This rhymes with how one treats product recommendations from users. It is typically the case that a user advising you to make a change does indeed have a problem when using your product that they're trying to solve, and you should figure out what that problem is, but their account of how to solve it (what 'improvement' to make) is usually worth throwing out the window.

But the mere choice of job title is usually not a deontology violation for these people, because they don't think it has the harms to the world you think it does!

I don't think this step is locally valid? Or at least, in many situations, I don't think ignorance of the consequences if your actions absolves you of responsibility for them.

As an example, if you work hard to help elect a politician who you believe was principled and good, and then when they get into office they're a craven sellout who causes thousands of people to die, you bear some responsibility for it and for cleaning up your mess. As another example, if you work hard at a company and then it turns out the company is a scam and you've stolen money from all your customers, you bear some responsibility to clean up the mess and help the people whose lives your work ruined.

Relatedly, it is often the case that the right point to apply liability is when someone takes an action with a lot of downside, regardless of intent. Here are some legal examples a shoggoth gave me of holding people accountable even if they didn't know the harm they were causing.

• A company can be liable for harm caused by its products even if it followed all safety procedures.
• Employers are held responsible for harms caused by employees acting within the scope of their job.
• Sellers may be liable for false statements that cause harm, even if they made them in good faith.

These examples are a bit different. Anyhow, I think that if you work at a company that builds a doomsday machine, you bear some responsibility for that even if you didn't know.

I don't really know what we're talking about right now.

Okay. But I nonetheless believe it's necessary that we have to judge communication sometimes by outcomes rather than by process.

Like, as a lower stakes examples, sometimes you try to teasingly make a joke at your friend's expense, but they just find it mean, and you take responsibility for that and apologize. Just because you thought you were behaving right and communicating well doesn't mean you were, and sometimes you accept feedback from others that says you misjudged a situation. I don't have all the rules written down such that if you follow them your friend will read your comments as intended, sometimes I just have to check.

Similarly sometimes you try to criticize an author, but they take it as implying you'll push back whenever they enforce boundaries on LessWrong, and then you apologize and clarify that you do respect them enforcing boundaries in general but stand by the local criticism. (Or you don't and then site-mods step in.) I don't have all the rules written down such that if you follow them the author will read your comments as intended, sometimes I just have to check.

Obviously mod powers can be abused, and having to determine on a case by case basis is a power that can be abused. Obviously it involves judgment calls. I did not disclaim this, I'm happy for anyone to point it out, perhaps nobody has mentioned it so far in this thread so it's worth making sure the consideration is mentioned. And yeah, if you're asking, I don't endorse "nothing that makes authors feel bad about bans", and there are definitely situations where I think it would be appropriate for us to reverse someone's bans (e.g. if someone banned all of the top 20 authors in the LW review, I would probably think this is just not workable on LW and reverse that).

Mm, I think sometimes I'd rather judge on the standard of whether the outcome is good, rather than exclusively on the rules of behavior.

A key question is: Are authors comfortable using the mod tools the site gives them to garden their posts?

You can write lots of judgmental comments criticizing an author's posts, and then they can ban you from their comments because they find engaging with you to be exhausting, and then you can make a shortform where you and your friends call them a coward, and then they stop using the mod tools (and other authors do too) out of a fear that using the mod tools will result in a group of people getting together to bully and call them names in front of the author's peers. That's a situation where authors become uncomfortable using their mod tools. But I don't know precisely what comment was wrong and what was wrong with it such that had it not happened the outcome would counterfactually not have obtained i.e. that you wouldn't have found some other way to make the author uncomfortable using his mod tools (though we could probably all agree on some schelling lines).

Also I am hesitant to fully outlaw behavior that might sometimes be appropriate. Perhaps there are some situations where it's appropriate to criticize someone on your shortform after they banned you. Or perhaps sometimes you should call someone a coward for not engaging with your criticism. 

Overall I believe sometimes I will have to look at the outcome and see whether the gain in this situation was worth the cost, and directly give positive/negative feedback based on that.

Related to other things you wrote, FWIW I think you have a personality that many people would find uncomfortable interacting with a lot. In-person I regularly read you as being deeply pained and barely able to contain strongly emotional and hostile outbursts. I think just trying to 'follow the rules' might not succeed at making everyone feel comfortable interacting with you, even via text, if they feel a deep hostility from you to them that is struggling to contain itself with rules like "no explicit insults", and sometimes the right choice for them will just be to not engage with you directly. So I think it is a hypothesis worth engaging with that you should work to change your personality somewhat. 

To be clear I think (as Said has said) that it is worth people learning to be able to make space to engage with people like you who they find uncomfortable, because you raise many good ideas and points (and engaging with you is something I relatively happily do, and this is a way I have grown stronger relative to myself of 10 years ago), and I hope you find more success as I respect many of your contributions, but I think a great many people who have good points to contribute don't have as much capacity as me to do this, and you will sometimes have to take some responsibility for navigating this.

Not a direct response, but I want to take some point in this discussion (I think I said this to Zack in-person the other day) to say that, while some people are arguing that things should as a rule be collaborative and not offensive (e.g. to varying extents Gordon and Rafael), this is not the position that the LW mods are arguing for. We're arguing that authors on LessWrong should be able to moderate their posts with different norms/standards from one another, and that there should not reliably be retribution or counter-punishment by other commenters for them moderating in that way.

I could see it being confusing because sometimes an author like Gordon is moderating you, and sometimes a site-mod like Habryka is moderating you, but they are using different standards, and the LW-mods are not typically endorsing the author standards as our own. I even generally agree with many of the counterarguments that e.g. Zack makes against those norms being the best ones. Some of my favorite comments on this site are offensive (where 'offensive' is referring to Wei's meaning of 'lowering someone's social status').

Kk. Will move future chat to DMs so we don't keep this comment section going.

(I don’t mean to derail this thread with discussion of discussion norms. Perhaps if we build that “move discourse elsewhere button” that can later be applied back to this thread.)

I agree with your middle paragraph.

To be clear, I would approve more of a comment that made the comparison overtly[0], rather than one that made it in a subtle way that was harder to notice or that people missed (I did not realize what you were referring to until I tried to puzzle at why boaz had gotten so upset!). I think it is not healthy for people to only realize later that they were compared to Nazis. And I think it fair for them to consider that an underhanded way to cause them social punishment, to do it in a way that was hard to directly respond to. I believe it’s healthier for attacks[1] to be open and clear.

[0] To be clear, there may still be good reasons to not throw in such a jab at this point in the conversation, but my main point is that doing it subtly makes it worse, not better, because it also feels sneaky.

[1] “Attacks”, a word which here means “statements that declare someone has a deeply rotten character or whose behavior has violated an important norm, in a way that if widely believed will cause people to punish them”.