You implied and then confirmed that you consider a policy for a certain objective an aspiration, I argued that policies I can imagine that target that objective would be impossible to execute, making things worse in collateral damage. And that separately the objective seems bad (moderating factual claims).
(In the above two comments, I’m not saying anything about current moderator policy. I ignored the aside in your comment on current moderator policy, since it didn’t seem relevant to what I was saying. I like keeping my asides firmly decoupled/decontextualized, even as I’m not averse to re-injecting the context into their discussion. But I won’t necessarily find that interesting or have things to say on.)
So this is not meant as subtle code for something about the current issues. Turning to those, note that both Zack and Said are gesturing at some of the moderators’ arguments getting precariously close to appeals to moderate factual claims. Or that escalation in moderation is being called for in response to unwillingness to agree with moderators on mostly factual questions (a matter of integrity) or to implicitly take into account some piece of alleged knowledge. This seems related to how I find the objective of the hypothetical policy against strawmanning a bad thing.
Okay, gotcha, I had not understood that. (Vaniver’s comment elsethread had also cleared this up for me I just hadn’t gotten around to replying to it yet)
One thing about “not close to the top of our list of priorities” means is that I haven’t actually thought that much about the issue in general. On the issue of “do LessWrong moderators think they should respond to strawmanning?” (or various other fallacies), my guess (thinking about it for like 5 minutes recently), I’d say something like:
I don’t think it makes sense for moderators to have a “policy against strawmanning”, in the sense that we take some kind of moderator action against it. But, a thing I think we might want to do is “when we notice someone strawmanning, make a comment saying ‘hey, this seems like strawmanning to me?’” (which we aren’t treating as special mod comment with special authority, more like just proactively being a good conversation participant). And, if we had a lot more resources, we might try to do something like “proactively noticing and responding to various fallacious arguments at scale.”
(Note that I see this issue as fairly different from the issue with Said, where the problem is not any one given comment or behavior, but an aggregate pattern)
You implied and then confirmed that you consider a policy for a certain objective an aspiration, I argued that policies I can imagine that target that objective would be impossible to execute, making things worse in collateral damage. And that separately the objective seems bad (moderating factual claims).
(In the above two comments, I’m not saying anything about current moderator policy. I ignored the aside in your comment on current moderator policy, since it didn’t seem relevant to what I was saying. I like keeping my asides firmly decoupled/decontextualized, even as I’m not averse to re-injecting the context into their discussion. But I won’t necessarily find that interesting or have things to say on.)
So this is not meant as subtle code for something about the current issues. Turning to those, note that both Zack and Said are gesturing at some of the moderators’ arguments getting precariously close to appeals to moderate factual claims. Or that escalation in moderation is being called for in response to unwillingness to agree with moderators on mostly factual questions (a matter of integrity) or to implicitly take into account some piece of alleged knowledge. This seems related to how I find the objective of the hypothetical policy against strawmanning a bad thing.
Okay, gotcha, I had not understood that. (Vaniver’s comment elsethread had also cleared this up for me I just hadn’t gotten around to replying to it yet)
One thing about “not close to the top of our list of priorities” means is that I haven’t actually thought that much about the issue in general. On the issue of “do LessWrong moderators think they should respond to strawmanning?” (or various other fallacies), my guess (thinking about it for like 5 minutes recently), I’d say something like:
I don’t think it makes sense for moderators to have a “policy against strawmanning”, in the sense that we take some kind of moderator action against it. But, a thing I think we might want to do is “when we notice someone strawmanning, make a comment saying ‘hey, this seems like strawmanning to me?’” (which we aren’t treating as special mod comment with special authority, more like just proactively being a good conversation participant). And, if we had a lot more resources, we might try to do something like “proactively noticing and responding to various fallacious arguments at scale.”
(FYI @Vladimir_Nesov I’m curious if this sort of thing still feels ‘hair raisingly alarming’ to you)
(Note that I see this issue as fairly different from the issue with Said, where the problem is not any one given comment or behavior, but an aggregate pattern)