Followup question: you thought criticism was useful in April 2023. What changed your mind?

your attempts at posting good-faith critiques in the comments of most LW posts are costlier to [...] the community you care about, than they are beneficial.

Why? What are the costs to the community?

Thanks for commenting!

Describing them as posts versus comments probably isn't ideal, but I think it's mostly okay.

Yes, in retrospect, I wish I had done a better job of flagging the metonymy. I'm glad the idea got through despite that.

I claim that yes, these two different types of writing are significantly different activities.

Different in what respect? When I write a critical post (arguing that author $X$ is wrong about $Y_1$ because $Z_1$), it feels like relevantly the same activity as when I write a "non-critical" post (just arguing that $Y_2$ because $Z_2$ without reference to any reputedly mistaken prior work) in terms of what cognitive skills I'm using: the substance is about working out how $Z_i$ implies $Y_i$. That's the aspect relevant to the playing/coaching metaphor. Whether there happens to be an $X$ in the picture doesn't seem to change the essential character of the work. (Right? Does your subjective assessment differ?)

The effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by my username does not need to be the same as the effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by another username!

It doesn't need to, but should it? The section titled "However, Critic Contributions Can Inform Uncertain Estimates of Comment Value" describes one reason why it should. My bold philosophical claim is that that's the only reason. (I'm counting gjm's comment about known expertise as relevantly "the same reason.")

Alternatively, for the purpose of the argument in that section, we can instead imagine that we're talking about a blog where the commenting form has a blank "Author name" field, rather than a site with passworded accounts: the name could be forged just as easily as the comment content, and the "comment" is the (author-name, content) pair. That would restore the screening-off property.

When discussing rationality, I typically use the word normative to refer to what idealized Bayesian reasoners would do, often in contrast to what humans do.

(Example usage, bolding added: "Normatively, theories are preferred to the quantitative extent that they are simple and predict the observed data [...] For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer 'their own' ideas, and in that context, a 'principle of charity' can be useful as a corrective heuristic—but the corrective heuristic only works by colliding the non-normative bias with a fairness instinct [...]")

As Schopenhauer observes, the entire concept of adversarial debate is non-normative!

"[N]ot demand[ing] [...] that a compelling argument be immediately accepted" is normatively correct insofar as even pretty idealized Bayesian reasoners would face computational constraints, but a "stubborn defense of one's starting position—combined with a willingness [...] to change one's mind later" isn't normatively correct, because the stubbornness part comes from humans' innate vanity rather than serving any functional purpose. You could just say, "Let me think about that and get back to you later."

And yet here you demand I immediately change my mind in response to reason and evidence.

I think this is an improperly narrow interpretation of the word now in the grandparent's "I'll take that retraction and apology now." A retraction and apology in a few days after you've taken some time to cool down and reflect would be entirely in line with Schopenhauer's advice. I await the possibility with cautious optimism.

Zack Davis describes that position as "laughable, obviously wrong, and deeply corrosive"

I mean, I do think that (recall that I actually did the experiment with an LLM to demonstrate), but do you understand the rhetorical device I was invoking by using those exact words in the comment in question?

You had just disparagingly characterized Achmiz as "describing [interlocutors'] positions as laughable, obviously wrong, deeply corrosive, etc". I was deliberately "biting the bullet" by choosing to express my literal disagreement with your hyperbolic insult using those same words verbatim, in order to stick up for the right to express disagreement using strong language when appropriate.

Just checking that you "got the joke."

"normatively correct". You guys

Please note that I had put a Disagree react on the phrase "normatively correct" on the comment in question. (The react was subsequently upvoted by Drake Morrison and Habryka.)

My actual position is subtler: I think Schopenhauer is correct to point out that it's possible to concede an argument too early and that good outcomes often result from being obstinate in the heat of an argument and then reflecting at leisure later, but I think describing the obstinacy behavior as "normatively correct" is taking it way too far; that's not what the word normative means.

Thank you for answering my question.

Allowing lots of top-level posts

As it happens, I was planning (in due time) to write my own top-level reaction post to your post of 22 August. I had assumed this would be allowed, as I have written well-received top-level reaction posts to other Less Wrong posts many times before: for example, "Relevance Norms" (which you evidently found valuable enough to cite in your post of 22 August) or "Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think" (which was Curated).

Will I be permitted to post?

will inevitably then cause me to have to spend another 100+ hours on this

I don't think "have to" is warranted. You don't have to reply if you don't want to. But other people have a legitimate interest in publicly discussing your public statements among themselves, independently of whether you think it's worth your time to reply.

Sting, the author of the post, thought a top-level question post was the right choice. If you think the algorithm should deprioritize showing other people Sting's post because you think it's bad, you have a strength-10 strong downvote. Why isn't that enough? On any other topic, if someone makes a post about something other people have also made posts about, you don't demote later posts to comments. Why is this topic different?

What makes you describe this as a "typical reporter perspective"? One would expect that people who write for a living are sensitive to the effects of word choices (such that, if they're nudging readers one way or the other, it's probably on purpose rather than on accident).

the only important thing is ensuring that these weirdos don't get status

Seems too self-centered to be the real explanation. (Most of the time, people who do things that hurt you aren't doing it because they hate you; it's because you're in the way.)

As a technology reporter whose job is to cover what rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley are up to, the fact that companies your readers have heard of (DeepMind and OpenAI and Anthropic) are causally downstream of this internet ideology that no one has heard of, is itself an interesting story that the public deserves to hear about.

It is a legitimate and interesting story that the public deserves to hear about! The problem, from our perspective, is that he doesn't accept that the object level is a relevant part of the story. He's correct to notice the asymmetry in vibes between people at MATS trying to save the world and people at Meta trying to make money as being "a key part of the debate" as far as the psychology of the participants goes—and by writing a story about that observation, he's done his job as a technology reporter. Simulacrum 1 isn't in scope.