Seems like the rapid-fire nature of an InkHaven writing sprint is a poor fit for a public post under a personally-charged summary bullet like “Oliver puts personal conflict ahead of shared goals”.

High-quality discourse means making an effort to give people the benefit of the doubt when making claims about their character. It’s worth taking time to carefully follow our rationalist norms of epistemic rigor, productive discourse, and personal charity.

I’d expect a high-evidence post about a very non-consensus topic like this to start out in a more norm-calibrated and self-aware epistemic tone, e.g. “I have concerns about Oliver’s decisionmaking as leader of Lightcone based on a pattern of incidents I’ve witnessed in his personal conflicts (detailed below)”.

A lot of the claims about me, and about Lightcone, in this post are false, which is sad. I left a large set of comments on a draft of thist post, pointing out many of them, though not all of them got integrated before the post was published (presumably because this post was published in a rush as Mikhail is part of Inkhaven, and decided to make this his first post of Inkhaven, and only had like 2 hours to get and integrate comments).

A few quick ones, though this post has enough errors that I mostly just want people to really not update on this at all:  

Oliver said that Lightcone would be fine with providing Lighthaven as a conference venue to AI labs for AI capabilities recruiting, perhaps for a higher price as a tax.

This is technically true, but of course the whole question lies in the tax! I think the tax might be quite large, possible enough to cover a large fraction of our total operational costs for many months (like a 3-4x markup on our usual cost of hosting such an event, or maybe even more). If you are deontologically opposed to Lighthaven ever hosting anything that has anything even vaguely to do with capability companies, no matter the price, then yeah, I think that's a real criticism, but I also think it's a very weird one. Even given that, at a high enough price, the cost to the labs would be virtually guaranteed to be more than they would benefit from it, making it a good idea even if you are deontologically opposed to supporting AI companies. 

he said he already told some people and since he didn’t agree to the conditions before hearing the information, he can share it, even though wouldn’t go public with it.

The promise that Mikhail asked me to make was, as far as I understood it, to "not use any of the information in the conversation in any kind of adversarial way towards the people who the information is about". This is a very strong request, much stronger than confidentiality (since it precludes making any plans on the basis of that information that might involve competing or otherwise acting against the interests of the other party, even if they don't reveal any information to third parties). This is not a normal kind of request! It's definitely not a normal confidentiality request! Mikhail literally clarified that he thought that it would only be OK for me to consider this information in my plans, if that consideration would not hurt the interests of the party we were talking about.

And he sent the message in a way that somehow implied that I was already supposed to have signed up for that policy, as if it's the most normal thing in the world, and with no sense that this is a costly request to make (or that it was even worth making a request at all, and that it would be fine to prosecute someone for violating this even if it had never been clarified at all as an expectation from the other side).

He just learned that keeping secrets is bad in general, and so he doesn’t by default, unless explicitly agrees to.

This is not true! My policy is simply that you should not assume that I will promise to keep your secrets after you tell me, if you didn't check with me first. If you tell me something without asking me for confidentiality first, and then you clarify that the information is sensitive, I will almost always honor that! But if you show up and suddenly demand of me that I will promise that I keep something a secret, without any kind of apology or understanding that this is the kind of thing you do in advance, of course I am not going to just do whatever you want. I will use my best judgement!

My general policy here is that I will promise to keep things secret retroactively, if I would have agreed to accept the information with a confidentiality request in advance. If I would have rejected your confidentiality request in advance, you can offer me something for the cost incurred by keeping the secret. If you don't offer me anything, I will use my best judgement and not make any intense promises but broadly try to take your preferences into account in as much as it's not very costly, or offer you some weaker promise (like "I will talk about this with my team or my partner, but won't post it on the internet", which is often much cheaper than keeping a secret perfectly). 

Roughly the aim here is to act in a timeless fashion and to not be easily exploitable. If I wouldn't have agreed to something before, I won't agree to it just because you ask me later, without offering me anything to make up the cost to me!

And to repeat the above again, the request here was much more intense! The request, as I understood it, was basically "don't use this information in any kind of way that would hurt the party the information is about, if the harm is predictable", which I don't even know how to realistically implement at a policy level. Of course if I end up in conflict with someone I will use my model of the world which is informed by all the information I have about someone! 

And even beyond that, I don't think I did anything with the relevant information that Mikhail would be unhappy about! I have indeed been treating the informations as sensitive. This policy might change if at some point the information looks more valuable to communicate. Mikhail seems only angry about me not fully promising to do what he wants, without him offering me anything in return, and despite me thinking that I would not have agreed to any kind of promise like this in the first place if I was asked to do that before receiving the information (and would have just preferred to never receive the information in the first place).

I ask Oliver to promise that he’s not going to read established users’ messages without it being known to others at Lightcone Infrastructure and without a justification such as suspected spam, and isn’t going to share the contents of the messages.

We've had internal policies here for a long time! We never look at DMs unless one of the users in the conversation reports a conversation as spam. Sometimes DM contents end up in error logs, but I can't remember a time where I actually saw any message contents instead of just metadata in the 8 years that I've been working on LW (but we don't have any special safeguards against it).

We look at drafts that were previously published. We also sometimes look at early revisions of posts that have been published for debugging purposes (not on-purpose, but it's not something we currently have explicit safeguards or rules about). We never look at unpublished drafts, unless the user looks pretty clearly spammy, and never for established users.

It shouldn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep a website running and moderated and even to ship new features with the help from the community.

Look, we've had this conversation during our fundraiser. There is zero chance of running an operation like LW 2.0 long-term without that not somehow costing at least $200k/yr. Even if someone steps up and does it for free, that is still them sacrificing at least $200k in counterfactual income, if they are skilled enough to run LessWrong in the first place. I think even at a minimum skeleton crew, you would be looking at at least $300k of costs.

The cost of running/supporting LessWrong is much lower than Lightcone Infrastructure’s spending.

This is false! Most of our spending is LessWrong spending these days (as covered in our annual fundraiser post). All of our other projects are much closer to paying for itself. Most of the cost of running Lightcone is the cost of running LessWrong (since it's just a fully unmonetized product).

IDK, I am pretty sad about this post. I am happy to clarify my confidentiality policies and other takes on honoring retroactive deals (which I am generally very into, and have done a lot of over the years), if anyone ends up concerned as a result of it. 

I will be honest in that it does also feel to me like this whole post was written in an attempt at retaliation when I didn't agree with Mikhail's opinions on secrets and norms. Like, I don't think this post was written in an honest attempt at figuring out whether Lightcone is a good donation target.

After a while in a conversation that involved me repeatedly referring to Lawfulness of the kind exhibited by Keltham from Yudkowsky’s planecrash, he said that he didn’t actually read planecrash.

Is this supposed to be a negative thing? I don't think there is any obligation that people read any particular work of fiction in order to run an infrastructure project...

I don't think the decision theory described here is correct. (I've read Planecrash.)

Specifically, there's an idea in glowfic that it should be possible for lawful deities to follow a policy wherein counterparties can give them arbitrary information, on the condition that information is not used to harm the information-provider. This could be as drastic as "I am enacting my plan to assassinate you now, and would like you to propose edits that we both would want to make to the plan"!

I think this requires agreement ahead of time, and is not the default mode of conversation. ("Can I tell you something, and you won't get mad?" is a request, not a magic spell to prevent people from getting mad at you.) I think it also is arguably something that people should rarely agree to. Many people don't agree to the weaker condition of secrecy, because the information they're about to receive is probably less valuable than the costs of partitioning their mind or keeping information secret. In situations where you can't use the information against your enemies (like two glowfic gods interacting), the value of the information is going to be even lower, and situations where it makes sense to do such an exchange even rarer. (Well, except for the part where glowfic gods can very cheaply partition their minds and so keeping secrets or doing pseudohypothetical reasoning is in fact much cheaper for them than it is for humans.)

That is, I think this is mostly a plot device that allows for neat narratives, not a norm that you should expect people to be expecting to follow or get called out.

[This is not a complete treatment of the issue; I think most treatments of it only handle one pathway, the "this lets you get information you can use for harm reduction" pathway, and in fact in order to determine whether or not an agent should do it, you must consider all relevant pathways. But I think the presumption should not be "the math pencils out here", and I definitely don't think the math pencils out in interacting with Oli. I think characterizing that as "Oli is a bad counterparty" instead of something like "Oli doesn't follow glowfic!lawful deity norms" or "I regret having Oli as a counterparty" is impolite.]

the website of the venue literally says:

Whatever is supposed to show up here, isn't.