Okay, overall outline of thoughts on my mind here:
What actually happened in the recent set of exchanges? Did anyone break any site norms? Did anyone do things that maybe should be site norms but we hadn’t actually made it an explicit rule and we should take the opportunity to develop some case law and warn people not to do it in the future?
5 years ago, the moderation team has issued Said a mod warning about a common pattern of engagment he does that a lot of people have complained about (this was operationalized as “demanding more interpretive labor than he has given”). We said if he did it again we’d ban him for a month. My vague recollection is he basically didn’t do it for a couple years after the warning, but maybe started to somewhat over the past couple years, but I’m not sure, (I think he may have not done the particular thing we asked him not to, but I’ve had a growing sense his commenting making me more wary of how I use the site). What are my overall thoughts on that?
Various LW team members have concerns about how Duncan handles conflict. I’m a bit confused about how to think about it in this case. I think a number of other users are worried about this too. We should probably figure out how we relate to that and make it clear to everyone.
It’s Moderation Re-Evaluation Month. It’s a good time to re-evaluate our various moderation policies. This might include “how we handle conflict between established users”, as well as “are there any important updates to the Authors Can Moderate Their Posts rules/tech?
It seems worthwhile to touch on each of these at least somewhat. I’ll follow up on each topic at least somewhat.
Maybe explicit rules against blocking users from “norm-setting” posts.
On blocking users from commenting
I still endorse authors being able to block other users (whether for principles reasons, or just “this user is annoying”). I think a) it’s actually really important for authors for the site to be fun to use, b) there’s a lot of users who are dealbreakingly annoying to some people but not others. Banning them from the whole site would be overkill. c) authors aren’t obligated to lend their own karma/reputation to give space to other people’s content. If an author doesn’t want your comments on his post, whether for defensible reasons or not, I think it’s an okay answer that those commenters make their own post or shortform arguing the point elsewhere.
Yes, there are some trivial inconveniences to posting that criticism. I do track that in the cost. But I think that is outweighed by the effect on authors being motivated to post.
That all said...
Blocking users on “norm-setting posts”
I think it’s more worrisome to block users on posts that are making major momentum towards changing site norms/culture. I don’t think the censorship effects are that strong or distorting in most cases, but I’m most worried about censorship effects being distorting in cases that affect ongoing norms about what people can say.
There’s a blurry line here, between posts that are putting forth new social concepts, and posts advocating for applying those concepts towards norms (either in the OP or in the comments), and a further blurry line between that and posts which arguing about applying that to specific people. i.e. I’d have an ascending wariness of:
I think it was already a little sketchy that Basics of Rationalist Discourse went out of it’s way to call itself “The Basics” rather than “Duncan’s preferred norms” (a somewhat frame-control-y move IMO although not necessarily unreasonably so), while also blocking Zack at the time. It feels even more sketchy to me to write Killing Socrates, which AFAICT a thinly veiled “build-social-momentum-against-Said-in-particular”, where Said can’t respond (and it’s disproportionately likely that Said’s allies also can’t respond)
Right now we don’t have tech to unblock users from a specific post, who have been banned from all of a user’s posts. But this recent set of events has me learning towards “build tech to do that”, and then make it a rule that post over at the threshold of “Basics” or higher (in terms of site-norm-momentum-building), need to allow everyone to comment.
I do expect that to make it less rewarding to make that sort of post. And, well, to (almost) quote Duncan:
Put another way: a frequent refrain is “well, if I have to put forth that much effort, I’ll never say anything at all,” to which the response is often [“sorry I acknowledge the cost here but I think that’s an okay tradeoff”]
Okay but what do I do about Said when he shows up doing his whole pattern of subtly-missing/and/or/reframing-the-point-while-sprawling massive threads, in an impo
My answer is “strong downvote him, announce you’re not going to engage, maybe link to a place where you went into more detail about why if this comes up a lot, and move on with your day.” (I do generally wish Duncan did more of this and less trying to set-the-record straight in ways that escalate in IMO very costly ways)
maybe link to a place where you went into more detail about why if this comes up a lot, and move on with your day.
This is exactly why I wrote Here’s Why I’m Hesitant To Respond In More Depth. The purpose wasn’t just to explain myself to somebody specific. It was to give myself an alternative resource when I received a specific time of common feedback that was giving me negative vibes. Instead of my usual behaviors (get in an argument, ignore and feel bad, downvote without explanation, or whatever), I could link to this post, which conveyed more detail, warmth and charity than I would be able to muster reliably or in the moment. I advocate that others should write their own versions tailored to their particular sensitivities, and I think it would be a step toward a healthier site culture.
I note for context/as a bit of explanation that Zack was blocked because of having shot from the hip with “This is insane” on what was literally a previous partial draft of that very post (made public by accident); I didn’t want a repeat of a specific sort of interaction I had specific reason to fear.
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forth with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
Ultimately we told him this:
As Eliezer is wont to say, things are often bad because the way in which they are bad is a Nash equilibrium. If I attempt to apply it here, it suggests we need both a great generative and a great evaluative process before the standards problem is solved, at the same time as the actually-having-a-community-who-likes-to-contribute-thoughtful-and-effortful-essays-about-important-topics problem is solved, and only having one solved does not solve the problem.
I, Oli and Ray will build a better evaluative process for this online community, that incentivises powerful criticism. But right now this site is trying to build a place where we can be generative (and evaluative) together in a way that’s fun and not aggressive. While we have an incentive toward better ideas (weighted karma and curation), it is far from a finished system. We have to build this part as well as the evaluative before the whole system works, and while we’ve not reached there you’re correct to be worried and want to enforce the standards yourself with low-effort comments (and I don’t mean to imply the comments don’t often contain implicit within them very good ideas).
But unfortunately, given your low-effort criticism feels so aggressive (according to me, the mods, and most writers I talk to in the rationality community), this is just going to destroy the first stage before we get the second. If you write further comments in this pattern which I have pointed to above, I will not continue to spend hours trying to pass your ITT and responding; I will just give you warnings and suspensions.
I may write another comment in this thread if there is something simple to clarify or something, but otherwise this is my last comment in this thread.
Followed by:
This was now a week ago. The mod team discussed this a bit more, and I think it’s the correct call to give Said an official warning (link) for causing a significant number of negative experiences for other authors and commenters.
Said, this moderation call is different than most others, because I think there is a place for the kind of communication culture that you’ve advocated for, but LessWrong specifically is not that place, and it’s important to be clear about what kind of culture we are aiming for. I don’t think ill of you or that you are a bad person. Quite the opposite; as I’ve said above, I deeply appreciate a lot of the things you’ve build and advice you’ve given, and this is why I’ve tried to put in a lot of effort and care with my moderation comments and decisions here. I’m afraid I also think LessWrong will overall achieve its aims better if you stop commenting in (some of) the ways you have so far.
Said, if you receive a second official warning, it will come with a 1-month suspension. This will happen if another writer has an extensive interaction with you primarily based around you asking them to do a lot of interpretive labour and not providing the same in return, as I described in my main comment in this thread.
I do have a strong sense of Said being quite law-abiding/honorable about the situation despite disagreeing with us on several object and meta-level moderation policy, which I appreciate a lot.
I do think it’s worth noting that LessWrong 2.0 feels like it’s at a more stable point than it was in 2018. There’s enough critical mass of people posting here I that I’m less worried about annoying commenters killing it completely (which was a very live fear during the initial LW2.0 revival)
But I am still worried about the concerns from 5 years ago, and do basically stand by Ben’s comment. And meanwhile I still think Said’s default commenting style is much worse than nearby styles that would accomplish the upside with less downside.
My summary of previous discussions as I recall them is something like:
Mods: “Said, lots of users have complained about your conversation style, you should change it.”
Said: “I think a) your preferred conversation norms here don’t make sense to me and/or seem actively bad in many cases, and b) I think the thing my conversation style is doing is really important for being a truthtracking forum.”
[...lots of back-and-forth...]
Mods: ”...can you change your commenting style at all?”
Said: “No, but I can just stop commenting in particular ways if you give me particular rules.”
Then we did that, and it sorta worked for awhile. But it hasn’t been wholly satisfying to me. (I do have some sense that Said has recently ended up commenting more in threads that are explicitly about setting norms, and while we didn’t spell this out in our initial mod warning, I do think it is extra costly to ban someone from discussions of moderation norms than from other discussion. I’m not 100% sure how to think about this)
I think some additional relevant context is this discussion from three years ago, which I think was 1) an example of Said asking for definitions without doing any interpretive labor, 2) appreciated by some commenters (including the post author, me), and 3) reacted to strongly by people who expected it to go poorly, including some mods. I can’t quickly find any summaries we posted after the fact.
Death by a thousand cuts and “proportionate”(?) response
A way this all feels relevant to current disputes with Duncan is that thing that is frustrating about Said is not any individual comment, but an overall pattern that doesn’t emerge as extremely costly until you see the whole thing. (i.e. if there’s a spectrum of how bad behavior is, from 0-10, and things that are a “3” are considered bad enough to punish, someone who’s doing things that are bad at a “2.5″ or “2.9” level don’t quite feel worth reacting to. But if someone does them a lot it actually adds up to being pretty bad.
If you point this out, people mostly shrug and move on with their day. So, to point it out in a way that people actually listen to, you have to do something that looks disproportionate if you’re just paying attention to the current situation. And, also, the people who care strongly enough to see that through tend to be in an extra-triggered/frustrated state, which means they’re not at their best when they’re dong it.
I think Duncan’s response looks very out-of-proportion. I think Duncan’s response is out of proportion to some degree (see Vaniver thread for some reasons why. I have some more reasons I plan to write about).
But I do think there is a correct thing that Duncan was noting/reacting to, which is that actually yeah, the current situation with Said does feel bad enough that something should change, and it indeed the mods hadn’t been intervening on it because it didn’t quite feel like a priority.
I liked Vaniver’s description of Duncan’s comments/posts as making a bet that Said was in fact obviously banworthy or worthy of significant mod action, and that there was a smoking gun to that effect, and if this was true then Duncan would be largely vindicated-in-retrospect.
I’ll lay out some more thinking as to why, but, my current gut feeling + somewhat considered opinion is that “Duncan is somewhat vindicated, but not maximally, and there are some things about his approach I probably judge him for.”
Personally, the thing I think should change with Said is that we need more of him, preferably a dozen more people doing the same thing. If there were a competing site run according to Said’s norms, it would be much better for pursuing the art of rationality than modern LessWrong is; disagreeable challenges to question-framing and social moves are desperately necessary to keep discussion norms truth-tracking rather than convenience-tracking.
But this is not an argument I expect to be able to win without actually trying the experiment. And even then I would expect at least five years would be required to get unambiguous results.
It would definitely be an interesting experiment. Different people would make different predictions about its outcome, but that’s exactly what the experiments are good for.
(My bet would be that the participants would only discuss “safe” topics, such as math and programming.)
Various LW team members have concerns about how Duncan handles conflict. I’m a bit confused about how to think about it in this case. I think a number of other users are worried about this too. We should probably figure out how we relate to that and make it clear to everyone.
When Said was spilling thousands of words uncharitably psychoanalyzing me last week, I asked for mod help, and got none. I did, in fact, try the strategy of “don’t engage much” (I think I left like three total comments to Said’s dozens) and “get someone else to handle the conflict,” and the moderators demurred.
If you don’t want me to defend myself my way, please make it not necessary to defend myself.
I am not sure what you mean, didn’t Ray respond on the same day that you tagged him?
I haven’t read the details of all of the threads, but I interpreted your comment here as “the mod team ignored your call for clarification” as opposed to “the mod team did respond to your call for clarification basically immediately, but there was some <unspecified issue> with it”.
He responded to say ~”I don’t like this much but we’re not gonna do anything.”
EDIT: to elaborate, Ray actually put quite a bit of effort into a back and forth with Said, and eventually asked him to stop commenting/put a pause on the whole conversation. But there wasn’t any “this thing that Said was doing before I showed up is not clearing the bar for LW.”
EDIT: to elaborate, Ray actually put quite a bit of effort into a back and forth with Said, and eventually asked him to stop commenting/put a pause on the whole conversation. But there wasn’t any “this thing that Said was doing before I showed up is not clearing the bar for LW.”
Yeah, I think Ray is currently working on figuring out what the actual norms here should be, which I do think just takes awhile. Ideally we would have a moderation philosophy pinned down in which the judgement here is obvious, but as moderation disputes go, a common pattern is if people disagree with a moderation philosophy, they tend to go right up to the edge of the clear rules you have established (in a way I don’t really think is inherently bad, in domains where I disagree with the law I also tend to go right up to the edge of what it allows).
This seems like one of those cases, where my sense is there is a bunch of relatively deep disagreement about character and spirit of LessWrong, and people are going right up to the edge of what’s allowed, and disputing those edge-cases almost always tends to require multiple days of thought. My model of you thinks that things were pretty clearly over your line, though indeed my sense is Said’s behavior was more optimized to go up to the line of the rules we had set previously, and wasn’t that optimized to not cross your lines.
It’s plausible there is some meta-level principle here about line-toeing, but I am not even confident line-toeing is going on here, and I have a bunch of complicated meta thoughts on how to handle line-toeing (one of which is that if you try to prevent line-toeing, people will toe the line of ambiguity of whether they are toeing lines, which makes everything really confusing).
That does not seem like an accurate summary of this comment?
My current take is “this thread seems pretty bad overall and I wish everyone would stop, but I don’t have an easy succinct articulation of why and what the overall moderation policy is for things like this.” I’m trying to mostly focus on actually resolving a giant backlog of new users who need to be reviewed while thinking about our new policies, but expect to respond to this sometime in the next few days.
What I will say immediately to @Said Achmiz is “This point of this thread is not to prosecute your specific complaints about Duncan. Duncan banning you is the current moderation policy working as intended. If you want to argue about that, you should be directing your arguments at the LessWrong team, and you should be trying to identify and address our cruxes.”
I have more to say about this but it gets into an effortcomment that I want to allocate more time/attention to.
I’d note: I do think it’s an okay time to open up Said’s longstanding disagreements with LW moderation policy, but, like, all the previous arguments still apply. Said’s comments so far haven’t added new information we didn’t already consider.
I think it is better to start a new thread rather than engaging in this one, because this thread seems to be doing a weird mix of arguing moderation-abstract-policies while also trying to prosecute one particular case in a way that feels off.
He said pretty clearly “I am dealing with a backlog of users so won’t give this the full response it deserves until a few days later” (which is right now). It also responded pretty clearly to a bunch of the object-level.
I think it’s fine for you to say you didn’t feel helped immediately, or something, but I really don’t think characterizing Ray’s response as “not doing anything” is remotely accurate. My guess is he has spent on the order of 20 hours on this conflict in the last week, with probably another 10-15 hours from both Ruby and Robert, resulting at least thousands, possible tens-of-thousands of words written publicly by now. Again, it might be the case that somehow those moderation comments didn’t align with your preferences, but I do sure think it counts as “clarifying whether this is something we want happening on LessWrong” which was your literal request.
Okay, overall outline of thoughts on my mind here:
What actually happened in the recent set of exchanges? Did anyone break any site norms? Did anyone do things that maybe should be site norms but we hadn’t actually made it an explicit rule and we should take the opportunity to develop some case law and warn people not to do it in the future?
5 years ago, the moderation team has issued Said a mod warning about a common pattern of engagment he does that a lot of people have complained about (this was operationalized as “demanding more interpretive labor than he has given”). We said if he did it again we’d ban him for a month. My vague recollection is he basically didn’t do it for a couple years after the warning, but maybe started to somewhat over the past couple years, but I’m not sure, (I think he may have not done the particular thing we asked him not to, but I’ve had a growing sense his commenting making me more wary of how I use the site). What are my overall thoughts on that?
Various LW team members have concerns about how Duncan handles conflict. I’m a bit confused about how to think about it in this case. I think a number of other users are worried about this too. We should probably figure out how we relate to that and make it clear to everyone.
It’s Moderation Re-Evaluation Month. It’s a good time to re-evaluate our various moderation policies. This might include “how we handle conflict between established users”, as well as “are there any important updates to the Authors Can Moderate Their Posts rules/tech?
It seems worthwhile to touch on each of these at least somewhat. I’ll follow up on each topic at least somewhat.
Maybe explicit rules against blocking users from “norm-setting” posts.
On blocking users from commenting
I still endorse authors being able to block other users (whether for principles reasons, or just “this user is annoying”). I think a) it’s actually really important for authors for the site to be fun to use, b) there’s a lot of users who are dealbreakingly annoying to some people but not others. Banning them from the whole site would be overkill. c) authors aren’t obligated to lend their own karma/reputation to give space to other people’s content. If an author doesn’t want your comments on his post, whether for defensible reasons or not, I think it’s an okay answer that those commenters make their own post or shortform arguing the point elsewhere.
Yes, there are some trivial inconveniences to posting that criticism. I do track that in the cost. But I think that is outweighed by the effect on authors being motivated to post.
That all said...
Blocking users on “norm-setting posts”
I think it’s more worrisome to block users on posts that are making major momentum towards changing site norms/culture. I don’t think the censorship effects are that strong or distorting in most cases, but I’m most worried about censorship effects being distorting in cases that affect ongoing norms about what people can say.
There’s a blurry line here, between posts that are putting forth new social concepts, and posts advocating for applying those concepts towards norms (either in the OP or in the comments), and a further blurry line between that and posts which arguing about applying that to specific people. i.e. I’d have an ascending wariness of:
Concentration of Force
Basics of Rationalist Discourse or Speaking of Stag Hunts
Killing Socrates
I think it was already a little sketchy that Basics of Rationalist Discourse went out of it’s way to call itself “The Basics” rather than “Duncan’s preferred norms” (a somewhat frame-control-y move IMO although not necessarily unreasonably so), while also blocking Zack at the time. It feels even more sketchy to me to write Killing Socrates, which AFAICT a thinly veiled “build-social-momentum-against-Said-in-particular”, where Said can’t respond (and it’s disproportionately likely that Said’s allies also can’t respond)
Right now we don’t have tech to unblock users from a specific post, who have been banned from all of a user’s posts. But this recent set of events has me learning towards “build tech to do that”, and then make it a rule that post over at the threshold of “Basics” or higher (in terms of site-norm-momentum-building), need to allow everyone to comment.
I do expect that to make it less rewarding to make that sort of post. And, well, to (almost) quote Duncan:
Okay but what do I do about Said when he shows up doing his whole pattern of subtly-missing/and/or/reframing-the-point-while-sprawling massive threads, in an impo
My answer is “strong downvote him, announce you’re not going to engage, maybe link to a place where you went into more detail about why if this comes up a lot, and move on with your day.” (I do generally wish Duncan did more of this and less trying to set-the-record straight in ways that escalate in IMO very costly ways)
(I also kinda wish gjm had also done this towards the beginning of the thread on LW Team is adjusting moderation policy)
This is exactly why I wrote Here’s Why I’m Hesitant To Respond In More Depth. The purpose wasn’t just to explain myself to somebody specific. It was to give myself an alternative resource when I received a specific time of common feedback that was giving me negative vibes. Instead of my usual behaviors (get in an argument, ignore and feel bad, downvote without explanation, or whatever), I could link to this post, which conveyed more detail, warmth and charity than I would be able to muster reliably or in the moment. I advocate that others should write their own versions tailored to their particular sensitivities, and I think it would be a step toward a healthier site culture.
“I do generally wish Duncan did more of this and less trying to set-the-record straight in ways that escalate in IMO very costly ways”
strongly agree.
I note for context/as a bit of explanation that Zack was blocked because of having shot from the hip with “This is insane” on what was literally a previous partial draft of that very post (made public by accident); I didn’t want a repeat of a specific sort of interaction I had specific reason to fear.
Recap of mod team history with Said Achmiz
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forth with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
Ultimately we told him this:
Followed by:
I do have a strong sense of Said being quite law-abiding/honorable about the situation despite disagreeing with us on several object and meta-level moderation policy, which I appreciate a lot.
I do think it’s worth noting that LessWrong 2.0 feels like it’s at a more stable point than it was in 2018. There’s enough critical mass of people posting here I that I’m less worried about annoying commenters killing it completely (which was a very live fear during the initial LW2.0 revival)
But I am still worried about the concerns from 5 years ago, and do basically stand by Ben’s comment. And meanwhile I still think Said’s default commenting style is much worse than nearby styles that would accomplish the upside with less downside.
My summary of previous discussions as I recall them is something like:
Then we did that, and it sorta worked for awhile. But it hasn’t been wholly satisfying to me. (I do have some sense that Said has recently ended up commenting more in threads that are explicitly about setting norms, and while we didn’t spell this out in our initial mod warning, I do think it is extra costly to ban someone from discussions of moderation norms than from other discussion. I’m not 100% sure how to think about this)
I think some additional relevant context is this discussion from three years ago, which I think was 1) an example of Said asking for definitions without doing any interpretive labor, 2) appreciated by some commenters (including the post author, me), and 3) reacted to strongly by people who expected it to go poorly, including some mods. I can’t quickly find any summaries we posted after the fact.
Death by a thousand cuts and “proportionate”(?) response
A way this all feels relevant to current disputes with Duncan is that thing that is frustrating about Said is not any individual comment, but an overall pattern that doesn’t emerge as extremely costly until you see the whole thing. (i.e. if there’s a spectrum of how bad behavior is, from 0-10, and things that are a “3” are considered bad enough to punish, someone who’s doing things that are bad at a “2.5″ or “2.9” level don’t quite feel worth reacting to. But if someone does them a lot it actually adds up to being pretty bad.
If you point this out, people mostly shrug and move on with their day. So, to point it out in a way that people actually listen to, you have to do something that looks disproportionate if you’re just paying attention to the current situation. And, also, the people who care strongly enough to see that through tend to be in an extra-triggered/frustrated state, which means they’re not at their best when they’re dong it.
I think Duncan’s response looks very out-of-proportion. I think Duncan’s response is out of proportion to some degree (see Vaniver thread for some reasons why. I have some more reasons I plan to write about).
But I do think there is a correct thing that Duncan was noting/reacting to, which is that actually yeah, the current situation with Said does feel bad enough that something should change, and it indeed the mods hadn’t been intervening on it because it didn’t quite feel like a priority.
I liked Vaniver’s description of Duncan’s comments/posts as making a bet that Said was in fact obviously banworthy or worthy of significant mod action, and that there was a smoking gun to that effect, and if this was true then Duncan would be largely vindicated-in-retrospect.
I’ll lay out some more thinking as to why, but, my current gut feeling + somewhat considered opinion is that “Duncan is somewhat vindicated, but not maximally, and there are some things about his approach I probably judge him for.”
Personally, the thing I think should change with Said is that we need more of him, preferably a dozen more people doing the same thing. If there were a competing site run according to Said’s norms, it would be much better for pursuing the art of rationality than modern LessWrong is; disagreeable challenges to question-framing and social moves are desperately necessary to keep discussion norms truth-tracking rather than convenience-tracking.
But this is not an argument I expect to be able to win without actually trying the experiment. And even then I would expect at least five years would be required to get unambiguous results.
It would definitely be an interesting experiment. Different people would make different predictions about its outcome, but that’s exactly what the experiments are good for.
(My bet would be that the participants would only discuss “safe” topics, such as math and programming.)
When Said was spilling thousands of words uncharitably psychoanalyzing me last week, I asked for mod help, and got none. I did, in fact, try the strategy of “don’t engage much” (I think I left like three total comments to Said’s dozens) and “get someone else to handle the conflict,” and the moderators demurred.
If you don’t want me to defend myself my way, please make it not necessary to defend myself.
I am not sure what you mean, didn’t Ray respond on the same day that you tagged him?
I haven’t read the details of all of the threads, but I interpreted your comment here as “the mod team ignored your call for clarification” as opposed to “the mod team did respond to your call for clarification basically immediately, but there was some <unspecified issue> with it”.
He responded to say ~”I don’t like this much but we’re not gonna do anything.”EDIT: to elaborate, Ray actually put quite a bit of effort into a back and forth with Said, and eventually asked him to stop commenting/put a pause on the whole conversation. But there wasn’t any “this thing that Said was doing before I showed up is not clearing the bar for LW.”
Yeah, I think Ray is currently working on figuring out what the actual norms here should be, which I do think just takes awhile. Ideally we would have a moderation philosophy pinned down in which the judgement here is obvious, but as moderation disputes go, a common pattern is if people disagree with a moderation philosophy, they tend to go right up to the edge of the clear rules you have established (in a way I don’t really think is inherently bad, in domains where I disagree with the law I also tend to go right up to the edge of what it allows).
This seems like one of those cases, where my sense is there is a bunch of relatively deep disagreement about character and spirit of LessWrong, and people are going right up to the edge of what’s allowed, and disputing those edge-cases almost always tends to require multiple days of thought. My model of you thinks that things were pretty clearly over your line, though indeed my sense is Said’s behavior was more optimized to go up to the line of the rules we had set previously, and wasn’t that optimized to not cross your lines.
It’s plausible there is some meta-level principle here about line-toeing, but I am not even confident line-toeing is going on here, and I have a bunch of complicated meta thoughts on how to handle line-toeing (one of which is that if you try to prevent line-toeing, people will toe the line of ambiguity of whether they are toeing lines, which makes everything really confusing).
That does not seem like an accurate summary of this comment?
He said pretty clearly “I am dealing with a backlog of users so won’t give this the full response it deserves until a few days later” (which is right now). It also responded pretty clearly to a bunch of the object-level.
I think it’s fine for you to say you didn’t feel helped immediately, or something, but I really don’t think characterizing Ray’s response as “not doing anything” is remotely accurate. My guess is he has spent on the order of 20 hours on this conflict in the last week, with probably another 10-15 hours from both Ruby and Robert, resulting at least thousands, possible tens-of-thousands of words written publicly by now. Again, it might be the case that somehow those moderation comments didn’t align with your preferences, but I do sure think it counts as “clarifying whether this is something we want happening on LessWrong” which was your literal request.
Yeah, as you were typing this I was also typing an edit. My apologies, Ray, for the off-the-cuff wrong summary.
Cool, no problem.