nesov1mo4-9

I think the crux is what feeds the dangerous norms, and what makes norms dangerous. I expect that when considered in detail, Said or most others with similar behaviors aren't intending or causing the kinds of damage you describe to an important extent. But at the same time, norms (especially insane ones) feed on first impressions, not on detailed analyses.

Such norms might gain real power and do major damage if they do take hold. I don't believe they have, and so the damage you are describing is overstated, but the risk the norms represent is real. Said mig... (read more)

[-]Vladimir_Nesov1mo42

The affective conflationary alliance discussion is interesting (it likely would've been better standalone). This has implications for the architecture of internal judgement, dangers of forming conflationary alliances among your own understandings when making holistic judgements. This is a distinction between non-specific contemplation of some decision for an extended period of time, and doing detailed analyses from dubious technical premises followed by dismissal of the poorly founded but legible conclusions and settling the matter with an intuitive overal... (read more)

[-]Algon1mo40

Incentivizing strong judge performance seems difficult. The default outcome I've seen from committees and panels is that everyone on them half-asses their job, because they rarely have stake in the outcome being good. Even if someone cares about LessWrong, that is not the same as being generally held personally responsible for it, and having your salary and broader reputation depend on how well LessWrong is going.

Couldn't prediction markets solve this? Make one for decisions by judges asking whether you'd agree with them. After some time, randomly choose t... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1mo30

Disclaimer: Note that my analysis is based on reading only very few comments of Said (<15).

To me it seems the "sneering model" isn't quite right. I think often what Said is doing seems to be:

Analyze a text for flaws.
Point out the flaws.
Derive from the demonstrated flaws some claim that shows Said's superiority.

One of the main problems seems to be that in 1. any flaw is a valid target. It does not need to be important or load bearing to the points made in the text.

It's like somebody building a rocket shooting it to the moon and Said complaining tha... (read more)

[-]Martin Randall17d20

So, despite it being close to site-consensus that authors do not face obligations to respond to each and every one of Said's questions, on any given post, there is basically nothing to be done to build common knowledge of this.

Please could you write a policy regarding what obligations/duties/commitments/responsibilities people DO have by contributing LessWrong, regarding responding to comments? This could be a top-level post similar to Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong.

After reading Banning Said Achmiz..., and associated comments, I thought that I und... (read more)

6habryka17d

I think it's a bit weird since the obligation isn't really something we could authoritatively determine using site policy, but I agree that clarifying our best guess of the prevailing norms more would be good. FWIW, I think the policy I would choose is something like: There are more thoughts I have on this, but figured I would leave this short comment with some initial thoughts.

3Martin Randall17d

Thanks for replying. I would prefer the policy you describe to the status quo of people having different ideas what the norms are. Perhaps this would be combined with a policy statement on "Do not try to win arguments by fights of attrition". I don't think it's a weird subject to have a policy on. Thinking of the Policy on LLM Writing: * The policy states what obligations people have to LessWrong itself. These obligations are notable for having some moral and legal force, and having moderator enforcement. * Of course any random person may think I have an obligation to do more, or less. But that has no moral force. * In the absence of a policy, we get debates as on Deontic Explorations in Paying to Talk to Slaves about (in part) whether certain content is acceptable on LessWrong. After the policy, there is an objective answer to that question, and fewer debates. I think a policy on responding to comments would be similarly helpful. For example, as I read through the section "But why ban someone, can't people just ignore Said?" above, it only really works as a debate in the absence of a site policy. Achmiz says: That line of argument doesn't work if there is a site policy that authors are not expected to respond to comments. Firstly, the attack itself is subject to moderation. Secondly, anyone, not just the author, can defuse it by linking to the site policy, which conveniently has a space where the policy can be discussed. Certainly site policy can't stop Achmiz thinking I'm ignorant. But it can reduce the extent to which Achmiz can convince the rest of the audience that I'm ignorant. LessWrong/Lightcone doesn't have to weakly clarify its best guess of the prevailing norms. It can state what the norms are, in a self-fulfilling statement that sets the norms to what it states. As long as the stated norms are broadly popular, this just works.

[-]habryka1mo2-1

Moving this top-level question by @Sting to this comment thread:

Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away?

Habryka recently decided to ban Said Achmiz. He wrote an extensive post explaining the decision. There were some very good things about this decision at the meta level, such as having one person make the decision and take full responsibility for it, explaining the reasoning in detail, and giving Said a comment thread under which he can respond.

However, I did not find the specific examples given for the ban persuasive. E.g., the example given u... (read more)

4habryka1mo

Responding here briefly, though I would really like to make people understand I am not going to generally respond to things like this, as I really don't want to spend even more time on this and am far beyond my allotted 10 hours. This totally misrepresents what I said! I even clarify directly in the comments on this post: The thing I am saying here is that Said's engagements with Duncan in that comment thread are not the cause of me banning him. It doesn't say anything about Duncan's complaints which long preceded that engagement! Separately, I also clarify a bunch of times in this comment section that no author complaints were load-bearing for this banning decision. I would make the same decision even if no prominent authors had complained. I had much more than enough direct engagement with Said, and seen many more than enough comments of his on my own to understand the consequences of his commenting style first-hand. Author complaints are not a load-bearing part of any of this decision-making, that's why it really isn't emphasized much in the post above and why I instead give detailed models for 10,000+ words! I think it's totally fine for someone to be uncompelled by that, but excluding datapoints about which author "counts" by your own lights, based on whether they played a role in the banning decision is confused, because no author complaints ended up load-bearing for the banning decision.

4Sting1mo

To me, by far the most compelling reason for the ban was: I don't want to take up a significant amount of your time, but can you at least answer the yes-or-no question, of whether you still stand by this claim (the bolded part)?

4habryka1mo

Sure, I definitely stand by it (though I will again reiterate for like the 15th time that the vast majority of complaints about other users are not made in public but are made privately either through Intercom or direct conversation in user interviews we conduct, though there are definitely some that are public, some of which I quote in the thread mentioned above).

1Sting1mo

I don't think this is a fair accusation. If that's your position, fine, but it does not straightforwardly follow from what you wrote. You were responding to Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel's comment: Wei Dai then chimed in: You responded to Alexander (emphasis added): Based on both your comment and the context, it looked like you were referring to Duncan/Said interactions in general, not to a specific thread. Your clarification does not appear anywhere under Alexander's original top-level comment. The comments total over 70,000 words, so I do not think it is fair to accuse me of misrepresenting you because I missed a clarification elsewhere. Fair enough. My true reason for not counting Duncan is that he appears to be an unusually sensitive individual, who often gets mad at people without good reason. I was quoting you to establish (as a non-controversial, "bipartisan" point) that Said's interactions with Duncan were not ban-worthy.

3habryka1mo

Sure, I am not saying your misreading of what I intended to convey was totally unreasonable, but it definitely wasn't accurate to what I meant to convey and things I said in other places. I didn't mean to imply much of any malice in you doing so and am sorry if it came across that way! I personally think what I wrote was reasonably clear, but communication is hard, especially in a sprawling comment thread like this. Seems like we mostly cleared it up (and I can edit the OP comment with any edits, or transfer ownership fully over to you, if you want to change what you wrote in response to that). Edit: Maybe a misunderstanding in this and other threads is that somehow you expect most people who complain about Said did so after they had comment threads with Said? That's definitely not the case! Most people who complain about Said never had a long back-and-forth with him, they formed their impressions from his engagements with other people. Most effects from Said are chilling effects, not something that you should have any expectations to chase back to a specific comment thread (as is the case with most cultural effects, as well as effects from moderation).

4Sting1mo

Yes, your reply makes your position clear. I don't feel like taking the time to edit my comment, but thank you for offering to edit in any changes. Also, you definitely have my sympathy for the amount of time you have burned on this! I would not want your job.

[-]DanielFilan1mo20

A classical example of microeconomics-informed reasoning about criminal justice is the following snippet of logic.
If someone can gain in-expectation $X$ dollars by committing some crime (which has negative externalities of $Y > X$ dollars), with a probability $p$ of getting caught, then in order to successfully prevent people from committing the crime you need to make the cost of receiving the punishment ( $Z$ ) be greater than $\frac{X}{p}$ , i.e. $X < p * Z$ .

Note that this is more centrally an example of micro-informed reasoning ... (read more)

7Linch1mo

The other complaint I had about that segment is that I do not believe microeconomics-informed reading of criminal punishment (as exemplified by Gary Becker's work) has held up well. I think it's often given as an example of where microeconomics-informed reasoning has led policymakers astray (as criminals are often bad at expected value calculations, even intuitively), and certainty of punishment >> expected cost of punishment. I don't have a direct source for this but I think it's a common position among economists.

2habryka1mo

Criminal justice is not criminal law! I think it's normal to refer to part of civil litigation under the broader umbrella of "criminal justice" but maybe I am wrong? Like, I guess I have never heard the term "civil justice" used instead, and I don't know of a better term that clearly spans both.

5DanielFilan1mo

Just realized I never responded to this - I would just use the term "civil law" (as I did). For a term that covers both, "the legal system" perhaps, altho it's a bit too broad, and you're right that there's not a great option.

3Howie Lempel1mo

Fwiw, "civil justice" is in fact used to refer to (many?) parts of the (US?) justice system where people entities sue each other. It's true the phrase is less common (in part because criminal justice reform is a hot button issue) and I'm not surprised you haven't heard it. Here's an example of a reputable seeming organisation using it this way. https://instituteforlegalreform.com/blog/what-is-civil-justice-and-why-is-it-important/

2habryka1mo

Huh, OK, I am convinced. Do you know of any umbrella term that would meaningfully cover both? "Legal justice"? Not sure whether I ever heard that one before, but maybe it's real.

7Howie Lempel1mo

I think depends on context and what you're trying to use the term for. In the original sentence that was quoted, I think "the justice system" or "law enforcement" would have worked though colloquially, some people would have misunderstood both as just implying the criminal side. I think "the legal system," "legal conflict," or just "the law" also would've basically worked though each might have a slightly different connotation.

2DanielFilan1mo

I would not use the term "criminal justice" to describe civil law, since civil law deals with civil wrongs rather than crimes.

2DanielFilan1mo

Relevant evidence from the Wikipedia page on Criminal justice: Civil law lacks parts 1 and 3.

3habryka1mo

Violating a civil court order can result in prison time, and if you get convicted in civil court, the police will enforce that judgement, so seems like it has all three? I agree one could maybe make some argument that it's not "criminal justice" until you "commit a crime by violating a civil court order", but that seems confused to me, especially when thinking about things like enforcement and discovery dynamics. The civil courts power is directly downstream of its ability to enforce its judgements using criminal punishments. Also, separately, that article sure is very America-centric. For example Germany has one set of courts for both criminal and civil cases, IIRC.

2DanielFilan1mo

I can't comment on how things work in Germany, since they have a very different structure of law (that my guess is English-language terms are not well-designed for), but: This is what I think - in particular, the "criminal justice system" is the system that involves dealing with crimes, and the "civil law system" is the system that involves dealing with civil wrongs. You're correct that they relate, but there are enough distinctions (who brings cases, proof standards, typical punishments, source of the laws) that I think it makes sense to distinguish them. I further think that most people with enough context to know the difference between civil and criminal law would not guess that a similarly informed person would use the term "criminal justice system" to cover civil law.

1Howie Lempel1mo

Having spent two years in law school, I feel pretty confident that Daniel's right about this.

[-]bfinn8d1-3

So with all that Said

Kudos for this heading. A passing pun on someone’s name is a great way of poking fun & mildly insulting them (warranted in this case). I am reminded of a paper critiquing one by QM physicist Henry Stapp, entitled “A Stapp in the wrong direction”.

[-]Alex Vermillion1mo10

I frequently expect people on the Lightcone team to disagree with decisions I make, and when that happens, I will encourage them to write up their perspective and serve as a record that will make it easier to spot broader blind spots in my decision-making (and also reduce gaslighting dynamics where people feel forced to support decisions I make out of fear of being retaliated against).

I don't know if you know this, but if you encourage this "correctly" (something that I suspect literally no one knows how to do but which we can aim for) it also helps you in that no one can accuse the team of being secretly fractious (since it would be public).

[-]bohaska2mo10

Is this decision generally considered final and not subject to appeal, or do you expect comments on here/arguments by Said/etc to affect the final outcome you decide on?

6Richard Korzekwa1mo

He says, under the section titled "So what options do I have if I disagree with this decision?":

7habryka1mo

Yep, the overall decision is very unlikely to change. It's still a good place to express your disagreement, and especially so if you disagree with the more generalized case-law I tried to abstract away from this case.

[-]Three-Monkey Mind1mo-1-3

Some days it’s hard to not start rooting for the paperclip maximizers.

Some days I actually do start rooting for the paperclip maximizers, but so far I’ve returned to not rooting for them in an hour or a day or two.

I’ve been chewing on the contents of this post for a week+ now.

I think the decision behind this post lurched my set point permanently towards, but not totally in, “root for the paperclip maximizers”, assuming habryka isn’t overridden or removed for this.

When a site that’s supposed to be humanity at its most rational removes one of its backstops a... (read more)

-13Ben Pace1mo

[-]Jasnah Kholin16d-30

most of what i want to say is about The Sneer Attractor and The Niceness Attractor, and unrelated to Said. is there some canonical post on that? i think this part of the post should have been separate post, that allow discussion of that.

***

This is Bad:
Elizabeth said roughly "if you don't change your behavior in some way you'll be banned"
He did not change his behavior, we did not end up banning him at this time, and he also did not stop participating on LW.

as in, it make things LW stuff say untrustworthy, and LW team should not do that. empty threats ... (read more)

^{^}

Why spend so much time engaging with a single commenter? Well, the answer is that I do think the specific way Said has been commenting on the site had a non-trivial chance of basically just killing the site, in the sense of good conversation and intellectual progress basically ceasing, if not pushed back on and the collateral damage limited by moderator action.

Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here, and also I personally (and the LessWrong team more broadly) would have had little interest in further investing in LessWrong if the kind of the kind of culture that Said brings had taken hold here.

So the stakes have been high, and the alternative would have been banning, which I think also in itself requires at least many dozens of hours of effort, and given that Said is a really valuable contributor via projects like greaterwrong and readthesequences.com, a choice I felt appropriately hesitant about.

^{^}

Now, one might think that it seems weird for one person to be able to derail a comment thread. However, I claim this is indeed the case. As long as you can make comments that do not get reliably downvoted, you can probably successfully cause a whole comment thread to almost exclusively focus on the concern you care about. This is the result of a few different dynamics:

Commenters on LW do broadly assume that they shouldn't ask a question or write a critique that someone else has already asked, or has indirectly already been answered in a different comment (this is good, this is what makes comment sections on LW much more coherent than e.g. on HN)
LW is high enough trust that I think authors generally assume that an upvoted comment is made in good standing and as such deserves some kind of response. This is good, since it allows people to coordinate reasonably well on requesting justification or clarification. However, voting is really quite low-fidelity, it's not that hard to write comments that will not get downvoted, and there is little consistent reputational tracking on LessWrong across many engagements, meaning it's quite hard for anyone to lose good standing.

Ultimately I think it's the job of the moderators to remove or at least mark commenters who have lost good standing of this kind, given the current background of social dynamics (or alternatively to rejigger the culture and incentives to remove this exploit of authors thinking non-downvoted comments are made in good standing)

^{^}

Occupy Wall Street strikes me as another instance of the same kind of popular sneer culture. Occupy Wall Street had no coherent asks, no worldview that was driving their actions. Everyone participating in the movement seemed to have a different agenda of what they wanted to get out of it. The thing that united them was a shared dislike of something in the vague vicinity of capitalism, or government, or the man, not anything that could be used as the basis for any actual shared creations or efforts.

^{^}

To be clear, I think it's fine and good for people to congratulate each other on getting new jobs. It's a big life change. But of course if your discourse platform approximately doesn't allow anything else, as I expand in the rest of this section, then you run into problems.

^{^}

And... unfortunately... we are just getting started.

^{^}

I am here trying to give a high-level gloss that tries to elucidate the central problems. Of course many individual conversations diverge, and there are variations on this, often in positive ways, but I would argue the overall tendency is strong and clear.

^{^}

I switched to a different comment thread here, as a different thread made it easier to see the dynamics at hand. The Benquo thread also went meta, and you can read it here, but it seemed a bit harder to follow without reading a huge amount of additional context, and was a less clear example of the pattern I am trying to highlight.

^{^}

See e.g. this comment thread with IMO a usually pretty good commenter who kept extremely strongly insisting that any analysis or evaluation of IMO clearly present subtext is fabricated or imagined.

^{^}

I am not making a strong claim here that direct aggression is much worse or much better than passive aggression, I feel kind of confused about it, but I am saying that independently of that, there is one argument that passive/hidden aggression requires harsher punishment when prosecution does succeed.

^{^}

Who to be clear, have contributed to the site in the past and have a bunch of karma.

^{^}

For some further details on what Said means by "responding" see this comment.

^{^}

A bit unclear what exactly happened, you can read the thread yourself. Mostly we argued for a long time about what kind of place LessWrong should be and how authors should relate to criticism until we gave an official warning, and then nothing about Said's behavior changed in the future, but we didn't have the energy to prosecute the subtext another time.

^{^}

The functionality for this had been present earlier, but we hadn't really encouraged people to use it.

^{^}

Unless we are talking about weird issues that involve doxxing or infohazards or things like that.

^{^}

Requiring you to read only 15,000 words of summary. :P

^{^}

The full quote being:

Buuuut what's going on here is that - and this is imo unfortunate - the website you guys have built is such that posting or commenting on it provides me with a fairly low amount of value
This is something I really do find disappointing, but it is what it is (for now? things change, of course)
So again it's not that I disagree with you about anything you've said
But the sort of care / attention / effort w.r.t. tone and wording and tact and so on, that you're asking, raises the cost of participation for me above the benefit
(Another aspect of this is that if I have to NOT say what I actually think, even on e.g. the CFAR thing w.r.t. Double Crux, well, again, what then is the point)
(I can say things I don't really believe anywhere)
[...]
If the takeaway here is that I have to learn things or change my behavior, well - I'm not averse in principle to doing that ever under any circumstances, but it has to be worth my while, if you see what I mean
Currently it is not
I hope to see that change, of course!

The specific moderation message we sent at the end of that exchange was:

The mod team has talked about it, and we're going to insist you comment with the same level of tact you showed while talking with me. If that makes it not worth your while to comment on the new LW that's regrettable and we hope someday the quality makes it worth your while to come back on these terms, but we understand and there are no hard feelings.

^{^}

To be clear, I think as I point out in the earlier sections of this post, I think there are ways of doing this that would be good for the site, and functions that Said performed that are good, but I would be quite concerned about people doing a cargo-culting thing here.

^{^}

And to be clear, this is all a pretty tricky topic. It is not rare for whole social groups, including the rationality community, to pretend to misunderstand something. As the moderators it's part of our job to take into account whether the thing that is going on here is some social immune reaction that is exaggerating their misunderstandings, or maybe even genuinely preventing any real understanding from forming at all, and to adjust accordingly. This is hard.

^{^}

Like, with some reasonable limit around 3000 words or so.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

244

Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)

244

244

Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away?

So with all that Said

The sneer attractor

The LinkedIn attractor

How this relates to LessWrong

Weaponized obtuseness and asymmetric effort ratios

Concentration of force and the trouble with anonymous voting

But why ban someone, can't people just ignore Said?

Ok, but shouldn't there be some kind of justice process?

So what options do I have if I disagree with this decision?

An overview over past moderation discussion surrounding Said

What does this mean for the rest of us?

So with all that Said

Appendix: 2022 moderation comments