Crosspost from my blog.

[Epistemic status: !! 🚨 Drama Alert 🚨 !! discoursepoasting, LWslop]

Case 1: You only get six words

In 2024, the MATS team published a post, originally titled "Talent Needs in Technical AI Safety".

I, a hero, made this comment and elaborated in the ensuing comment thread. The content isn't so important here—basically, I was objecting to a certain framing in the post, which tied into a general issue I had with the broader landscape of people nominally working on decreasing AGI X-risk.

Now, I have not actually read this post. (I kinda skimmed it and read parts.) So I don't actually know what's in it. The post's description of itself, from the introduction:

In the winter and spring of 2024, we conducted 31 interviews, ranging in length from 30 to 120 minutes, with key figures in AI safety, including senior researchers, organization leaders, social scientists, strategists, funders, and policy experts. This report synthesizes the key insights from these discussions.

Well, that sounds like a lot of work, and I believe that they definitely did write about several ideas coming from that work. My comment was not about any of that—which makes sense, given that I didn't read the post—but that did not stop my comment from being the second highest-upvoted comment, and dominating the discussion on that forum.

Is this bad? My comment was fine; I made an important remark, wasn't super disrespectful, clarified that I was talking about a broader phenomenon in the community... And yet, from another perspective, what happened is:

1. I (understandably) misunderstood an idiom in the original title ("talent needs") as subtly framing what counts as "technical AI safety", and homed in sharply on just a couple phrases from the post;
2. I used morally charged language (e.g. "...it's not enough...", "...should be made aware...", "...is conflating...", "I don't buy...") while prosecuting my off-topic issue;
3. and this distracted from the actual effort and content of the original post, while sucking up some attention from the author(s).

[There might be worse examples of me doing this Pattern, but I didn't immediately find them in the first page or two of my top-voted comments.]

Case 2: Trees may be cool but how should concepts work in general??

When eukaryote wrote a very nice post about trees ("There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)"), Zack_M_Davis had a reply. Follow that link if you want to read the whole thread (not very long). But I'll give an abstracted (and maybe somewhat unfair) paraphrase:

0. eukaryote: "...and by the way, this stuff about trees reminds us that X isn't uncomplicatedly true."
1. Zack: "Excuse me! X is definitely true! This is important and I've written about that a lot."
2. eukaryote: "Oh yeah I agree. We agree."
3. Zack: "No but X is super-duper true."
4. eukaryote: "Oh yeah I agree, I wasn't saying X is not super-duper true, I'm just also saying there's some interesting complications."
5. Zack: "But if I take your specific word choice and imagine a whole epistemological stance that produced that word choice, I disagree with that epistemological stance because of such-and-such."

Then eukaryote claps back and DESTROYS Zack with CLEAR CALM EXPLANATION of why his interaction was KINDA NOT GREAT!! gives a discourse-level response, which I'll quote here almost in full (bolding mine):

I don't love this thread - your first comment reads like you're correcting me on something or saying I got something important philosophically wrong, and then you just expand on part of what I wrote with fancier language. The actual "correction", if there is one, is down the thread and about a single word used in a minor part of the article, which, by your own findings, I am using in a common way and you are using in an idiosyncratic way. ...It seems like a shoehorn for your pet philosophical stance. [...]

To be clear, the expansion was in fact good, it's the unsupported framing as a correction that I take issue with. This wouldn't normally bother me enough to remark on, but it's by far the top-rated comment, and you know everyone loves a first-comment correction, so I thought I should put it out there.

[Note: Zack was the first association in my head to this pattern—so I was slightly surprised to find that it took a bit of effort to find an example. Some of his other top-voted comments are similarly confrontational, but do not exhibit The Pattern. E.g. here he does something superficially similar—but, even though it's technically off-topic it's close enough, and also he explicitly signposts the slightly-off-topicness, and also it's a useful comment, and I think its main argument doesn't misunderstand anything from the original post. Also Zack apologized to eukaryote. Maybe there are other examples I didn't quickly find.]

Case 3: The Bannination

I wrote a post ("The problem of graceful deference"). Wei Dai made a comment with an ensuing thread. You can read it there; I'll again provide an abstracted gloss (which is not trying to be a comprehensive summary [ETA: Wei states here that "I think it's a significant misrepresentation of my words (that makes me appear more unreasonable than I was)", which I don't agree with.]):

0. Tsvi: "...X..."
1. Wei: "It seems strange to say X because [reasons]. Also, not-Y."
2. Tsvi: "Here's some reasons for X; and I don't see how your reasons say not-X. Also, I'm not saying Y—in fact I done been sayin not-Y!"
3. Wei: "In response to your reasons for X, I would like to say that actually not-Y."
4. Tsvi: "I agree with not-Y. That's not an argument for X though."
5. Wei: "But it seems like you're saying "X" and "X implies Y"."
6. Tsvi: "Noooo rawr I keep saying "X and not-Y", and in fact I said that in the original post, how could you possibly think I'm saying "X implies Y"?"
7. Wei: "Ok, I misunderstood, but like, you didn't say "not Y" in your post right after you said "X". Anyway, let's talk about how Y is not true."
8. Tsvi: "I'm banning you from commenting on my posts."

I think this is another clear example of The Pattern. (If you're trying to interpret the full thread: X is "Yudkowsky is the best strategic thinker on AGI X-risk." and Y is something like "People should have been deferring to Yudkowsky as much as they did.".)

[Note: I'm unbanning Wei Dai from commenting on my posts so that he can respond here if he wants. By default I won't reban him. I prefer and would like to support open discourse within a community. But I reserve the normative right to block trolling.]

The Pattern

So what is this pattern? I'd call it The Charge of Hobby Horse. It's where you ride your hobby horse into battle in the comments, crashing through obstacles such as "the author did not even disagree with me, so there's nothing to actually have a battle about". A bit more explicitly:

0. You have a hobby horse. It's important, and you care about it, and you talk about it, but it's not satisfied yet. You don't know how to satisfy it. You only know how to ride it.
1. Someone says something, preferably getting some attention which you can ride into. What they said has one or two statements or word choices which are kinda related to your hobby horse. You pick up on that one thing.
2. You do your best to interpret them (correctly or not) as disagreeing with your hobby horse position, and you start arguing with them. You don't try too hard to quickly correct any misinterpretation—you have to get the argument going a bit.
3. This works, in that you start a big discussion about your hobby horse.

This comes off as misinterpretation; especially, "mistakenly" reading in a bunch of disagreement that isn't there. But really it's disinterpretation: You're searching for something to argue with, so you can talk about your thing. You're not trying to understand what the author actually thinks, so communication becomes difficult.

Conclusion

Mainly I just want to describe this behavior pattern. And also ask: Please don't fabricate fights just so you get to talk about your thing! That's pretty rude!

It's a bit tough because there are a lot of comments that look kinda similar to a Charging Hobby Horse, but that are good. It's fine to make corrections. It's fine to request for the author to give opinions. It's fine and good to use someone's post as a way of discussing some amorphous diaphanous distributed social pattern that is otherwise hard to point at.

It's fine to say things that are kinda off-topic, though it helps to acknowledge you're doing that. I would say it's even fine to comment on a post that you have not fully read, as long as you say you're doing that. If you're responding to The Broader Discourse, Not This Post Specifically™, then it would be nice to say you're doing that. Also, unless you're pretty sure what the author thinks, it's always good to quickly restate what you think they think, in a sentence or two.

And remember, you always have the option to write about your hobby horse in your own post or other forum. If it is actually relevant to the original post that got you wanting to rant a little, you can link to your separate write-up in a comment on that original post.

Anyway, thanks for your attention on this very something matter.