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).
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).