I note for any other readers that Said is evincing a confusion somewhere in the neighborhood of the Second Guideline and the typical mind fallacy.
In particular, it's false that I "write and act as though I did hold that belief," in the sense that a supermajority of those polled would check "true" on a true-false question about it, after reading through (say) two of my essays and a couple dozen of my comments.
("That belief" = "Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says 'what are some examples of this claim?' is, in his view, unacceptable.")
It's pretty obvious that it seems to Said that I write and act in this way. But one of the skills of a competent rationalist is noticing that [how things seem to me] might not be [how they actually are] or [how they seem to others].
Said, in my experience, is not versed in this skill, and does not, as a matter of habit, notice "ah, here I'm stating a thing about my interpretation as if it's fact, or as if it's nearly-universal among others."
e.g. an unequivocally true statement would have been something like "But that still leaves the question of why you write and act in a way that indicates to me that you do hold that belief."
In addition to being unequivocally true (since it limits its claims to the contents of Said's own experience, about which he has total authority to speak), it also highlights the territory more clearly, since it draws the reader's attention to the fact that what's going isn't:
Duncan writes and acts in a way that indicates [period; no qualification] that he holds that belief
but rather
Duncan writes and acts in a way that indicates [to me, Said] that he holds that belief
Which makes it more clear that the problem is either in Duncan's words and actions or in Said's oft-idiosyncratic interpretation, rather than eliding the whole question and predeciding that of course it's a Duncan-problem.
My various models of Said retort that:
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.
Update: Ruby and I have posted moderator notices for Duncan and Said in this thread. This was a set of fairly difficult moderation calls on established users and it seems good for the LessWrong userbase to have the opportunity to evaluate it and respond. I'm stickying this post for a day-or-so.
Recently there's been a series of posts and comment back-and-forth between Said Achmiz and Duncan Sabien, which escalated enough that it seemed like site moderators should weigh in.
For context, a quick recap of recent relevant events as I'm aware of them are. (I'm glossing over many details that are relevant but getting everything exactly right is tricky)
LessWrong moderators got together for ~2 hours to discuss this overall situation, and how to think about it both as an object-level dispute and in terms of some high level "how do the culture/rules/moderation of LessWrong work?".
I think we ended up with fairly similar takes, but, getting to the point that we all agree 100% on what happened and what to do next seemed like a longer project, and we each had subtly different frames about the situation. So, some of us (at least Vaniver and I, maybe others) are going to start by posting some top level comments here. People can weigh in the discussion. I'm not 100% sure what happens after that, but we'll reflect on the discussion and decide on whether to take any high-level mod actions.
If you want to weigh in, I encourage you to take your time even if there's a lot of discussion going on. If you notice yourself in a rapid back and forth that feels like it's escalating, take at least a 10 minute break and ask yourself what you're actually trying to accomplish.
I do note: the moderation team will be making an ultimate call on whether to take any mod actions based on our judgment. (I'll be the primary owner of the decision, although I expect if there's significant disagreement among the mod team we'll talk through it a lot). We'll take into account arguments various people post, but we aren't trying to reflect the wisdom of crowds.
So if you may want to focus on engaging with our cruxes rather than what other random people in the comments think.