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Well, it’s true that this post is completely ignorant of literally decades of discussion about this—from mailing list posts to blog posts to articles to books (including an entire chapter in R:AZ, and of course Superintelligence, etc.). The author seems to have made no effort at all, not only to review, but to even acknowledge the existence, of previous work on the subject.
But it’s also AI slop:
About the authors: Max Abecassis in collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.
This, of course, also (at least partially) explains the first point.
(As the next paragraph tells us, the author seems to have something of a specialty in writing and posting this sort of “written in collaboration with [some LLM]” stuff.)
So what possible reason is there to engage with this stuff?
I think most people’s most burning question if they were talking to a superintelligence … would be “is there a god? …”
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.
Of course they do, because the people who would criticize you in substantive, serious ways… just don’t bother.
If you see only one person saying a thing, then the correct conclusion isn’t “only that guy thinks that thing”—it’s “out of all those who think that thing, only that guy cares enough / is contrarian enough / has the time and energy / etc. to speak up”.
This is especially true if you actively discourage saying that thing.
You earlier gave the example of this 2018 post. Well, I went back and read through the comments section. None of the top-level comments were mine. The most critical comments were not mine. The comments that referenced the Sequences were not mine. The comments you deleted from that comments section (and whose author you threatened with banning from your posts) were not mine. Much (I think most, though I haven’t counted) of that comments section consists of strongly critical comments, written by people who aren’t me.
That was in 2018. But those other critical commenters either stopped engaging with you or essentially stopped commenting on LW entirely, largely as a result of this sort of “ban the critics” behavior. I’m the one who’s still around. You’ve had to resort to banning me from your posts, not because my comments were somehow unusually “adversarial” or “unproductive” or any such thing—nothing remotely like that is true (and I invite anyone who doubts this to check out the above link)—but simply because I haven’t gotten fed up with Less Wrong and left on my own, and am still pointing out when you write things that are wrong and/or nonsensical. That’s all.
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1There’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.
“Subtle”! No, it’s actually not subtle at all. It’s a very simple dynamic: you write something that is wrong and/or nonsensical; I point this out; you do not like this being pointed out. Well, who does? It’s embarrassing! Or, in other words:
Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.
Schopenhauer also suggests a sure-fire remedy, to prevent such unpleasant scenarios:
The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment.
Hmm. Yeah, that’s a tough row to hoe.
I don’t know about you, but to me, “frank discussion, out of which correct judgments emerge” seems a lot easier and more reliable than “always be correct, right from the start”. Of course, if you banish from your comment sections anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, then you only have the harder option available to you. I don’t envy you in that case.
Fascinating story; thank you for posting it!
You don’t mention it and the Wikipedia page also doesn’t say—when did Quesalid live?
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.
The first is a conversation (in 2018!) involving a whole bunch of people, not just me; many of those people’s comments were just as critical, and some more critical, than mine.
The second was a brief back-and-forth, certainly not “hours” of anything.
I think that you severely exaggerate.
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
What prevented you from simply not replying to my comment? Even once, never mind multiple times?
I’m not a coward
Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but now that you’ve denied it explicitly—sorry, no, I have to disagree. Banning critics from your posts is a cowardly act. I think that you know this.
As for this:
I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.
Statements of the form “I don’t understand X” (where X is a thing such that literally not understanding it is very weird) are a well-known genre of engagement bait (with several well-defined subgenres, such as “I don’t understand what [specific type of bad person, such as ‘racists’] even believe”, “I don’t understand why people [do common thing that basically everyone does]”, “I don’t understand why people don’t just [do some absurd thing or apply some absurd solution to some problem]”, etc.)
With such things, the greatest engagement will only come if you can appear to be totally innocent and sincere in your incomprehension. (If it looks like a “work”—a performance piece, posted for engagement—then people will mostly be reluctant to engage.) Now, as you no doubt well know, the best and most surest way to convince other people that you believe something is to actually believe it yourself.
And the outcome of these incentives is…
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 him, or to benefit him.
The point of writing a comment (or, for that matter, a post) is to make a contribution to a discussion, out of which some productive outcome (useful knowledge or understanding, etc.) may emerge—for the benefit of all participants, and all readers. That’s why we have a public forum in the first place! The central motivating idea of a public discussion forum is “we all talk to each other, and as a result, we all benefit; and everyone who reads what we write in these public discussions also benefits”.
So when you motivate your banning of my comments from your posts by asking “what do I, personally, gain from Said Achmiz commenting on my posts”, this strikes me as a bizarrely selfish view.
(And I use the word “bizarrely” quite deliberately. An ordinarily selfish view might be, say, the idea that you write your posts in order to promote your ideas, to convince others, etc., and therefore any comment is evaluated only on whether it helps you to do that. But the idea that comments are to be evaluated by whether they make you, personally, “better”—but not by whether any other participant in the discussion (never mind any readers) are benefited—I don’t think such a view would ever have even occurred to me, had I not seen it expressed by you and others.)
In short: why in the world should it matter whether you “feel the better” for me commenting? If you don’t like my comments—fine; just don’t read them and don’t respond to them. Easy.
If instead you ban me from posting them at all, then it seems reasonable to suspect other motives.
P.S.: Here’s Tycho of Penny Arcade opining on a similar situation: