“If it’s posting like a LWer, and replying like a LWer, and acting like a LWer, then it’s a LWer; doesn’t matter what its internal state is.” I’d be willing to give up a small swath of conversational space, to purchase that.
Indeed.
I still don’t like the idea of having a particular set of hypotheses being taboo; I can buy an instrumental argument that we might want to make an exception around triggeredness that’s similar to the exceptions around positing that someone might have a lot of unacknowledged racist biases—
Exactly. We can make it even more stark:
“Have you considered that maybe you only think that because you’re just really stupid? What’s your IQ?”
“Have you considered that maybe you’re a really terrible person and a sociopath or maybe just evil?”
[to a woman] “You seem angry, is it that time of the month for you?”
etc.
We don’t say these sorts of things. Any of them might be true. But we don’t say them, because even if they are true, it’s none of our business. Really, the only hypothesis that needs to be examined for “why person X is saying thing Y” is “they think that it’s a good idea to say thing Y”.
Note that this is a very broad class of hypotheses. It’s much broader, in particular, than merely “person X thinks that thing Y is [insofar as it constitutes any sort of proposition(s)] true”. It excludes only things where you say something, not because you’re consciously choosing to say it in the service of some conversational (or other) goal, but because you’re compelled to say it, by forces outside of your control.
And maybe you are. But to the extent that you do not choose to say a thing, but are compelled to say it, we—your interlocutors—are not interacting with you. Rather, we are interacting with the abstract person-interface which “you” are implementing, which—by specification—chooses to say and do things, and is not compelled to do anything.
“Have you considered that maybe you’re a really terrible person and a sociopath or maybe just evil?”
I’ll note that, empirically, we do say these things. Or at least, people say them to me, and they’re net upvoted, and no one takes a public stance against it, mods included. And I’m not just referring to benquo or to the overt troll in the original Dragon thread, either.
(There’s a BIG difference between, e.g., Ray silently private messaging Benquo, and Ray saying out loud in the thread “I’m privately messaging Benquo about this.”)
(I am curious of examples of this, either here or via PM. I think I basically agree with you that there were multiple period in which we haven’t been able to reliably moderate all content on LW, but I also care about setting the historical record straight, and right now we have a bunch more resources for moderation available than we had over the last few weeks, so it might still be the correct call to add mod annotations to those threads, saying that these things are over the line. I have somewhat complicated feelings about writing publicly that we are in a private conversation with someone, since that does tend to warp expectations a bunch, but I am still pretty open to making it a policy that when we ping users about infractions in private, that we also make a relevant note on the thread, and that the benefits might just reliably outweigh the costs here.)
The vast majority of the examples are in the two Dragon Army threads, one from LW1 and the other from LW2, which are now Gone. I am willing to share the PDFs with you (Ray already has them), but in this case there’s no useful retroactive action.
(The rest are in the thread quoted in this essay, and at my last check (last night) are still un-addressed.)
I don’t remember anything in the second Dragon Army thread that fit this pattern, but it’s been a while and I was pretty busy at the time and don’t think I was able to read everything before the thread got removed, so I would be curious about the pdf.
Agree that there are things unresolved in the thread quoted here. I definitely plan to address them, but currently want to wait until the private conversations we are having with people come to a natural stop.
Interested in more input on this. It seems obvious to me that future readers of the original Dragon Army thread should not think that writing stuff like the numbers guy did, will not result in a ban or punishment. And since I want LessWrong to be a timeless archive, it’s important for historic discussion to be kept similarly curated as present discussion.
If you only plan on annotating past discussions that have long-since died, I mind a lot less. But for a discussion that is still live or potentially live, it feels like standing on a platform and shouting through a loudspeaker. I’d advocate for only annotating comments without any activity within the past X months.
Ah, yes. I was thinking of all the old stuff that is much older than that (such as the original DA thread). Anything that’s still active should have different policies.
I suspect all mods would prefer that you and I not directly engage just yet, until there’s structure in place for a facilitated and non-weaponized conversation.
The comment I was responding to was attributing an opinion to me. A norm (even a temporary one) in which you can do that, but I can’t ask for evidence, seems like it ends up allowing whichever of us is more interested in the exercise to snipe at the other unchallenged pretty much indefinitely.
I’m not interested in sniping at you right now, I’m just interested in people parsing the literal comment of my comments (and your posts) and not attributing to me things that I did not in fact say.
A norm (even a temporary one) in which you can do that, but I can’t ask for evidence, seems like it ends up allowing whichever of us is more interested in the exercise to snipe at the other unchallenged pretty much indefinitely.
To be clear on my view (as a mod), it is fine for you to ask for evidence (note that habryka did as well, earlier), and also fine for Duncan to disengage. I suspect that the world where he disengages is better than the one where he responds, primarily because it seems to me like handling things in a de-escalatory way often requires not settling smaller issues until more fundamental ones are addressed.
I do note some unpleasantness here around the question of who gets “the last word” before things are handled a different way, where any call to change methods while a particular person is “up” is like that person attempting to score a point, and I frown on people making attempts to score points if they expect the type of conversation to change shortly.
As a last point, the word “indefinitely” stuck out to me because of the combination with “temporary” earlier, and I note that the party who is more interested in repeatedly doing the ‘disengage until facilitated conversation’ move is also opening themselves up to sniping in this way.
In particular, there is something happening here that I notice myself wanting to narrativize as weaponized disingenuousness (which is probably not Ben’s intention) that’s like …
I’m just interested in people … not attributing to me things that I did not in fact say.
… politely following the rules, over here in this thread, and by example of virtuous action making me seem unreasonable for not wanting to reply …
… whereas over in the other thread, I get the impression that this exact rule is the one he was breaking (e.g. when he explicitly asserted that I want to ghettoize people, when what I said was that we could treat people who found punch bug norms highly costly in a manner analogous to how we treat people with peanut allergies (to the best of my knowledge, there is no ghetto in which we confine people with peanut allergies)).
It reminds me of the phrase peace treaties are not suicide pacts. In fact the norm Ben is pushing for here is one I already follow, the vast majority of the time, except in cases where I see the other person as having already repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t hold themselves to the same standard. I don’t like being made to look bad for having a superseding principle prevent me from proving, in this case, that I am in fact principled in this way, too.
My favorite world would be one in which someone else would reliably make points such as this one, and so I could disengage in this particular likely-to-be-on-tilt case, while also feeling that all the things which “need” to be said will be taken care of.
Duncan’s comment here persuaded me to go search for cases where my use of “ghetto” was ambiguous between quoting Duncan and making a claim about what his proposal implied. I’ve added clarifying notes in the cases that seemed possibly ambiguous to me. If anyone (including but not limited to Duncan) points out cases I’ve missed, and I agree that they’re potentially ambiguous, I’ll be happy to correct those as well.
I still stand by the claim, but it’s important to distinguish that claim from a false impression that Duncan said that he envisioned ghettoes for people who don’t want to play punchbug. He didn’t say that.
One thing that makes Duncan’s criticisms comparatively easy to evaluate here is that he’s grounding things in the object level text with a fairly high degree of precision. I don’t always agree with the criticisms, and sometimes strongly dispute his characterization of what I meant (though that’s at least evidence that something I wrote was unclear), of course.
Indeed.
Exactly. We can make it even more stark:
“Have you considered that maybe you only think that because you’re just really stupid? What’s your IQ?”
“Have you considered that maybe you’re a really terrible person and a sociopath or maybe just evil?”
[to a woman] “You seem angry, is it that time of the month for you?”
etc.
We don’t say these sorts of things. Any of them might be true. But we don’t say them, because even if they are true, it’s none of our business. Really, the only hypothesis that needs to be examined for “why person X is saying thing Y” is “they think that it’s a good idea to say thing Y”.
Note that this is a very broad class of hypotheses. It’s much broader, in particular, than merely “person X thinks that thing Y is [insofar as it constitutes any sort of proposition(s)] true”. It excludes only things where you say something, not because you’re consciously choosing to say it in the service of some conversational (or other) goal, but because you’re compelled to say it, by forces outside of your control.
And maybe you are. But to the extent that you do not choose to say a thing, but are compelled to say it, we—your interlocutors—are not interacting with you. Rather, we are interacting with the abstract person-interface which “you” are implementing, which—by specification—chooses to say and do things, and is not compelled to do anything.
I’ll note that, empirically, we do say these things. Or at least, people say them to me, and they’re net upvoted, and no one takes a public stance against it, mods included. And I’m not just referring to benquo or to the overt troll in the original Dragon thread, either.
(There’s a BIG difference between, e.g., Ray silently private messaging Benquo, and Ray saying out loud in the thread “I’m privately messaging Benquo about this.”)
Well, empirically, we also say the stuff about being triggered. I’m saying that we shouldn’t say either sort of thing.
(I am curious of examples of this, either here or via PM. I think I basically agree with you that there were multiple period in which we haven’t been able to reliably moderate all content on LW, but I also care about setting the historical record straight, and right now we have a bunch more resources for moderation available than we had over the last few weeks, so it might still be the correct call to add mod annotations to those threads, saying that these things are over the line. I have somewhat complicated feelings about writing publicly that we are in a private conversation with someone, since that does tend to warp expectations a bunch, but I am still pretty open to making it a policy that when we ping users about infractions in private, that we also make a relevant note on the thread, and that the benefits might just reliably outweigh the costs here.)
The vast majority of the examples are in the two Dragon Army threads, one from LW1 and the other from LW2, which are now Gone. I am willing to share the PDFs with you (Ray already has them), but in this case there’s no useful retroactive action.
(The rest are in the thread quoted in this essay, and at my last check (last night) are still un-addressed.)
I don’t remember anything in the second Dragon Army thread that fit this pattern, but it’s been a while and I was pretty busy at the time and don’t think I was able to read everything before the thread got removed, so I would be curious about the pdf.
Agree that there are things unresolved in the thread quoted here. I definitely plan to address them, but currently want to wait until the private conversations we are having with people come to a natural stop.
i find this idea very distasteful
Interested in more input on this. It seems obvious to me that future readers of the original Dragon Army thread should not think that writing stuff like the numbers guy did, will not result in a ban or punishment. And since I want LessWrong to be a timeless archive, it’s important for historic discussion to be kept similarly curated as present discussion.
If you only plan on annotating past discussions that have long-since died, I mind a lot less. But for a discussion that is still live or potentially live, it feels like standing on a platform and shouting through a loudspeaker. I’d advocate for only annotating comments without any activity within the past X months.
Ah, yes. I was thinking of all the old stuff that is much older than that (such as the original DA thread). Anything that’s still active should have different policies.
Can you give an example of where I said this?
I suspect all mods would prefer that you and I not directly engage just yet, until there’s structure in place for a facilitated and non-weaponized conversation.
The comment I was responding to was attributing an opinion to me. A norm (even a temporary one) in which you can do that, but I can’t ask for evidence, seems like it ends up allowing whichever of us is more interested in the exercise to snipe at the other unchallenged pretty much indefinitely.
I’m not interested in sniping at you right now, I’m just interested in people parsing the literal comment of my comments (and your posts) and not attributing to me things that I did not in fact say.
To be clear on my view (as a mod), it is fine for you to ask for evidence (note that habryka did as well, earlier), and also fine for Duncan to disengage. I suspect that the world where he disengages is better than the one where he responds, primarily because it seems to me like handling things in a de-escalatory way often requires not settling smaller issues until more fundamental ones are addressed.
I do note some unpleasantness here around the question of who gets “the last word” before things are handled a different way, where any call to change methods while a particular person is “up” is like that person attempting to score a point, and I frown on people making attempts to score points if they expect the type of conversation to change shortly.
As a last point, the word “indefinitely” stuck out to me because of the combination with “temporary” earlier, and I note that the party who is more interested in repeatedly doing the ‘disengage until facilitated conversation’ move is also opening themselves up to sniping in this way.
In particular, there is something happening here that I notice myself wanting to narrativize as weaponized disingenuousness (which is probably not Ben’s intention) that’s like …
… politely following the rules, over here in this thread, and by example of virtuous action making me seem unreasonable for not wanting to reply …
… whereas over in the other thread, I get the impression that this exact rule is the one he was breaking (e.g. when he explicitly asserted that I want to ghettoize people, when what I said was that we could treat people who found punch bug norms highly costly in a manner analogous to how we treat people with peanut allergies (to the best of my knowledge, there is no ghetto in which we confine people with peanut allergies)).
It reminds me of the phrase peace treaties are not suicide pacts. In fact the norm Ben is pushing for here is one I already follow, the vast majority of the time, except in cases where I see the other person as having already repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t hold themselves to the same standard. I don’t like being made to look bad for having a superseding principle prevent me from proving, in this case, that I am in fact principled in this way, too.
My favorite world would be one in which someone else would reliably make points such as this one, and so I could disengage in this particular likely-to-be-on-tilt case, while also feeling that all the things which “need” to be said will be taken care of.
Duncan’s comment here persuaded me to go search for cases where my use of “ghetto” was ambiguous between quoting Duncan and making a claim about what his proposal implied. I’ve added clarifying notes in the cases that seemed possibly ambiguous to me. If anyone (including but not limited to Duncan) points out cases I’ve missed, and I agree that they’re potentially ambiguous, I’ll be happy to correct those as well.
I still stand by the claim, but it’s important to distinguish that claim from a false impression that Duncan said that he envisioned ghettoes for people who don’t want to play punchbug. He didn’t say that.
One thing that makes Duncan’s criticisms comparatively easy to evaluate here is that he’s grounding things in the object level text with a fairly high degree of precision. I don’t always agree with the criticisms, and sometimes strongly dispute his characterization of what I meant (though that’s at least evidence that something I wrote was unclear), of course.
Upvoted, and appreciated on a visceral, emotional level.