E.g. building good tooling for alignment research doesn't require this at all. 

What do you mean, of course it does? If you don't care about it you just take the highest paying job, which will definitely not be to build good tooling for alignment research?

I mean, I think no, if truly there is only a relatively small fraction of people like that around, we as the moderators can just ask those people to leave. Like, it's fine if we have to ask hundreds of people to leave, the world is wide and big. If most of the internet is on board with not having this specific stipulation, then there is a viable LessWrong that doesn't have those people.

We are saying that there is an obvious conflict of interest when an author removes a highly upvoted piece of criticism. Humans being biased when presented with COIs is common sense, so connecting such author moderation with rationality is natural, not a weird rhetorical move.

Look, we've had these conversations. 

I am saying the people who are moderating the spaces have the obvious information advantage about their own preferences and about what it's actually like to engage with an interlocutor, plus the motivation advantage to actually deal with it. "It's common sense that the best decisions get made by people with skin in the game and who are most involved with the actual consequences of the relevant decision". And "it's common sense that CEOs of organizations make hiring and firing decisions for the people they work with, boards don't make good firing decisions, the same applies to forums and moderators".

This is a discussion as old as time in business and governance and whatever. Framing your position as "common sense" is indeed just a rhetorical move, and I have no problem framing the opposite position in just as much of an "obvious" fashion. Turns out, neither position obviously dominates by common sense! Smart people exist in both sides of this debate. I am not against having it again, and I have my own takes on it, but please don't try to frame this as some kind of foregone conclusion in which you have the high ground.

The rest of your comment seems to be forgetting that I'm only complaining about authors having COI when it comes to moderation, not about all moderation in general.

I was (and largely am) modeling you as being generically opposed to basically any non-spam bans or deletions on the site. Indeed, as I think we've discussed, the kind of positions that you express in this thread suggest to me that you should be more opposed to site-wide bans than author bans (since site-wide bans truly make counterveiling perspectives harder to find instead of driving them from the comment sections to top-level posts).

If you aren't against site-wide bans, I do think that's a pretty different situation! I certainly didn't feel like I was empowered to moderate more in our conversations on moderation over the last year. It seemed to me you wanted both less individual author moderation, and less admin moderation for anything that isn't spam. Indeed, I am pretty sure, though I can't find it, that you said that LW moderation really should only establish a very basic level of protection against spam and basic norms of discourse, but shouldn't do much beyond that, but I might be misremembering. 

If you do support moderation, I would be curious about you DMing me some example of users you think we should ban, or non-spam comments we should delete. My current model of you doesn't really think those exist. 

I mean, yes, these dynamics have caused many people, including myself, to want to leave LessWrong. It sucks. I wish people stopped. Not all moderation is censorship. The fact that it universally gets treated as such by a certain population of LW commenters is one of the worst aspects of this site (and one of the top reasons why in the absence of my own intervention into reviving the site, this site would likely no longer exist at all today).

I think we can fix it! I think it unfortunately takes a long time, and continuous management and moderation to slowly build trust that indeed you can moderate things without suddenly everyone going insane. Maybe there are also better technical solutions.

Claiming this is about "rationality" feels like mostly a weird rhetorical move. I don't think it's rational to pretend that unmoderated discussion spaces somehow outperform moderated ones. As has been pointed out many times, 4Chan is not the pinnacle of internet discussion. Indeed, I think largely across the internet, more moderation results in higher trust and higher quality discussions (not universally, you can definitely go on a censorious banning spree as a moderator and try to skew consensus in various crazy ways, but by and large, as a correlation).

This is indeed an observation so core to LessWrong that Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism was, as far as I can tell, a post necessary for LessWrong to exist at all.

I'm talking specifically about the comment boxes in the Feed section of the front page, which do not have such policies displayed, as of this writing.

FWIW, this is just a bug (as I think I mentioned somewhere else in the thread).

This comment was pretty obviously AI written and shouldn't have made it past the LessWrong content moderation! (Sorry about that, we have automatic AI written flagging for posts, but haven't yet activated it for comments) 

It's plausible it was written reflecting a real human experience, but I wouldn't trust it. It got very high scores on 3 AI-detection platforms I tried. (And also, posting AI slop in this context feels particularly sad)

I currently doubt the Buck thread would qualify as such from Eliezer's perspective (and agree with you there that in as much as Eliezer disagrees, he is wrong in that case). 

IMO I do think it's a pretty bad mark on LW's reputation that posts like Matthew's keep getting upvoted, with what seem to me like quite aggressively obtuse adversarial interpretations of what people are saying.

The existence of the latter unfortunately makes the former much harder to navigate.

I think an issue you'll face is that few people will "try to socially censure people for using any moderation tools",

No, my guess is this is roughly the issue. I think the vast majority of complaints here tend to be centered in a relatively small group of people who really care. 

It's not a particularly common expectation that people have about how the internet works, as I have said in other places in this thread. I don't think the rest of the internet gets these kinds of things right, but I also don't think that there will be an unquenchable torrent of continuous complaints that will create a landscape of perpetual punishment for anyone trying to use moderation tools. 

I think if you resolve a few disagreements, and moderate a relatively small number of people, you end up at an equlibrium that seems a bunch saner to me.

Yes, Reddit is one of the last places on the internet where this is semi-common, but even there, most subreddits are moderated by people who are active posters, and there are no strong norms against moderators moderating responses to their own comments or posts.

I agree I overstated here and that there are some places on the internet where this is common practice, but it's really a very small fraction of the internet these days. You might bemoan this as a fate of the internet, but it's just really not how most of the world thinks content moderation works.

Given my new understanding, will you eventually move to banning or censoring people for expressing disapproval of what they perceive as bad or unfair moderation, even in their own "spaces"?

I mean, I had a whole section in the Said post about how I do think it's a dick move to try to socially censure people for using any moderation tools. If someone keeps trying to create social punishment for people doing that, then yeah, I will ask them to please do that somewhere else but here, or more likely, leave the content up but reduce the degree to which things like the frontpage algorithm feed attention to it. I don't know how else any norms on the site are supposed to bottom out. 

Top-level posts like this one seem totally fine. Like, if someone wants to be like "I am not trying to force some kind of social punishment on anyone, but I do think there is a relevant consideration here, but I also understand this has been litigated a bunch and I am not planning to currently reopen that", then that's fine. Of course you did kind of reopen it, which to be clear I think is fine on the margin, but yeah, I would totally ask you to stop if you did that again and again.