Sonia Albrecht's Shortform

Sonia Albrecht

Sonia Albrecht's Shortform — LessWrong

Sonia Albrecht's Shortform

4th Oct 2026

1 min read

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

Sonia Albrecht's Shortform

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[-]Sonia Albrecht24d*10

[Edit: If you don't know me, I don't think reading this is worth your time, as it's just my opinion]

I made my first post on LessWrong 11 days ago, and the discourse quality was so much poorer than what I was expecting from my 5 years in the Berkeley rationalist community that I deleted the post. My overly defensive reaction to the surprise contributed to the deterioration of discourse, but the contrast between that discussion and the discussion taking place on the (more polished) EA Forum version of the post is still striking. I've been working on another LessWrong post, but will only post it on the EA Forum after that experience. This seems like a waste.

[Edit: I was so impressed with Habryka's response to this quick take that I have changed my mind about not posting on LessWrong again]

The main problems in my view were strawmanning, overgeneralization, and considering subjective questions objective. Meanwhile, the critiques of the post on the EA Forum are far more sophisticated. It's contributed to a feeling that the relatively higher confidence in our beliefs that sets rationalists apart from EAs can be so counterproductive that Rationalism may have worse epistemics overall, despite its many advantages. I identify as both a rationalist and an EA, and probably always will, but overconfidence can be a dangerous drug. Many of us partook of it in that debate, and that was a mistake.

[Edit: If anyone is curious why I got overly emotional in this debate, I go into it here. Word on the street is that at least one person I felt was too aggressive towards me in it is also deeply attached to their writing in a way that can make people too defensive, and that I think is entirely legitimate.]

Here's the EA forum version of the post:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cF4zZ8EdQhfGZxed5/our-community-often-overestimates-pangram-s-accuracy

[-]habryka23d20

Huh, I thought the conversation on that thread was quite good. I... do think you are just kind of confused about the whole AI writing topic and are getting defensive about it, though it's hard to adjudicate that kind of stuff.

But the thing that seems unambiguously the case is that the discussion on the EA Forum is not... sophisticated? There are a total of 5 comments on that post, 4 of which are in one thread. I think that discussion is OK, though far too overly wordy, and mostly makes a basic point that has been covered on LW many times, in better ways (my favorite reference is LLM-generated text is not testimony).

I think it's fine to be unhappy with the reception of your post on LW but also as a moderator heads-up, please don't draft posts when you don't like the discussion on it. This loses many people's work who put effort into contributing to public discussion. We prefer people not contribute to LW at all if they end up taking down discussion this way.

[-]Sonia Albrecht23d10

I guess I want to add to my reply by saying that I think the type of wordiness you may be referring to is underrated among rationalists. Often we like to think we are too smart to find wordiness useful when the extra words are used for diplomacy. But we are only human. I haven’t seen evidence that we are resistant enough to the excessive emotion bluntness can cause in debate partners to be above more diplomatic wording. To me the way that dynamic played out in the comments of that post was only a small addition to the evidence I’ve seen of that among rationalists.

[-]habryka23d20

Alas, in my experience the politeness only hides underlying conflict and/or hostility, it does not prevent it. I don't have a super confident take on this one cultural tradeoff, but I have been burned many times by people being polite to me in EA in a way that made me far too likely to let my guard down, and made navigating the actually present conflict much harder.

But again, the different cultures here have pretty different tradeoffs and I don't think it's overwhelmingly obvious.

[-]Sonia Albrecht23d*30

No wait now that I think about it more I have observed that! During debates with some people I felt were overly #MeToo on the EA Forum 3 years ago, I valued being openminded so much that I convinced myself of things I should have known better than to believe. It felt really good recently to say what I should of said instead back then on the EA Forum.

Still, in my experience politeness is on net overwhelmingly beneficial. I don't even think the main benefit comes from how our debate partners respond to it but in the discipline it instills in ourselves to question our own beliefs.

I do believe there is merit in rationalist bluntness, and my comments in that post were partly an experiment with trying on that persona for myself. I'm sure if I was more experienced with bluntness I would have done it better, but it still seems like too costly an experiment to continue.

[-]Sonia Albrecht22d10

I was really impressed with your sophistication in this conversation. You have changed my mind about not posting on LessWrong again. The main thing that bothered me that made me delete the post was me falling short of my own values of openminded-ness, and feeling like the conversation had gotten so bad that I couldn't trust myself to get them back. That is within my power to change, as is not posting while I'm sick (the pharmacy gave me the wrong medicine, which was causing cognitive impairment I was unaware of at the time). Not posting on LessWrong again seems like too big a waste when you have displayed such a high quality discourse standard in this conversation.

[-]Sonia Albrecht23d10

I'm sorry you've had that experience! That's not something I've observed myself, so it's valuable to me to know that someone I respect has.

[-]Sonia Albrecht23d10

Yeah I agree it’s bad to delete posts, so much so that that‘s part of why I don’t plan to post on LessWrong again. In this case I didn’t feel like I had a choice because the comments had become a distraction from school.

I do wish there were more comments on the EA forum post. The point I was making is I feel the insightful/boring ratio is much higher on the critiques on the EA Forum post than it was on LessWrong. Despite the low amount of comments, I’ve actually learned more from those critiques than I did from the LessWrong discussion.

Thanks for sharing the link.

[-]Vladimir_Nesov23d*20

Meanwhile, the critiques of the post on the EA Forum are far more sophisticated.

Sophistication is a cost. Simple modular/general takeaways are much better, as long as they hold water. They don't even need to be relevant to the inciting text.

(Now you have a comment in evidence that wasn't deleted. I can only guess what was in the original thread, but there are possibilities not ruled out in your characterization that I'm gesturing at. It's N=1, but also there's an actual culture clash, with arguments on both sides.)

[-]Sonia Albrecht23d10

I agree simple observations are often better, but that wasn‘t the definition of sophisticated I meant. Insightful would probably have been a better word to use.

[-]Sonia Albrecht21d10

[This comment was a reply to my post that I realized was important enough to make it an edit to the post instead, so I shifted the content to there.]

[-]Bojadła24d10

I wish you hadn't deleted the post. Then I could have formed my own opinion about discourse quality instead of having to take your word for it.

[-]Sonia Albrecht24d*10

I don't expect people who don't know me to take my word for it at all. People who know me might make a small update from my opinion, so it seemed slightly better than useless to post this quick take. I didn't realize this would appear outside my profile. I have added an edit to discourage people from wasting their time on it.

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