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Said Achmiz's Shortform — LessWrong

Said Achmiz's Shortform

3rd Feb 2023

1 min read

11

This is a special post for quick takes by Said Achmiz. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Mentioned in

246Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)

Said Achmiz's Shortform

19Said Achmiz

6Vladimir_Nesov

4JenniferRM

2the gears to ascension

14JenniferRM

2the gears to ascension

7Gordon Seidoh Worley

56[anonymous]

14Gordon Seidoh Worley

8[anonymous]

-10Said Achmiz

4Gordon Seidoh Worley

0Zack_M_Davis

26Gordon Seidoh Worley

11Zack_M_Davis

4Gordon Seidoh Worley

8clone of saturn

2Gordon Seidoh Worley

5Said Achmiz

2Gordon Seidoh Worley

2Said Achmiz

2Gordon Seidoh Worley

4Said Achmiz

3Gordon Seidoh Worley

5rsaarelm

1Said Achmiz

-3Gordon Seidoh Worley

19[anonymous]

6Gordon Seidoh Worley

1dirk

2Gordon Seidoh Worley

4Gordon Seidoh Worley

2Said Achmiz

8Gordon Seidoh Worley

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[-]Said Achmiz3y190

Note for the record:

I can no longer reply to comments addressed to me (or referring to me, etc.) on the post “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”, because its author has banned me from commenting on any of his posts.

6Vladimir_Nesov3y

That's shaping up to be a really interesting club. If the world wasn't currently on fire, or if I enjoyed this sort of thing, I would've considered taking the time to write up some essays as an application for joining it, something about efficient communication (as opposed to effective-if-you-try-real-hard) and pragmatic navigation of disagreement (that cultivates progress towards changing one's mind without unsustainable urgency). But I might be on track anyway (edit: the reference is to the fact that the linked comment was surprisingly heavily karma-downvoted; now it's back to the positives, and some disagreement-vote is reasonable).

4JenniferRM3y

It does seem that Lesswrong is becoming more "archipelagic" lately, which... I mean... I guess that's what it now says on the tin is what it is explicitly aiming for? So it seems hard to complain <3 That said, I wish the mods and perhaps Duncan himself would spend more time thinking about the CAP theorem, and the importance and value of healing "partitions" quickly and thoroughly, rather than taking the risk of letting minor confusing disagreements explode into all out forks.

2the gears to ascension3y

partitions are good, as long as information flow between them continues, and they are able to have useful disagreements. Those are not trivial desiderata, but they're achievable, and it's worth it to allow and encourage there to be multiscale grouping. We should be trying to reduce graph orientability; every node should make their own decisions, and yet via each node observing the graph and making themselves more like outliers in connectivity pattern, no node should stay an outlier in connectivity statistics. we need scale free soft groupings with no outgrouping. https://www.microsolidarity.cc/

[-]JenniferRM3y141

I think, ideally, for anything that really matters, I'd selfishly prefer to just be in consensus with flawless reasoners, by sharing the same key observations, and correctly deriving the same important conclusions?

The whole definition of a partition here is "information NOT flowing because it CANNOT easily flow because cuts either occurred accidentally or were added on purpose(?!)" and... that's a barrier to sharing observations, and a barrier to getting into consensus sort of by definition?

It makes it harder for all nodes to swiftly make the same good promises based on adequate knowledge of the global state of the world because it makes it harder for facts to flow from where someone observed them to where someone could usefully apply the knowledge.

If an information flow blockage persists for long enough then commitments can be accidentally be made on either side of the blockage such that the two commitments cannot be both satisfied (and trades that could have better profited more people if they'd been better informed don't happen, and so on), and in general people get less of what they counted on or would have wanted, and plans have to be re-planned, and it is generally just... (read more)

2the gears to ascension3y

But you're embedded in physics, and can rely on the fact that you will never be a flawless reasoner. You're made of neurons, none of which are flawless reasoners, but they are able to work together to be a single agent by nature of keeping each other informed about what your opinion is as that opinion gets refined. Your neurons operate at or near criticality, so any neuron could potentially cause an update that propagates through the whole brain; neurons' uncertainty about whether other neurons will provide an insightful contribution, combined with consensus network that refines away errors in ways that diffuse towards your self, is what allows free will to fall out of a deterministic system: your neurons inform each other of your personality, and you move your environment towards yourself. In a social network, overly dense connectivity can break edge-of-chaos, criticality-seeking behavior, by resulting in a network that accept updates from people with too little processing. This is especially severe when there's any sort of hierarchy, especially when that hierarchy is related to a hierarchy of control or dominance. I propose that, if there are conflicts about approach to reasoning, information flow should continue, and if things go well, the partition should be one that results in the networks staying overlapped but separating partially. (I do not intend to be at all metaphorical. I am intending to make claims that these patterns are literally the same, not mere metaphor. If they are not literally the same, my claim is wrong, and discovering it will teach me new things.) I can link some lectures I've watched recently about this. Eg, I liked this one on "what is complexity", which goes over how complex systems science is about the process of understanding what laws can be stated universally about large systems that are neither simple due to high entropy nor simple due to low entropy. It is not highly relevant such that it is worth it if that's not new to you, bu

[-]Said Achmiz4mo143

Why am I still rate-limited in commenting? None of the criteria described in the post about Automatic Rate Limiting on Less Wrong seem to apply:

My total karma is obviously not less than 5
My “recent karma” (sum of karma values of last 20 comments) is positive
My “last post karma” is positive
My “last month karma” is positive

What gives?

1ProgramCrafter4mo

I guess that it counts comment's karma minus your implicit vote, and that sums to around zero. Edit: I thought your implicit vote strength was 3 instead of 2. My next best hypothesis is that limits recalculate only when posting comment; will check code now.

8Rafael Harth4mo

(FYI no one's implicit vote strength is 3.)

6Said Achmiz4mo

No, I accounted for that. Anyhow, it seems like the rate limit has ended now, so maybe there’s just some sort of… delay? Batching? Who knows… (The opacity of this feature is, I feel, a major strike against it.)

5habryka4mo

Yeah, agree, we really should build a better rate-limiting dashboard and UI for explaining what is going on. This is also making our job as moderators harder! I might try to prioritize it this coming week, though there are many things to do.

4Said Achmiz4mo

Looks like the rate limit is back, even though (I just checked!) my “recent karma” is again positive, etc. It seems to me that this feature does not, in fact, work in the way that it is described as working, in the post that I linked.

[-]habryka4mo110

Seems like it's recent karma from last 20 posts/comments:

Here is the karma for your 20 most recent comments:

Subtracting 2 from all of these numbers for your own small-upvote to get the net karma from them, I get:

3 - 14 - 5 + 1 - 5 - 17 + 3 + 4 + 3 + 1 - 2 + 8 + 2 + 1 + 3 + 11 - 3 + 2 - 2 + 0 = -6

So I don't see any errors in the logic. Seems like it works exactly as advertised in the "comment rate limit" section of the post:

-5 recent karma (4+ downvoters)
- 1 comment per day

[-]rsaarelm4mo105

How does it make sense to just run the rate limiter robot equally on everyone no matter how old their account and how much total karma they have? It might make sense for new users, as a crude mechanism to make them learn the ropes or find out the forum isn't a good fit for them. But presumably you want long-term commenters with large net-positive karma staying around and not be annoyed by the site UI by default.

A long-term commenter suddenly spewing actual nonsense comments where rate-limiting does make sense sounds more like an ongoing psychotic break, in which case a human moderator should probably intervene. Alternatively, if they're getting downvoted a lot it might mean they're engaged in some actually interesting discussion with lots of disagreement going around, and you should just let them tough it out and treat the votes as a signal for sentiment instead of a signal for signal like you do for the new accounts.

[-]gwern4mo*184

I would also point out a perverse consequence of applying the rate limiter to old high-karma determined commenters: because it takes two to tango, a rate-limiter necessarily applies to the non-rate-limited person almost as much as the rate-limited person...

You know what's even more annoying than spending some time debating Said Achmiz? Spending time debating him when he pings you exactly once a day for the indefinite future as you both are forced to conduct it in slow-motion molasses. (I expect it is also quite annoying for anyone looking at that page, or the site comments in general.)

5habryka4mo

I actually happen to prefer it in once a day spurts, and think this generalizes some to others. I don’t think it’s obvious in general which way is better on this dimension though.

1ProgramCrafter4mo

Are the dialogues rate limited too? If not, they might be a more suitable medium. They are admittedly harder to branch, but the object-level point of Said vs GSW case has been lost already.

[-]RobertM4mo1010

Almost every comment rate limit stricter than "once per hour" is in fact conditional in some way on the user's karma, and above 500 karma you can't even be (automatically) restricted to less than one comment per day:

https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/blob/master/packages/lesswrong/lib/rateLimits/constants.ts#L108

  // 3 comments per day rate limits
    {
      ...timeframe('3 Comments per 1 days'),
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      rateLimitType: "newUserDefault",
      isActive: user => (user.karma < 5),
      rateLimitMessage: `Users with less than 5 karma can write up to 3 comments a day.<br/>${lwDefaultMessage}`,
    }, 
    {
      ...timeframe('3 Comments per 1 days'), // semi-established users can make up to 20 posts/comments without getting upvoted, before hitting a 3/day comment rate limit
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      isActive: (user, features) => (
        user.karma < 2000 && 
        features.last20Karma < 1
      ),  // requires 1 weak upvote from a 1000+ karma user, or two new user upvotes, but at 2000+ karma I trust you more to go on long conversations
      rateLimitMessage: `You've recently posted a lot without getti

... (read more)

1Said Achmiz4mo

That’s a heck of an “almost”, given that it excludes the specific example that we are in fact discussing… I definitely think so. I’d just like to register my strong objection to the very concept of “demon threads”. I consider it to be both misleading descriptively and detrimental to understanding forum dynamics and to building good discussion environments.

7habryka4mo

At least in my experience having high karma is very little evidence of being a good commenter. It’s almost exclusively evidence of being a frequent commenter, which also happens to be the people most important to rate limit. We have some rules that apply on recent karma, and they are generally less harsh, and then some much harsher rules based on total karma, so we do take this into account, but overall I think it’s crucial for rate limiting to apply to high karma accounts as well. We have considered applying rate limits based on high average karma, but haven’t done so because I don’t want to disincentivize productive niche conversations, but it seems like a better start.

6Rafael Harth4mo

Why don't you make it so karma from posts gives much higher boost to total karma than karma from comments (maybe 5x, possibly even 10x)? This has seemed like an obvious improvement to me for a while. (If you don't wanna inflate total karma, you could instead do 13x vs. 3x or something.)

4ryan_greenblatt4mo

Something a bit awkward about this is it incentivizes making long comments and quick takes into low-effort posts.

3Ben Pace4mo

Sometimes I wonder whether there should just be nonlinear returns to karma on any item. Like, a 100 karma post should count for much more than 20 5-karma comments / posts.

5rsaarelm4mo

I feel like it's a thing where you should use human moderator judgment once the account isn't new. Figure out how the person is being counterproductive, warn them about it, and if they keep doing the thing, ban them. Ongoing mechanisms like this make sense for something like Reddit where there is basically zero community at this point, but on LW if someone is sufficiently detached from the forum and community that it actually makes sense to apply a mechanical paper cut like the rate limit on them after years of them being on site and accumulating positive karma, they probably shouldn't be here to begin with. The basic problem is that it's not treating the person as a person, like a human moderator actually talking to them and going "hey, we think you're not helping here, here's why ... in the future could you ..." (and then proceeding to a ban if there's no improvement) would be. People occasionally respond well the moderator feedback, but being hit by the rate limiter robot is pretty likely to piss off just about any invested and competent person and might also make them go "cool, then I'll treat your thing as less of a community made of people and more like a video game to beat on my end as well", which makes it less likely for things to be improved in the future.

1habryka4mo

I think the impartiality really helps. The default thing that happens if we threaten moderation action on any specific individual with a long history on LW is that they feel personally persecuted, complain about it publicly, and try to generally rile up a bunch of social momentum to defend against the prosecution, which then produces a lot of distrust and paranoia and stress for everyone involved. A nice thing about automatic rate limits is that it’s really transparent we are not doing some kind of strategic purging of dissenters or are trying to find the most politically convenient pretense by which to ban someone, which many people tend to be worried about (I think not without reason given the outside view on the realities of human politics). I think for many people it is much less stressful to interact with a deterministic machine than a human who could potentially be pulling some kind of galaxy brained strategic moves at each step. Many people get triggered for a while. LessWrong commenters change in quality. People get caught in some horrible demon-thread where they feel like they have to keep saying things or lose face. Temporary rate-limits do actually catch many of those cases reasonably well. To be clear, the thing I would do instead of a ban in most cases is an intense rate limit. They just have much better properties in terms of not completely banning certain viewpoints from the site for most cases. I also think you vastly overestimate our ability to give people constructive feedback. New content review and moderation currently already takes up around one full-time equivalent on average. We don't have time to do much more of that. And lastly, I also think you just underestimate the internet's tendencies to desperately freak out if you ever try to ban anyone. Every time we consider banning any long-term contributor, no matter how obviously harmful they seem for the site, we have dozens of people who otherwise leave good comments come out of the wood

8Said Achmiz4mo

Indeed, that is true now, but the total was different when I posted the grandparent comment! Here’s my suspicion, tell me if it’s right: the rate limit kicks in if the “recent karma” ever dips below the threshold, and then does not get withdrawn if the “recent karma” rises back up over the threshold. True?

6habryka4mo

I don't think so. The code to display rate limit warnings gets run anew every time the page loads, and the final check whether a user is allowed to post gets run on comment submission, querying their last 20 comments, with no intermediate caching as far as I can tell:

4Said Achmiz4mo

I see… well, this really just highlights the aforementioned fact that the UI for this stuff really needs work, which I guess you already know.

2Ben Pace4mo

I just did a quick check by-hand, I got -5 net karma on last 20 comments. [Edit: Ah, Habryka edited in his own recent karma sum, my comment is now redundant.]

[-]Said Achmiz2y84

A comment I wrote in response to “Contra Contra the Social Model of Disability” but couldn’t post because @DirectedEvolution seems to have banned me from commenting on his posts.

You say:

First, try reading [the below quotes] with the conventional definition of “disability” in mind, where “disability” is a synonym for “impairment” and primarily means “physical impediment, such as being paraplegic or blind.” Under this definition, which we’ve just seen is not the one they use, they sound ridiculous.[1]
Then, see how the meaning changes using the definition

... (read more)

8DirectedEvolution2y

FYI, I had accidentally banned you and two other users in my personal posts only some time ago, but realized when you commented that I hadn’t banned you in all my posts as I’d intended. The ban I enacted today isn’t specifically in response to your most recent comments. Since you took the time to post them and then were cut off, which I feel bad about, I’ll make sure to take the time to read them. I fully support you cross posting them here.

[-]Said Achmiz4mo71

Replying to @habryka’s recent comment here, because I am currently rate-limited to 1 comment per day and can’t reply in situ:

I think you have never interacted with either Ben or Zack in person!

You are mistaken.

(Why would I disagree-react with a statement about how someone behaves in person if I’d never met them in person? Have you ever known me to make factual claims based on no evidence whatsoever…? Really, now!)

2habryka4mo

I apologize! I had low probability on that, so my best guess is you meant something else by that. You were still making a statement about Ben's assessment of Zack, which is still kind of weird to disagree-react to, and separately, you are still very obviously mistaken as almost everyone who has interacted with Zack, at least within the past few years, would be very likely to attest. I like Zack, but it's very obvious that in conversations he has lots and lots of feelings barely contained (and indeed, he says so frequently).

8Said Achmiz4mo

I was disagreeing with Ben’s assessment of Zack. There’s nothing weird about that. Rather odd to claim otherwise, frankly. Sure, they can attest all they like, that’s their right. Nevertheless, I disagree. (I don’t put much stock in majoritarianism.) That’s what the react is for, right? Disagreeing? You have an assessment of Zack’s behavior; I have a different assessment of Zack’s behavior. (I don’t even know if Zack agrees with my assessment of Zack’s behavior. I certainly haven’t asked him about it. The react was an expression of my assessment, not anyone else’s.) That’s as may be. The claim was “barely able to contain strongly emotional and hostile outbursts”. I’ve seen no evidence of any “hostile outbursts” or “barely contained” “hostile outbursts” or any such thing.

[-]Said Achmiz4mo7-4

The post “Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future”, due to its high density of footnotes, works as a sort of stress-test of Less Wrong’s sidenote system. The result is decidedly not great:

The sidenotes, they do nothing!

(The sidenotes, they do nothing!)

Normally, a sidenote should be approximately adjacent to the in-text citation which refers to that note; in this case, sidenote #32 is pushed down, way out of the viewport, by the other sidenotes. (Hovering over a citation highlights the associated sidenote… which is, of course, useless when the sidenote is beyond the v... (read more)

8Said Achmiz4mo

An alternative solution (formerly used on gwern.net, prior to the introduction of the “slidenotes” feature) would be to check, on hover over a citation, whether the target sidenote is within the viewport; and, if it is not, to then provide the footnote popup, as if the client viewport were too narrow to display sidenotes:

2habryka4mo

Yeah, something like this is a good idea (though of course, realistically the number of posts for which this matters is very small and so not super high priority).

2habryka4mo

I'll be honest, I hate it. I immediately looked for a way to deactivate the sidenotes or the sliding when I first tried to hover over a sidenote and the text kept moving. Probably if I didn't really care about the stuff on gwern.net I would have probably just immediately bounced.

[-]Said Achmiz4mo4-2

Is there any way to disable the “Listen to this post” widget on one of my posts? (That is, I do not want this audio version of my post to be available.)

4habryka4mo

First time it has come up, so no, though of course wouldn't be that hard to build. You can make a PR for a flag to disable it, otherwise I'll add it to the pile of things to get to at some point.

3Said Achmiz4mo

Eh. Not sure it’s worth your time. Just asked in case it was already a thing.

[-]Said Achmiz2y4-2

This is a test comment.

2Dagon2y

I mean, testing with a production account is not generally best practice, but it seems to show things are operational. What aspect of things are you testing? I (a real human, not a test system) saw the post, upvoted but disagreeed, and made this reply comment.

2Said Achmiz2y

My ability to post comments!

2Said Achmiz2y

This is a test reply.

[-]Said Achmiz3y4-2

My solution for the stag hunt is to kill the hunter who leaps out and the rabbit, then cook & eat his flesh.

(Source; previously)

[-]Said Achmiz3y20

Test of the shortform feature.

[-]Said Achmiz4mo16

@Gordon Seidoh Worley recently wrote this comment, where he claimed:

I’d like to engage with you as a critic. As you can see, I gladly do that with many of my other critics, and have spent hours doing it with you specifically for many years.

As far as I can tell, this is just false. I mean, maybe it takes Gordon an hour to write a single comment like this one (and then to exit the discussion immediately thereafter)? I doubt it, though.

Maybe I’m forgetting some huge arguments that took place a long time ago. But I went back through five full years of my L... (read more)

7Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Said, we interacted many times over the years on posts and comments. That you don't remember seems fine, but I remember those interactions and they always left me drained and feeling like I spent hours talking to a brick wall. The ones that most stands out to me are our interactions on this post and here after I had implemented a soft ban on us interacting. I previously had a soft ban on interacting with you in my posts, which meant I would only reply to you once because we had long threads that just exhausted me. I thought maybe that would be enough. But I decided yesterday I was done and I have the karma to choose not to interact with you on my posts, so I finally decided to ban you from my posts after years of choosing not to (that you didn't realize this might happen is understandable since it's been a few years since we had most of our conversations as I've been writing a book during that time and posting here less). 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. I'll note this is also not your first time having similar run ins with other folks on this site, and I consider those additional evidence that swayed me in my decision, notably your previously blow-up with Duncan. As perhaps @Raemon will recall, I talked in person with him a few times years ago about how interacting with you was stressful. That you and I Said have not interacted in a long time, I had forgotten how much your comments make me not want to use Less Wrong, and seeing one that again was uncharitable and not in good faith (as I judge it) put me over the line. I want you to know I have no malaice against you as a person. But you consistently create the kind of conversations I don't want to have on my posts. I would invite your criticism and critique, but you deliver it in a way that is difficult to engage with because of your confrontational style and frequen

[-][anonymous]4mo5617

this post and here

For what it's worth, as an outsider to this conversation who nonetheless has experience engaging in very long arguments with Said that ultimately went nowhere, it seems to me that Said was... straightforwardly correct in both of these instances.

The same way he was straightforwardly correct when pointing out the applause lights and anti-epistemology proponents of Circling were engaging in here, when bringing attention to the way Duncan Sabien's proposed assumption of good faith contradicts LW culture here, when asking for examples so the author can justify why their proposed insight actually reflects something meaningful in the territory as opposed to self-wankery, and in a countless number of other such instances.

And when I say "straightforwardly correct," I'm not just referring to the object-level, although that is of course the most important part. I'm also referring to the rhetoric he employed (i.e., none) and the way he asked his questions. I think saying, "Do you have any examples to illustrate what you mean by this word?" is the perfect question to ask when you believe an author is writing up applause light after applause light, and this should be bloo... (read more)

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo140

Actually, I would really like it if Said left comments that were just critical of things and pointed out where he thought the author was wrong, but to do that requires actually engaging with the content and the author to understand their intent (because clear communication, especially about non-settled topics, is hard). There's something subtle about Said's style of commenting that is hard for me to pin down that makes it unhelpfully adversarial in a way that I'm sure some people like but I find incredibly frustrating.

For example, I often feel like Said uses a rhetorical technique of smashing the applause button by referencing something in the Sequences as if that was the end of the argument, when at times the thing being argued is a claim made in the Sequences.

This is frustrating as an author who is trying to explore an idea or try to share advice because it's not real engagement: it reads like trying to shut down the conversation to score points, and it's all the more frustrating because he hit the applause button so it gets a lot of upvotes.

It's also frustrating in that he never crosses a bright line that would make me say "this is totally unacceptable". It feels to me like some... (read more)

8[anonymous]4mo

I'm flagging this as the critical crux that explains the majority (but not the entirety) of the disagreement between us. If I believed Said was consistently engaging in distortions of clear authorial intent by failing to do due diligence and to engage sufficiently, then I probably would indeed have significantly different views on the propriety of his comments on this site.

-10Said Achmiz4mo

0Zack_M_Davis4mo

Wikipedia defines the antonym bad faith as "a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another." What hidden motive do you think Said is concealing, specifically? (Or if you're using the term with a nonstandard meaning, what do you mean?)

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo269

To me good faith means being curious about why someone said something. You try to understand what they mean and then engage with their words as they intended them. Arguing in bad faith would be arguing when you are not curious or open to being convinced.

My experiences with Said have all been more of a form of him disagreeing with something I said in a way that suggests he's already made up his mind and there's no curiosity or interest in figuring out why I might have said what I said, often dismissive of the idea that anyone could possible have a good reason for making the claim I have made, other than perhaps stupidity.

But look I'm also not really that interested in defending my decision too hard here. The simple fact is that Said pushes my buttons in a way basically no one else on this site does, and I think I finally hit a point of saying that it would be better if I just didn't have to interact with him so much. Everyone else who leaves critical comments does so in a way that does not so consistently feel like an attack, and I often feel like I can engage with them in ways where, even if we don't end up agreeing, we at least had a productive conversation.

[-]Zack_M_Davis4mo113

OK, I see the relationship to the standard definition. (It would be bad faith to put appearances of being open to being convinced, when you're actually not.) The requirement of curiosity seems distinct and much more onerous, though. (If you think I'm talking nonsense and don't feel curious about why, that doesn't mean you're not open to being convinced under any circumstances; it means you're waiting for me to say something that you find convincing, without you needing to proactively read my mind.)

4Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Perhaps it is relative to the bar most people set for good faith.

8clone of saturn4mo

It seems like this accusation of bad faith could go both ways. I haven't seen you demonstrate curiosity or openness to being convinced that your religion pushes anti-epistemology, I've only seen flat denial followed by casting of aspersions.

2Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Fair. This is, in part, why I feel I had to ban Said. The pattern from past interactions with him kills in me the desire to pursue an avenue of discussion because it's gone so poorly in the past. It's hard to be open and respond in good faith in response to assertions that are phrased such that they feel like personal attacks and when there's a pattern of trying to engage and finding it's met with refusal to engage in anything other than debate. If I were a somewhat better person then perhaps I could remain open while responding to comments that feel like attacks rather than explorations or discussions. Maybe I will be one day, but I'm not there yet.

5Said Achmiz4mo

If this were the really your motivation, then you could simply not respond to my comments. (Indeed you wouldn’t even have to read them. “A comment on my post? —oh, it’s Said Achmiz. Surely he has nothing useful to say, and I have nothing to gain by reading this. [dismiss notification]”) This is as good a time as any to make the following point. In an earlier comment, you wrote: You seem to believe that this is a relevant, even decisive, consideration. (And you’re not the only one; I’ve seen such sentiments a few times.) This seems to me to betray a view of Less Wrong discussions that I can only marvel at—but certainly not sympathize with, much less endorse. If we were having a private, one-on-one conversation—in person, via email, via direct messages or chat or whatever—then of course it would make perfect sense to say “I am gaining nothing from this interaction; I do not expect to gain anything from this interaction; and I have no obligation to continue this interaction—therefore I now terminate it”. Perfectly normal, straightforwardly sensible. But Less Wrong is a public forum! Why do you think people post comments under your posts? What do you think is the purpose of doing this, in the minds of the comment authors? What do they get out of it? Do you think that your posts’ comments sections are a series of one-to-one conversations between you and various readers? Do you think that people are commenting on your posts for your benefit? It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that I never have the authors’ interests in mind when commenting, or that this is of zero importance to me. But as far as I am concerned, insofar as the author of a post might benefit from reading my comments on his post, it is as one of the participants in the discussion. If the post author stands to benefit more, it is because his ideas are the focus of the discussion. (But this doesn’t even always apply.) It’s certainly not because the comments on his posts are being written for h

2Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

For what it may be worth, @Richard_Kennaway makes similar critiques to you on some of my posts, and I have felt no desire to ban him or like the threads I have had with him were unproductive.

2Said Achmiz4mo

It’s worth nothing. How does any of that affect anything I wrote? What’s the idea, here—that if I don’t write my comments, then someone else will just say exactly the same thing, but “more nicely” (or something), therefore nothing is lost if you ban me? Setting aside the fact that this is obviously false as a trivially demonstrable empirical fact… it strikes me as being absurdly arrogant to make this decision on behalf of everyone who might participate in, and read, your posts and the comments sections thereof. This might possibly be somewhat justified in some more primitive (or deliberately simpler, or otherwise differently designed) forum/blog system, where there’s no way for the commentariat/readership to express their dissatisfaction with one of the discussion’s participants, so the forum owner/administrator/moderators/whoever have to take it upon themselves to ban commenters who degrade the discussion. But LW has a voting system! And a fairly advanced one, at that—two-axis voting, reacts, not to mention the ability to collapse/hide entire comment threads… whatever criticism we may level at the design of LW’s commenting features, it certainly can’t be said that commenters and readers lack for ways to express their views on content posted here. The weird thing is that you can’t even coherently claim to only be concerned about your own benefit. The very post that started this discussion was written (or so you claim therein) out of concern for the well-being and benefit of “the … rationalist crowd”, i.e. the readers and commenters on Less Wrong. So you’re concerned enough for the mental and spiritual well-being and benefit of the LW commentariat to write such a post, but not concerned enough to let them discuss the matter in whatever way they see fit? How does this laser-like focus on how comments on your posts affect you, personally, fit with the motivation for writing a post like that?

2Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

We seen to have different ideas about what the norms of Less Wrong are, and maybe norms for truth seeking more generally. I didn't get into that because it seems I incorrectly assumed we were on the same page there, and so instead focused on my well-being as a decision relevant fact worth highlighting. I see LW as a place for collaborative truth seeking, emphasis on collaboration. Someone says something wrong, and then we figure out how to say something less wrong, together. I think the best way to do that is with comments that are kind, truthful, useful, and curious, and those are the norms that I, as a high enough karma members of this site, have earned the right to enforce on my posts. You violate the above norms in my judgment, particularly the kindness and curiosity parts, and so I have chosen to ban you from my posts. That threads with you are stressful is a manifestation of this judgment. You obviously don't fully violate the norms of wider Less Wrong, and my actions have no effect on your ability to use every part of the site that is not one of my posts. As to why I respond to your comments, if someone posted on something you wrote that your ideas are stupid for obvious reasons, would you ignore it? Maybe you would, but ignoring comes off to many readers as tactic acceptance. When people like your comments, it makes them worth responding to if I disagree, especially on my own posts, in order to engage with not just you, but everyone who reads the comments. To fail to do so would be to leave readers with an incomplete picture of my views. I also genuinely want to figure things out and try to engage with every comment on my posts that I meaningfully can. I'd actually be quite happy if we could some how work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is. I tried to do this with you a couple times years ago. It didn't go well. And seeing your most recent comments I could see the

4Said Achmiz4mo

Agreed, except the “emphasis on collaboration” part (which is deeply misguided). The best way to do it is the way that does it best. If a “kind” comment is the best way, then write a “kind” comment. If “kindness” is irrelevant, orthogonal, or even detrimental to efficiency and effectiveness of the process, then omit it. You have been granted that privilege. That is very different from earning a right. That obviously depends on whether the criticism is valid or not. If it’s valid, then naturally I wouldn’t ignore it; I’d acknowledge it as valid. If it’s not valid, then is it obviously invalid? Is that the consensus of other commenters? Do other LW members reply to it in my stead, and/or use the LW voting system to signal their disagreement? If they do, then there’s no need for me to reply. If they do not, then there may be a need for a brief reply. If the criticism is invalid but not obviously so, then a more substantive reply is warranted. If the criticism is valid but I ignore it, then readers would think less of me. They would be right to do so. If my ideas are wrong and stupid, and especially if they are wrong and stupid for obvious reasons, then it is good that comments to that effect may be posted under my posts, and it is good that people should think less of me for ignoring those comments. If your post failed to provide a complete picture of your views, then I am doing you—and, much more importantly, all your other readers—a service by writing my comments, and thus giving you the opportunity to rectify that lacuna. Irrelevant. All of this is irrelevant. However admirable this desire might be, and however understandable might be the failure to fulfill it, it has nothing whatever to do with the question of banning a critic from commenting on your posts, because that is not about you, it is about whether all of your readers, and the LW commentariat, is denied the ability to discuss your ideas without restrictions. And if you want to “work out our di

3Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

I am not banning you because you are a critic. I am banning you because your comments are frequently unkind and demonstrate a lack of curiosity. This is why I have banned literally no one else, which includes a great many critics. That you are a critic is an unfortunate coincidence that nevertheless taints the specific way in which you violate the norms I am enforcing in the small part of Less Wrong I'm responsible for.

5rsaarelm4mo

Just gonna chime in that I agree with Said here about this not just a two-way thing but a question of what the audience gets to see as well. I think his comments on your posts are valuable and banning him makes things worse as far as I'm concerned.

1Said Achmiz4mo

Thank heaven for that! But notice that you’re responding to a strawman: I never claimed that you banned me because I am a critic, period. Obviously not; since, as you say, you haven’t banned plenty of other people. (Although, as I pointed out upthread, you have, in at least one case, threatened to ban another person for their critical comments, after deleting several of their comments. As far as I’m aware, that person—quite unsurprisingly!—hasn’t commented on your posts since. So, no, you don’t get to claim that it’s just me.) No, my point is much more serious than this trivial imagined-accusation which you are protesting. I am not saying that you banned me because I’m a critic[1], and that this is bad. I am saying that you banned me, and that this is bad because I’m a critic. Do you see the difference? It’s not that you are unjustly depriving me of the privilege of commenting on your posts. It’s that you are depriving all of your readers[2] of the benefit of the criticism and discussion that is absent because you banned me. (Not to mention all of the comments that are absent due to the chilling effect of the ban on me.) (Is this because my comments are so incredibly clever and insightful? No, mostly what I write is fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, it is very often the case that no one else is saying those things. That’s not to my credit, but it is to the discredit of this forum.) ---------------------------------------- 1. Nor, of course, am I making the negation of this claim. ↩︎ 2. And yourself as well, but that part is strictly your own business. ↩︎

-3Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

As I have already explained, I consider your comments to violate the norms I want on Less Wrong around kindness and curiosity. On balance, I consider the degree of unkindness and incuriousity sufficient that it outweighs any loss to anyone of not seeing your criticisms. I'm willing to make some amount of trade-off between different norms for the benefit of myself and readers, but you cross the line of what I judge to be productive. Obviously you seem to disagree. And that seems fair, we disagree on what we think the norms should be! I think this is likely the crux. You seem to prioritize criticism above other things, in particular criticism to show what you believe to be the truth. That's admirable, but you are extreme in your approach in ways that violates other norms I hold in greater balance and am enforcing. I think your approach is on net worse because rather than convince, it drives away those who disagree with you rather than help them see the truth you want them to, and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you've clashed with. That is, I think your comments are antihelpful even if that's not what you intend, and since they fall into that category, they are now banned on my post until such time as I see evidence that I would believe your comments would be net helpful. Obviously some readers do find your comments helpful. They've said as much. That I disagree that on net users benefit from your comments if why you are banned. Again, I actually really want your criticisms, but until such time that they can be delivered in a way that results in productive conversations that help people, including myself, move towards finding the truth, I will keep you banned on my posts.

[-][anonymous]4mo1912

and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you've clashed with

The first half of this talks about readers, but the second half gives examples of authors. I think this is a rather important difference. In fact, it's absolutely critical to the particular issue being discussed.

Of course many authors do not view Said's comments positively; after all, he constantly points out that what they are writing is nonsense. But the main value Said provides at the meta-level (beyond the object-level of whether he is right or wrong, which I believe he usually but not always is) is in providing needed criticism for the readers of posts to digest.

There was a comment once by a popular LW user (maybe @Wei Dai?) who said that because he wants the time he spends on LW to be limited, his strategy is as follows: read the title and skim an outline of the post, then immediately go to the comment section to see if there are any highly-rated comments that debunk the core argument of the post and which don't have adequate responses by the author. Only if there are no such comments does he actually go back and read the post closely, since this is a hard... (read more)

6Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Then let it be a user who can do so in a way that is sufficiently kind and curious that the comment is not a mere attempt at refutation but an invitation to discussion. When I see most of Said's comments (and here I'm necessarily mostly talking about his comments on other people's posts), I think that they are on net bad. They smash applause lights. They don't dig into the details. They respond to surface level details that often skip over why the author is trying to explore a topic because, as I read him, he often disagrees that there is any question to be addressed because it already has an answer he agrees with, and rather that try to engage the author in a discussion to convince them, he registers this disagreement in a way designed to shut down rather than start a discussion that might lead to changed minds. Any amount of usefulness from dissent his comments offer is, at least for me, offset by their manner of delivery. I don't see Less Wrong as a place for his style of comments, but he clearly does. It's why I think the crux of Said and my disagreement is that we fundamentally disagree about what appropriate commenting norms are on Less Wrong. Everything else seems to be downstream of this disagreement, including my distress at dealing with Said's comments on my posts. Again, I welcome and encourage dissent on my posts. Please, if you think I am wrong, tell me why I am wrong. But do so in a way that invites engagement. I don't see Less Wrong as a place for ideas to battle, but a place for curious people to work together to better understand the world, and that means not just creating a written record of competing claims and their evaluation, but also an attempt to convince people who we believe hold wrong beliefs to come to hold less wrong beliefs, since otherwise Less Wrong would be nothing but a pretty artifact that had no effect on the world.

1dirk4mo

(You earlier mentioned trouble dropping threads like this, and also said two days ago that you wanted to be done as you felt it unlikely the conversation would be fruitful; apologies if this is overbearing, but, are you sure you endorse continuing this discussion?)

2Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Actually, I'm glad I didn't, because I think maybe Said and I have finally gotten to the crux.

-5Said Achmiz4mo

-11Said Achmiz4mo

[-]Said Achmiz4mo00

On @Gordon Seidoh Worley’s his recent post, “Religion for Rationalists”, the following exchange took place:

Kabir Kumar:

Rationality/EA basically is a religion already, no?

Gordon Seidoh Worley:

No, or so say I.
I prefer not to adjudicate this on some formal basis. There are several attempts by academics to define religion, but I think it’s better to ask “does rationality or EA look sufficiently like other things that are definitely religions that we should call them religions”.
I say “no” on the basis of a few factors: …

Said Achmiz:

EA is [a religion]

... (read more)

[-]Vladimir_Nesov4mo116

I think being inconsistent and contradicting yourself and not really knowing your own position on most topics is good, actually, as long as you keep working to craft better models of those topics and not just flail about randomly. Good models grow and merge from disparate fragments, and in the growing pains those fragments keep intermittently getting more and less viable. Waiting for them to settle makes you silent about the process, while talking it through is not a problem as long as the epistemic status of your discussion is clear.

Sticking to what you've said previously, simply because it's something you happened to have said before, opposes lightness, stepping with the winds of evidence at the speed of their arrival (including logical evidence from your own better understandings as they settle). Explicitly noting the changes to your point of view, either declaring them publicly or even taking the time to note them privately for yourself, can make this slightly inconvenient, and that can have significant impact on ability to actually make progress, for the numerous tiny things that are not explicitly seen as some important project that ought to be taken seriously and given the effort. There is little downside to this, as far as I can tell, except for the norms with some influence that resist this kind of behavior, and if given leave can hold influence even inside one's own mind.

[-]Said Achmiz4mo103

I totally agree that being able to change your mind is good, and that the important thing is that you end up in the right place. (Although I think that your caveat “as long as you keep working to craft better models of those topics and not just flail about randomly” is doing a lot of work in the thesis you express; and it seems to me that this caveat has some requirements that make most of the specifics of what you endorse here… improbable. That is: if you don’t track your own path, then it’s much more likely that you’re flailing, and much more likely that you will flail; so what you gain in “lightness”, you lose in directionality. Indeed, I think you likely lose more than you gain.)

However.

If you change your mind about something, then it behooves you to not then behave as if your previous beliefs are bizarre, surprising, and explainable only as deliberate insults or other forms of bad faith.

4Vladimir_Nesov4mo

Subjectively, it seems the things that are important to track are facts and observations, possibly specific sources (papers, videos), but not your own path or provisional positions expressed at various points along the way. So attention to detail, but not the detail of your own positions or externally expressed statements about them, that's rarely of any value. You track the things encountered along your own path, so long as they remain relevant and not otherwise, but never the path itself. That's the broadly accepted norm. My point is that I think it's a bad norm that damages effectiveness of lightness and does nothing useful.

4Said Achmiz4mo

Alright. Well, I guess we disagree here. I think the broadly accepted norm is good, and what you propose is bad (for the reason I describe in the grandparent comment).

4Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Eh. What can I say, I think both things are true. Most of the time when I've heard someone claim that EA is a religion they are in fact trying to dunk on EA, and I wrote a post where I previously took a more expansive view of what should count as religion in a way that included EA. I don't really endorse the expansive view now, and I also was not trying to claim EA is bad because it has features of religion. I am still in fact curious what you meant since you didn't and haven't explained. That I may have some reason to think of EA as a religion doesn't bear on the question of why you might think it is given we seem to disagree a lot.

2Said Achmiz4mo

Gee, I wonder why? Could something have somehow prevented me from replying to your request for elaboration, in the linked comment thread? Can’t think what that might be, though… Anyhow, the answer given in the grandparent is my actual answer. You were right the first time! Defining “religion” as “belief systems that involve supernatural claims”, or something along those lines, is commonplace but basically useless, because it results in a bunch of false positives (belief in ghosts, for instance) and, more importantly, a bunch of false negatives; we end up getting distracted by surface features, while missing the really important properties of religion, and failing to recognize other things which have those properties. You’re not the first, but no less correct thereby, to make the observation that the core characteristics of religion, which make it have the practical properties that it has, mostly aren’t the supernatural beliefs, but rather stuff like “a belief system that makes sense of the world and one’s place in it, provides meaning, organizes one’s life via rituals, creates an ingroup, tells you how to live, tells you that you’ll be a good person if you do this-and-such”. (The part you were wrong about is the claim that these are good things.) So Christianity is a religion, but so is Communism. Buddhism is a religion, but so is Progressivism. Judaism is a religion, but so is Effective Altruism (but I repeat myself). And you’re also right that calling EA a religion, in this sense, is not exactly flattering. But it’s definitely not a content-free slur. It’s pointing out that a good chunk of what makes EA so attractive (especially to the sorts of people who are most attracted to it) is that they have a “religion-shaped hole” in their lives, but for various reasons, traditional religions do not suit them, while EA does—and ends up telling them how to live, providing their lives with meaning, giving them an ingroup, telling them that they’re good people if they do

8Gordon Seidoh Worley4mo

Thanks for writing this out. The details of your position far more charitable than the tone of your comments suggested it is (and than even the tone of this comment suggests it is!), and I basically agree that EA has a lot of religious-like features, which is why I (incorrectly!) thought of it as being like a religion in the past. The reasons for thinking it's not a religion now I discussed over in the linked thread, but to reiterate, it's because EA lacks a rich relationship with sacredness (especially shared sacredness, even if some pockets of EA manage to hold some small number of things sacred) and is not high commitment in the ways that religions are (though it is high commitment in other ways). As I've spent more time understanding why it is I think religion as good, I've been able to get more clarity on just what features make it good, and also what features set religious-like groups apart from the ones we identify as central examples of religions.

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