But there was a large disagreement about the implicit defaults. About whether the removal was a regrettable reduction in some large positive number, or whether it was breaking something, taking something, driving some particular substat of the overall LessWrong revival from positive to negative.
I can’t promise I wasn’t also doing the thing you describe here (I don’t remember everything I said and would not be surprised if I don’t endorse all the ways I’ve ever phrased my complaining about this).
But my frame on what I remember being the main takeaway was:
“Ah, I thought Duncan was someone who was reasonably committed to building a collective thing together, such that I could safely build public goods on top of what he had built, such that there was a larger edifice that I, and others, could depend on. I had thought that was a thing Duncan was explicitly trying to contribute to, in his own self image. Now, that seems false.”
So, later, when I said “I couldn’t trust you again after you removed all your essays from LessWrong abruptly”, I don’t mean “Duncan did a generically bad thing”, I mean “Duncan did a thing that violated my expectations I had build around Duncan, which I thought Duncan been explicitly setting.”
(I might be wrong that you had intended to explicitly set such expectations, and my recollection of what was going on in your life at the time also makes me feel fairly sympathetic to “yeah I did intend to set those expectations of shared-build-ability, but I needed to renege on that because having the essays up was surprisingly costly to me.” I agree people do generally have the right to take their LW essays down, the thing at stake is “do they get to take their essays down, and still be thought of as a reliable community contributor”)
(aside: I recall us communicating by email about this at the time, but couldn’t find the email last time I checked. If you happen to have easy access to it and could re-forward it to me I’d appreciate that for the record. I might have already asked you about this and you said you couldn’t find it)
Note that on this one, I tried to signal (with “(because I was caught in the grips of my own unquestioned assumptions about where the zero point lay)”) that I think we were both attempting to set a zero point without explicitly declaring or defending it; I don’t think either side was exhibiting this vice much worse than the other.
I think there’s a thing here of, like … if a man suddenly physically assaults his spouse, and the spouse then leaves, we do not usually say that the spouse is the one who dissolved the marriage, even though the spouse is the one who technically performed the “end the marriage” game action?
Like, we generally acknowledge that, to the extent that there is fault or blame for the fact that the marriage is over, it lies on the man who assaulted his spouse.
Similarly, I don’t think it’s fair to model me as not “reasonably committed to building a collective thing together, such that I could safely build public goods on top of what he had built, such that there was a larger edifice that I, and others, could depend on.” I think that was absolutely 100% the thing I committed to in my marriage vows, metaphorically speaking.
And what Rankled was that it seemed to me that no one on the LW admin team credited “there’s vicious libel of Duncan up on our site, being highly upvoted, and for a period of at least nine straight days no mod or admin can be bothered to even poke their head in” as being the equivalent of the man assaulting his spouse.
Like, from my perspective, the LW position at the time was “yeah, I know you’re being beaten by your spouse, but come on, you married him; if you leave now you’re definitely defecting.”
I never thought I would need to explicitly state, as a precondition of my contribution to building a collective thing together, that it was conditional on stuff like “you won’t be left utterly undefended for well over a week by the people to whom you are contributing your free and substantial labor, while meanwhile patently ridiculous abuse of you is upvoted and hosted on their platform.”
Or in other words: the husband whose spouse leaves him and then says “what! This violated my expectations about our marriage, which I thought my spouse was explicitly and intentionally setting!” seems to me to be technically correct but overall wrongheaded. I don’t think the spouse leaving should lose their reputation as a reliable partner, and I don’t think that I, pulling my essays, deserved to lose my reputation as a reliable community contributor. I think the moment of trust-breaking lay earlier, and in a different place, than my “abrupt” removal of my essays.
(I’d been begging for help for over a week, and the team just … felt it had more important things to do than help me. I was on their list, but in the course of that week my plight never managed to make it to anyone’s top priority.)
EDIT: it feels weird to note that I’m upvoting all of Ray’s commentary thus far because it deserves upvotes, but it feels weirder not to note it? It also feels weird to note, like, feeling well-held and well-treated by the LW admin team in the years since, while talking about this old and not-fully-resolved grievance, but that too is important context.
(I haven’t read this carefully because I generally find it hard to participate in this class of convo with Duncan without it wrecking my weekend. I think this is largely a fact about me. I think I have things worth saying despite that, but flagging)
a) I don’t think the timing described here checks out. I believe you took your stuff down on the same day LW 2.0 launched formally, which was in March. Defense of Punch Bug, which I think is the discussion you’re referring to, happened in May, and was crossposted by Davis presumably because you had stopped crossposting your own stuff.
(My recollection is your motivation for pulling was the discussion of Dragon Army + a slow bleed of (probably?) less prominent things that added up to an overall pattern of LessWrong being bad for you)
This isn’t particularly cruxy for me – I think I’d have approximately the same reaction to either set of motivations.
b) I don’t mean it to be a huge judgment that I stopped thinking of you as reliable-for-Ray’s-purposes. Like, it seems like a longstanding thing is we don’t quite live up to each other’s standards of what we think reliable should mean, and that’s okay (albeit slightly tragic).
It matters what the extenuating circumstances are, kinda. It matters whether the LW team personally wronged you, or whether the ecosystem collectively wronged you. But, not much? I had had a model that the set of pressures you were facing wouldn’t lead you to withdraw all your essays. That model was falsified, and that changed my plans.
There’s probably more stuff I could say here that’s worth saying, but I expect it to be fairly costly and time-intensive to dig into For Serious, and not really worth doing in a half-hearted way. (concretely: I’d continue this conversation if it were important to you but it’d be a “okay Ray and Duncan set aside a 4 hour block to put in some kind of serious effort” deal)
Mmmm, seems like I am cross-remembering, then, yeah. Sorry. The core thing, though, was “basically no one will protect you on LW; basically no one will stand up for what’s right; basically no one will stand up for what’s true; basically, people will just allow abuse to extend infinitely, and the people who are doing anti-truth are the ones in power and the ones getting socially rewarded.”
If I actually reached the breaking point on all that in March, and took my stuff down, and then the Benquo stuff happened two months later on top of that, that … doesn’t exactly make that problem feel less bad.
No bid for four hours of your effort at this time.
Er. I notice myself again sort of setting the zero point in the above, with words like “libel”! Sorry.
To clarify: I felt genuinely threatened when a prominent, well-respected Jewish member of our community strawmanned my point into accusations of, quote, wanting to ghettoize people—that’s quite powerful and explosive speech.
That sense of threat grew no smaller when that commentary was rapidly upvoted into middling double-digit territory and nobody felt like saying “this is not at all what Duncan’s words mean?”
It was after over a week went by and no one seemed to think that this was urgent enough to need any publicly visible response at all that I “abruptly” pulled the essays.
My take on the removal of essays from LessWrong:
I can’t promise I wasn’t also doing the thing you describe here (I don’t remember everything I said and would not be surprised if I don’t endorse all the ways I’ve ever phrased my complaining about this).
But my frame on what I remember being the main takeaway was:
“Ah, I thought Duncan was someone who was reasonably committed to building a collective thing together, such that I could safely build public goods on top of what he had built, such that there was a larger edifice that I, and others, could depend on. I had thought that was a thing Duncan was explicitly trying to contribute to, in his own self image. Now, that seems false.”
So, later, when I said “I couldn’t trust you again after you removed all your essays from LessWrong abruptly”, I don’t mean “Duncan did a generically bad thing”, I mean “Duncan did a thing that violated my expectations I had build around Duncan, which I thought Duncan been explicitly setting.”
(I might be wrong that you had intended to explicitly set such expectations, and my recollection of what was going on in your life at the time also makes me feel fairly sympathetic to “yeah I did intend to set those expectations of shared-build-ability, but I needed to renege on that because having the essays up was surprisingly costly to me.” I agree people do generally have the right to take their LW essays down, the thing at stake is “do they get to take their essays down, and still be thought of as a reliable community contributor”)
(aside: I recall us communicating by email about this at the time, but couldn’t find the email last time I checked. If you happen to have easy access to it and could re-forward it to me I’d appreciate that for the record. I might have already asked you about this and you said you couldn’t find it)
Note that on this one, I tried to signal (with “(because I was caught in the grips of my own unquestioned assumptions about where the zero point lay)”) that I think we were both attempting to set a zero point without explicitly declaring or defending it; I don’t think either side was exhibiting this vice much worse than the other.
I think there’s a thing here of, like … if a man suddenly physically assaults his spouse, and the spouse then leaves, we do not usually say that the spouse is the one who dissolved the marriage, even though the spouse is the one who technically performed the “end the marriage” game action?
Like, we generally acknowledge that, to the extent that there is fault or blame for the fact that the marriage is over, it lies on the man who assaulted his spouse.
Similarly, I don’t think it’s fair to model me as not “reasonably committed to building a collective thing together, such that I could safely build public goods on top of what he had built, such that there was a larger edifice that I, and others, could depend on.” I think that was absolutely 100% the thing I committed to in my marriage vows, metaphorically speaking.
And what Rankled was that it seemed to me that no one on the LW admin team credited “there’s vicious libel of Duncan up on our site, being highly upvoted, and for a period of at least nine straight days no mod or admin can be bothered to even poke their head in” as being the equivalent of the man assaulting his spouse.
Like, from my perspective, the LW position at the time was “yeah, I know you’re being beaten by your spouse, but come on, you married him; if you leave now you’re definitely defecting.”
I never thought I would need to explicitly state, as a precondition of my contribution to building a collective thing together, that it was conditional on stuff like “you won’t be left utterly undefended for well over a week by the people to whom you are contributing your free and substantial labor, while meanwhile patently ridiculous abuse of you is upvoted and hosted on their platform.”
Or in other words: the husband whose spouse leaves him and then says “what! This violated my expectations about our marriage, which I thought my spouse was explicitly and intentionally setting!” seems to me to be technically correct but overall wrongheaded. I don’t think the spouse leaving should lose their reputation as a reliable partner, and I don’t think that I, pulling my essays, deserved to lose my reputation as a reliable community contributor. I think the moment of trust-breaking lay earlier, and in a different place, than my “abrupt” removal of my essays.
(I’d been begging for help for over a week, and the team just … felt it had more important things to do than help me. I was on their list, but in the course of that week my plight never managed to make it to anyone’s top priority.)
EDIT: it feels weird to note that I’m upvoting all of Ray’s commentary thus far because it deserves upvotes, but it feels weirder not to note it? It also feels weird to note, like, feeling well-held and well-treated by the LW admin team in the years since, while talking about this old and not-fully-resolved grievance, but that too is important context.
(I haven’t read this carefully because I generally find it hard to participate in this class of convo with Duncan without it wrecking my weekend. I think this is largely a fact about me. I think I have things worth saying despite that, but flagging)
a) I don’t think the timing described here checks out. I believe you took your stuff down on the same day LW 2.0 launched formally, which was in March. Defense of Punch Bug, which I think is the discussion you’re referring to, happened in May, and was crossposted by Davis presumably because you had stopped crossposting your own stuff.
(My recollection is your motivation for pulling was the discussion of Dragon Army + a slow bleed of (probably?) less prominent things that added up to an overall pattern of LessWrong being bad for you)
This isn’t particularly cruxy for me – I think I’d have approximately the same reaction to either set of motivations.
b) I don’t mean it to be a huge judgment that I stopped thinking of you as reliable-for-Ray’s-purposes. Like, it seems like a longstanding thing is we don’t quite live up to each other’s standards of what we think reliable should mean, and that’s okay (albeit slightly tragic).
It matters what the extenuating circumstances are, kinda. It matters whether the LW team personally wronged you, or whether the ecosystem collectively wronged you. But, not much? I had had a model that the set of pressures you were facing wouldn’t lead you to withdraw all your essays. That model was falsified, and that changed my plans.
There’s probably more stuff I could say here that’s worth saying, but I expect it to be fairly costly and time-intensive to dig into For Serious, and not really worth doing in a half-hearted way. (concretely: I’d continue this conversation if it were important to you but it’d be a “okay Ray and Duncan set aside a 4 hour block to put in some kind of serious effort” deal)
Mmmm, seems like I am cross-remembering, then, yeah. Sorry. The core thing, though, was “basically no one will protect you on LW; basically no one will stand up for what’s right; basically no one will stand up for what’s true; basically, people will just allow abuse to extend infinitely, and the people who are doing anti-truth are the ones in power and the ones getting socially rewarded.”
If I actually reached the breaking point on all that in March, and took my stuff down, and then the Benquo stuff happened two months later on top of that, that … doesn’t exactly make that problem feel less bad.
No bid for four hours of your effort at this time.
Seems reasonable.
Er. I notice myself again sort of setting the zero point in the above, with words like “libel”! Sorry.
To clarify: I felt genuinely threatened when a prominent, well-respected Jewish member of our community strawmanned my point into accusations of, quote, wanting to ghettoize people—that’s quite powerful and explosive speech.
That sense of threat grew no smaller when that commentary was rapidly upvoted into middling double-digit territory and nobody felt like saying “this is not at all what Duncan’s words mean?”
It was after over a week went by and no one seemed to think that this was urgent enough to need any publicly visible response at all that I “abruptly” pulled the essays.