This is false and uncharitable and I would like moderator clarification on whether this highly-upvoted [EDIT: at the time] comment is representative of the site leaders’ vision of what LW should be.
I’ve read a lot of your posts over the past few days because of this disagreement. My most charitable description of what I’ve read would be “spirited” and “passionate”.
You strongly believe in a particular set of norms and want to teach everyone else. You welcome the feedback from your peers and excitedly embrace it, insofar as the dot product between a high-dimensional vector describing your norms and a similar vector describing the criticism is positive.
However, I’ve noticed that when someone actually disagrees with you—and I mean disagreement in the sense of “I believe that this claim rests on incorrect priors and is therefore false.”—I have been shocked by the level of animosity you’ve shown in your writing.
Full disclosure: I originally messaged the moderators in private about your behavior, but I’m now writing this in public because in part because of your continued statements on this thread that you’ve done nothing wrong.
I think that your responses over the past few days have been needlessly escalatory in a way that Said’s weren’t. If we go with the Socrates metaphor, Said is sitting there asking “why” over and over, but you’ve let emotions rule and leapt for violence (metaphorically, although you then did then publish a post about killing Socrates, so YMMV).
There will always be people who don’t communicate in a way that you’d prefer. It’s important (for a strong, functioning team) to handle that gracefully. It looks to me that you’ve become so self-convinced that your communication style is “correct” that you’ve taken a war path towards the people who won’t accept it—Zack and Said.
In a company, this is problematic because some of the things that you’re asking for are actually not possible for certain employees. Employees who have English as a second language, or who come from a different culture, or who may have autism, all might struggle with your requirements. As a concrete example, you wrote at length that saying “This is insane” is inflammatory in a way that “I think that this is insane” wouldn’t be—while I understand and appreciate the subtlety of that distinction, I also know that many people will view the difference between those statements as meaningless filler at best. I wrote some thoughts on that here:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9vjEavucqFnfSEvqk/on-aiming-for-convergence-on-truth?commentId=rGaKpCSkK6QnYBtD4
I believe that you are shutting down debates prematurely by casting your peers as antagonist towards you. In a corporate setting, as an engineer acquires more and more seniority, it becomes increasingly important for them to manage their emotions, because they’re a role model for junior engineers.
I do think that @Said Achmiz can improve their behavior too. In particular, I think Said could recognize that sometimes their posts are met with hostility, and rather than debating this particular point, they could gracefully disengage from a specific conversation when they determine that someone does not appreciate their contributions.
However, I worry that you, Duncan, are setting an increasingly poor example. I don’t know that I agree with the ability to ban users from posts. I think I lean more towards “ability to hide any posts from a user” as a feature, more than “prevent users from commenting”. That is to say, I think if you’re triggered by Said or Zack, then the site should offer you tools to hide those posts automatically. But I don’t think that you should be able to prevent Said or Zack from commenting on your posts, or prevent other commentators from seeing that criticism. In part, I agree strongly (and upvoted strongly) with @Wei_Dai’s point elsewhere in this thread that blocking posters means we can’t tell the difference between “no one criticized this” and “people who would criticize it couldn’t”, unless they write their own post, as @Zack_M_Davis did.
your continued statements on this thread that you’ve done nothing wrong.
This is literally false; it is objectively the case that no such statement exists. Here are allthecommentsI’veleftonthisthread up to this point, none of which says or strongly implies “I’ve done nothing wrong.” Some of them note that behavior that might seem disproportionate has additional causes upstream of it, that other people seem to me to be discounting, but that’s not the same as me saying “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
This is part of the problem. The actual words matter. The actual facts matter. If you inject into someone’s words whatever you feel like, regardless of whether it’s there or not, you can believe all sorts of things about e.g. their intentions or character.
LessWrong is becoming a place where people don’t care to attend to stuff like “what was actually said,” and that is something I find alienating, and am trying to pump against.
(My actual problem is less “this stuff appears in comments,” which it always has, and more “it feels like it gets upvoted to the top more frequently these days,” i.e. like the median user cares less than the median user of days past. I don’t feel threatened by random strawmanning or random uncharitableness; I feel threatened when it’s popular.)
But escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, robustness to some fuzziness on the facts and their descriptions is crucial. When particular distinctions matter, it’s worth highlighting. Highlighting consumes a limited resource, the economy of allocating importance to particular distinctions.
The threat of pointing to many distinction as something that had to be attended imposes a minimum cost on all such distinctions, it’s costs across the board.
I agree that escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, and that you can and should only highlight the relevant and necessary distinctions.
I think “someone just outright said I’d repeatedly said stuff I hadn’t” falls above the line, though.
I note that in none of them did you take any part of the responsibility for escalating the disagreement to its current level of toxicity.
You have instead pointed out Said’s actions, and Said’s behavior, and the moderators lack of action, and how people “skim social points off the top”, etc.
Anonymousaisafety, with respect, and acknowledging there’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black intrinsic in my comment here, I think your comments in this thread are also functioning to escalate the conflict, as was clone of saturn’s top-level comment.
The things your comments are doing that seem to me escalatory include making an initially inaccurate criticism of Duncan (“your continued statements on this thread that you’ve done nothing wrong”), followed by a renewed criticism of Duncan that doesn’t contain even a brief acknowledgement or apology for the original inaccuracy. Those are small relational skills that can be immensely helpful in dealing with a conflict smoothly.
None of that has any bearing on the truth-value of your critical claims—it just bears on the manner and context in which you’re expressing them.
I think it is possible and desirable to address this conflict in a net-de-escalatory manner. The people best positioned to do so are the people who don’t feel themselves to be embroiled in a conflict with Duncan or Said, or who can take genuine emotional distance from any such conflict.
You’re an anonymous commenter who’s been here for a year sniping from the sidelines who has shown that they’re willing to misrepresent comments that are literally visible on this same page, and then, when I point that out, ignore it completely and reiterate your beef. I think Ray wants me to say “strong downvote and I won’t engage any further.”
Ray is owning stuff, so this is just me chiming in with some quick takes, but I think it is genuinely important for people to be able to raise hypotheses like “this person is trying to maintain a motte-and-bailey”, and to tell people if that is their current model.
I don’t currently think the above comment violated any moderation norms I would enforce, though navigating this part of conversational space is super hard and it’s quite possible there are some really important norms in the space that are super important and should be enforced, that I am missing. I have a model of a lot of norms in the space already, however the above comment does not violate any of them right now (mostly because it does prefix the statement with a “I suspect X”, and does not claim any broader social consensus beyond that).
I also think it’s good for you to chime in and say that it’s false (you are also correct in that it is uncharitable, but assuming that everyone is well-intentioned is IMO not true and not a required part of good discourse, so it not being charitable seems true but also not obviously bad and I am not sure what you pointing it out means. I think we should create justified knowledge of good intentions wherever possible, I just don’t think LW comment threads, especially threads about moderation, are a space where achieving such common knowledge is remotely feasible).
I am quite confused. The comment clearly says “I suspect”? That seems like one of the clearest prefixes I know for raising something as a hypothesis, and very clearly signals that something is not being asserted as a fact. Am I missing something?
The “I suspect” is attached to the “Duncan won’t like this idea.” I would bet $10 that if you polled 100 readers on whether it was meant to include “I suspect that Duncan wants, etc.” a majority would say no, the second part was taken as given.
It’s of the form “I suspect X, because Y.” Not “I suspect X because I suspect Y.”
Oh, sure, I would be happy to take that bet. I agree there is some linguistic ambiguity here, but I think my interpretation is more natural.
In any case, @clone of saturn can clarify here. I would currently bet this is just a sad case of linguistic ambiguity, not actually someone making a confident statement about you having ill-intent.
I can’t read Duncan’s mind and have no direct access to facts about his ultimate motivations. I can be much more confident that a person who is currently getting away with doing X has reason to dislike a rule that would prevent X. So the “I suspect” was much more about the second clause than the first. I find this so obvious that it never occurred to me that it could be read another way.
I don’t accept Duncan’s stand-in sentence “I suspect that Eric won’t like the zoo, because he wants to stay out of the sun.” as being properly analogous, because staying out of the sun is not something people typically need to hide or deny.
To be honest, I think I have to take this exchange as further evidence that Duncan is operating in bad faith. (Within this particular conflict, not necessarily in general.)
I would’ve preferred if you had proposed another alternative wording, so that poll could be run as well, instead of just identifying the feature you think is disanalogous. (If you supply the wording, after all, Duncan can’t have twisted it, and your interpretation gets fairly tested.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have quite the reach that Duncan has, but I think the result is still suggestive. (Subtract one from each vote, since I left one of each to start, as is usual.)
To be honest, I think I have to take this exchange as further evidence that Duncan is operating in bad faith. (Within this particular conflict, not necessarily in general.)
Oliver proposed an alternative wording and I affirmed that I’d still bet on his wording. I was figuring I shouldn’t try to run a second poll myself because of priming/poisoning the well but I’m happy for someone else to go and get data.
(It’s early yet, but so far it is unanimously in favor of my interpretation, with twenty reactions one way and zero the other, and one comment in between the two choices I gave but writing out that the epistemic status on the second clause seems stronger than “I suspect”.)
(Somewhat ironically, this makes me marginally more likely to interpret “well, I meant the more epistemically reserved thing” as being a fallback to a motte, if such a statement ever appears.)
This is false and uncharitable and I would like moderator clarification on whether this highly-upvoted [EDIT: at the time] comment is representative of the site leaders’ vision of what LW should be.
@Duncan_Sabien I didn’t actually upvote @clone of saturn’s post, but when I read it, I found myself agreeing with it.
I’ve read a lot of your posts over the past few days because of this disagreement. My most charitable description of what I’ve read would be “spirited” and “passionate”.
You strongly believe in a particular set of norms and want to teach everyone else. You welcome the feedback from your peers and excitedly embrace it, insofar as the dot product between a high-dimensional vector describing your norms and a similar vector describing the criticism is positive.
However, I’ve noticed that when someone actually disagrees with you—and I mean disagreement in the sense of “I believe that this claim rests on incorrect priors and is therefore false.”—I have been shocked by the level of animosity you’ve shown in your writing.
Full disclosure: I originally messaged the moderators in private about your behavior, but I’m now writing this in public because in part because of your continued statements on this thread that you’ve done nothing wrong.
I think that your responses over the past few days have been needlessly escalatory in a way that Said’s weren’t. If we go with the Socrates metaphor, Said is sitting there asking “why” over and over, but you’ve let emotions rule and leapt for violence (metaphorically, although you then did then publish a post about killing Socrates, so YMMV).
There will always be people who don’t communicate in a way that you’d prefer. It’s important (for a strong, functioning team) to handle that gracefully. It looks to me that you’ve become so self-convinced that your communication style is “correct” that you’ve taken a war path towards the people who won’t accept it—Zack and Said.
In a company, this is problematic because some of the things that you’re asking for are actually not possible for certain employees. Employees who have English as a second language, or who come from a different culture, or who may have autism, all might struggle with your requirements. As a concrete example, you wrote at length that saying “This is insane” is inflammatory in a way that “I think that this is insane” wouldn’t be—while I understand and appreciate the subtlety of that distinction, I also know that many people will view the difference between those statements as meaningless filler at best. I wrote some thoughts on that here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9vjEavucqFnfSEvqk/on-aiming-for-convergence-on-truth?commentId=rGaKpCSkK6QnYBtD4
I believe that you are shutting down debates prematurely by casting your peers as antagonist towards you. In a corporate setting, as an engineer acquires more and more seniority, it becomes increasingly important for them to manage their emotions, because they’re a role model for junior engineers.
I do think that @Said Achmiz can improve their behavior too. In particular, I think Said could recognize that sometimes their posts are met with hostility, and rather than debating this particular point, they could gracefully disengage from a specific conversation when they determine that someone does not appreciate their contributions.
However, I worry that you, Duncan, are setting an increasingly poor example. I don’t know that I agree with the ability to ban users from posts. I think I lean more towards “ability to hide any posts from a user” as a feature, more than “prevent users from commenting”. That is to say, I think if you’re triggered by Said or Zack, then the site should offer you tools to hide those posts automatically. But I don’t think that you should be able to prevent Said or Zack from commenting on your posts, or prevent other commentators from seeing that criticism. In part, I agree strongly (and upvoted strongly) with @Wei_Dai’s point elsewhere in this thread that blocking posters means we can’t tell the difference between “no one criticized this” and “people who would criticize it couldn’t”, unless they write their own post, as @Zack_M_Davis did.
This is literally false; it is objectively the case that no such statement exists. Here are all the comments I’ve left on this thread up to this point, none of which says or strongly implies “I’ve done nothing wrong.” Some of them note that behavior that might seem disproportionate has additional causes upstream of it, that other people seem to me to be discounting, but that’s not the same as me saying “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
This is part of the problem. The actual words matter. The actual facts matter. If you inject into someone’s words whatever you feel like, regardless of whether it’s there or not, you can believe all sorts of things about e.g. their intentions or character.
LessWrong is becoming a place where people don’t care to attend to stuff like “what was actually said,” and that is something I find alienating, and am trying to pump against.
(My actual problem is less “this stuff appears in comments,” which it always has, and more “it feels like it gets upvoted to the top more frequently these days,” i.e. like the median user cares less than the median user of days past. I don’t feel threatened by random strawmanning or random uncharitableness; I feel threatened when it’s popular.)
But escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, robustness to some fuzziness on the facts and their descriptions is crucial. When particular distinctions matter, it’s worth highlighting. Highlighting consumes a limited resource, the economy of allocating importance to particular distinctions.
The threat of pointing to many distinction as something that had to be attended imposes a minimum cost on all such distinctions, it’s costs across the board.
I agree that escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, and that you can and should only highlight the relevant and necessary distinctions.
I think “someone just outright said I’d repeatedly said stuff I hadn’t” falls above the line, though.
Yes, I have read your posts.
I note that in none of them did you take any part of the responsibility for escalating the disagreement to its current level of toxicity.
You have instead pointed out Said’s actions, and Said’s behavior, and the moderators lack of action, and how people “skim social points off the top”, etc.
Anonymousaisafety, with respect, and acknowledging there’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black intrinsic in my comment here, I think your comments in this thread are also functioning to escalate the conflict, as was clone of saturn’s top-level comment.
The things your comments are doing that seem to me escalatory include making an initially inaccurate criticism of Duncan (“your continued statements on this thread that you’ve done nothing wrong”), followed by a renewed criticism of Duncan that doesn’t contain even a brief acknowledgement or apology for the original inaccuracy. Those are small relational skills that can be immensely helpful in dealing with a conflict smoothly.
None of that has any bearing on the truth-value of your critical claims—it just bears on the manner and context in which you’re expressing them.
I think it is possible and desirable to address this conflict in a net-de-escalatory manner. The people best positioned to do so are the people who don’t feel themselves to be embroiled in a conflict with Duncan or Said, or who can take genuine emotional distance from any such conflict.
*shrug
You’re an anonymous commenter who’s been here for a year sniping from the sidelines who has shown that they’re willing to misrepresent comments that are literally visible on this same page, and then, when I point that out, ignore it completely and reiterate your beef. I think Ray wants me to say “strong downvote and I won’t engage any further.”
Ray is owning stuff, so this is just me chiming in with some quick takes, but I think it is genuinely important for people to be able to raise hypotheses like “this person is trying to maintain a motte-and-bailey”, and to tell people if that is their current model.
I don’t currently think the above comment violated any moderation norms I would enforce, though navigating this part of conversational space is super hard and it’s quite possible there are some really important norms in the space that are super important and should be enforced, that I am missing. I have a model of a lot of norms in the space already, however the above comment does not violate any of them right now (mostly because it does prefix the statement with a “I suspect X”, and does not claim any broader social consensus beyond that).
I also think it’s good for you to chime in and say that it’s false (you are also correct in that it is uncharitable, but assuming that everyone is well-intentioned is IMO not true and not a required part of good discourse, so it not being charitable seems true but also not obviously bad and I am not sure what you pointing it out means. I think we should create justified knowledge of good intentions wherever possible, I just don’t think LW comment threads, especially threads about moderation, are a space where achieving such common knowledge is remotely feasible).
This did not raise the hypothesis that I want to maintain a motte-and-bailey.
It asserted that I do, as if fact.
I am quite confused. The comment clearly says “I suspect”? That seems like one of the clearest prefixes I know for raising something as a hypothesis, and very clearly signals that something is not being asserted as a fact. Am I missing something?
The “I suspect” is attached to the “Duncan won’t like this idea.” I would bet $10 that if you polled 100 readers on whether it was meant to include “I suspect that Duncan wants, etc.” a majority would say no, the second part was taken as given.
It’s of the form “I suspect X, because Y.” Not “I suspect X because I suspect Y.”
Oh, sure, I would be happy to take that bet. I agree there is some linguistic ambiguity here, but I think my interpretation is more natural.
In any case, @clone of saturn can clarify here. I would currently bet this is just a sad case of linguistic ambiguity, not actually someone making a confident statement about you having ill-intent.
I can’t read Duncan’s mind and have no direct access to facts about his ultimate motivations. I can be much more confident that a person who is currently getting away with doing X has reason to dislike a rule that would prevent X. So the “I suspect” was much more about the second clause than the first. I find this so obvious that it never occurred to me that it could be read another way.
I don’t accept Duncan’s stand-in sentence “I suspect that Eric won’t like the zoo, because he wants to stay out of the sun.” as being properly analogous, because staying out of the sun is not something people typically need to hide or deny.
To be honest, I think I have to take this exchange as further evidence that Duncan is operating in bad faith. (Within this particular conflict, not necessarily in general.)
I would’ve preferred if you had proposed another alternative wording, so that poll could be run as well, instead of just identifying the feature you think is disanalogous. (If you supply the wording, after all, Duncan can’t have twisted it, and your interpretation gets fairly tested.)
Why not just use the original sentence, with only the name changed? I don’t see what is supposed to be accomplished by the other substitutions.
Unfortunately, I don’t have quite the reach that Duncan has, but I think the result is still suggestive. (Subtract one from each vote, since I left one of each to start, as is usual.)
Ok, I edited the comment.
Does that influence
in any way?
Four days’ later edit: guess not. :/
Oliver proposed an alternative wording and I affirmed that I’d still bet on his wording. I was figuring I shouldn’t try to run a second poll myself because of priming/poisoning the well but I’m happy for someone else to go and get data.
The poll is here for people to watch results trickle in, though I ask that no one present in this subthread vote so the numbers can be more raw.
(It’s early yet, but so far it is unanimously in favor of my interpretation, with twenty reactions one way and zero the other, and one comment in between the two choices I gave but writing out that the epistemic status on the second clause seems stronger than “I suspect”.)
(Somewhat ironically, this makes me marginally more likely to interpret “well, I meant the more epistemically reserved thing” as being a fallback to a motte, if such a statement ever appears.)