Before reading this post, I usually would refrain from posting/commenting on LW posts partially because of the high threshold of quality for contribution (which is where I agree with you in a certain sense), and partially because it seemed more polite to ignore posts I found flaws in, or disagreed with strongly, than to engage (which costs both effort and potential reputation). Now, I believe I shall try to be more Socratic—more willing to as politely as I can point out confusions and potential issues in posts/comments I have read and found wanting, if it seems useful to readers.
I find Said’s critiquing comments (herearethree good examples) extremely valuable, because they serve as a “red team” and a pruning function for the claims the post author puts forth and the reasoning behind them. What you seem to consider as a drive-by criticism (which is what I believe you think Said does) that puts forth a non-trivial cost upon you, is cost that I claim you should take upon yourself because your writing isn’t high quality enough and not “pruned” enough given the length of your posts.
That is the biggest issue I have with your writings (and that of Zack too, because he makes the same mistake): you write too much to communicate too little bits of usefulness. This is how I feel for all your 2023 posts that I have read (or skimmed, rather) -- it points to something useful, or interesting, but it is absolutely not worth the time investment of reading such huge and long-winding essays. I don’t even think you need to write them that long to provide the context you believe necessary to convey your points.
The good thing is that with comments like those of johnswentworth, Charlie Steiner, and FeepingCreature all give people like me the context they need to interpret how useful your post is, without having to read the post itself. Notice that all these comments are short and succinct while also being very relevant to the post, without nitpicking. This is the sort of writing I respect on LW. It is not coincidental that two of these three people are full time alignment researchers.
Right now, I can simply ignore your posts until they get sufficient traction (which is very easy given how popular you are) that the comments give me an idea of the core of your post and what the most serious weaknesses of your argument are, and with that I have gotten the value I need (given I skim your post while doing so, whenever relevant). However, your desire to censor Said’s comments gets in the way of this natural filter. Said’s comments provide incredible value to both you and your audience, even if you do not interact with them! To you, it provides you valuable evidence you can weigh up or down given how valuable you find Said’s comments in general, and to LW audience, it provides a way of knowing the critical weaknesses of your argument without having to read your post and parse it and try to figure out the weaknesses in it.
You claim emotional damage to yourself and to other people due to drive-by critiquing comments, and that this leads to an evaporative cooling effect where people post lesser and lesser. This seems like a problem, but given one person spending half an hour pruning their writing to improve its quality, and a hundred readers spending between ten minutes to an hour processing and individually critiquing the writing to calibrate and update their world model, I would want the writer to eat the cost. That is what I personally choose, after all. And by extension, I have realized that me critiquing other people’s contributions is also incredibly valuable, and I will start to do that more. And anyway, this probably isn’t a trade-off, and there may be solutions that do not impose a cost on either party.
As far as I know, Said seems to believe that moderation of comments should not be left to post authors because this creates a conflict of interest. Its consequences are simple: I get less value out of your posts and by extension, LW. Raemon’s decision to create an archipelago-like ecosystem makes sense to me given his goals and assumptions laid out in the post, but you seem to want more aggressive action against people whose criticisms you dislike.
“You don’t much care if This Rando doesn’t get it”, and I would be fine with that if you weren’t taking actions that have clear externalities for readers like me by making Said’s critiquing comments and comments of a similar nature by other people less welcome on LessWrong—both as a social norm and at the moderator level.
Basically, I’m claiming that there are competing access needs, here, such as can be found in a classroom in which some students need things to be still and silent, and other students need to fidget and stim.
The Socrati and the Athenians are not entirely in a zero-sum game, but their dynamic has nonzero zero-sum nature. The thing that Socrates needs is inimical to the thing the Athenians need, and vice versa.
I think that’s just … visibly, straightforwardly true, here on LW; you can actually just see how, as the culture has shifted Socratesward, many authors have left.
Other authors have arrived! Socrates had many followers! There were a lot of people who liked his whole deal, and were enjoying the vibe!
But I’m claiming that the current tradeoff leans in the direction of “make things optimal for mesaoptimizer and suboptimal for Duncan_Sabien,” and separately that “things being optimal for mesaoptimizer actually makes LessWrong as a whole more likely to dry up and shut down, since LW depends on people being willing to write essays.”
(The Socrati mode being better for commenters than authors, and the Athenian mode being better for authors than for (some) commenters (such as mesaoptimizer).)
This response has completely sidestepped the crucial piece, which is to what extent [that kind of commentary] drives authors away entirely.
You’re acting as if you always have fodder for that sort of engagement, and you in fact don’t; enough jesters, and there are no kings left to critique.
That is the biggest issue I have with your writings (and that of Zack too, because he makes the same mistake): you write too much to communicate too little bits of usefulness.
Given what Zack writes about, I think he has no choice but to write this way. If he was brief, there would be politically-motivated misreadings of his posts. His only option is to write a long post which preemptively rules those out.
(Sorry for triple reply, trying to keep threads separate such that each can be responded to individually.)
what the most serious weaknesses of your argument are
I claim that the LW of 2023 is worse at correctly identifying the most serious weaknesses of a given argument than the LW of 2018.
Relative to the LW of 2018, I have the subjective sense that there’s much much more strawmanning and zeroing-in-on-non-cruxes and eliding the distinctions between “A somewhat implies B,” “A strongly implies B,” and “A is tantamount to B.”
I would genuinely expect that a hypothetical LWer who gets the gist of my arguments mostly from comments written in disagreement is, in fact, getting the gist of a cardboard cutout created by people who (say) don’t actually read the thing that I wrote, but instead spend a few minutes on the first paragraph and then leap to reply “this is insane.”
(That user has since apologized for that specific thing that they did, and I wouldn’t harp on it except that I think it’s genuinely representative of, and emblematic of, the thing that LW is more of now than it used to be five years ago. The recent response to my Basics post, for instance, contained loads and loads of stuff that I straightforwardly agree with, presented as if it was contra my claims, and it simply wasn’t.)
A user who waits to read the top couple of disagreeing comments is a user who’s gonna very quickly build a shoulder strawman without even noticing that that’s what they’re doing.
FYI I think I disagree with the 2018 vs 2023 claim here, I think everything you’re pointing at was in fact worse in 2018 (i.e. there were more users actively pushing for it, and most of them kinda left since then)
I would trust you to have a better sense of the overall LW experience, so this is evidence that this might be a my-posts problem, but it’s definitely gotten worse for me specifically. It was not this hard to get people to let go of their strawmen even with stuff like Punch Bug (which is a topic people have very strong preconceptions and feelings about).
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the shift was from [zero] to [large number]. More wanted to gesture at a shift from [moderate number] to [large number].
Like, there’s the difference between viscerally expecting one in four essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 10 lasting for a day or two, and viscerally expecting two in three essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 30 lasting for four days.
If the “ban commenter” function had not been implemented, I wouldn’t have posted any of my last five or six essays, and would be already gone.
Before reading this post, I usually would refrain from posting/commenting on LW posts partially because of the high threshold of quality for contribution (which is where I agree with you in a certain sense), and partially because it seemed more polite to ignore posts I found flaws in, or disagreed with strongly, than to engage (which costs both effort and potential reputation). Now, I believe I shall try to be more Socratic—more willing to as politely as I can point out confusions and potential issues in posts/comments I have read and found wanting, if it seems useful to readers.
I find Said’s critiquing comments (here are three good examples) extremely valuable, because they serve as a “red team” and a pruning function for the claims the post author puts forth and the reasoning behind them. What you seem to consider as a drive-by criticism (which is what I believe you think Said does) that puts forth a non-trivial cost upon you, is cost that I claim you should take upon yourself because your writing isn’t high quality enough and not “pruned” enough given the length of your posts.
That is the biggest issue I have with your writings (and that of Zack too, because he makes the same mistake): you write too much to communicate too little bits of usefulness. This is how I feel for all your 2023 posts that I have read (or skimmed, rather) -- it points to something useful, or interesting, but it is absolutely not worth the time investment of reading such huge and long-winding essays. I don’t even think you need to write them that long to provide the context you believe necessary to convey your points.
The good thing is that with comments like those of johnswentworth, Charlie Steiner, and FeepingCreature all give people like me the context they need to interpret how useful your post is, without having to read the post itself. Notice that all these comments are short and succinct while also being very relevant to the post, without nitpicking. This is the sort of writing I respect on LW. It is not coincidental that two of these three people are full time alignment researchers.
Right now, I can simply ignore your posts until they get sufficient traction (which is very easy given how popular you are) that the comments give me an idea of the core of your post and what the most serious weaknesses of your argument are, and with that I have gotten the value I need (given I skim your post while doing so, whenever relevant). However, your desire to censor Said’s comments gets in the way of this natural filter. Said’s comments provide incredible value to both you and your audience, even if you do not interact with them! To you, it provides you valuable evidence you can weigh up or down given how valuable you find Said’s comments in general, and to LW audience, it provides a way of knowing the critical weaknesses of your argument without having to read your post and parse it and try to figure out the weaknesses in it.
You claim emotional damage to yourself and to other people due to drive-by critiquing comments, and that this leads to an evaporative cooling effect where people post lesser and lesser. This seems like a problem, but given one person spending half an hour pruning their writing to improve its quality, and a hundred readers spending between ten minutes to an hour processing and individually critiquing the writing to calibrate and update their world model, I would want the writer to eat the cost. That is what I personally choose, after all. And by extension, I have realized that me critiquing other people’s contributions is also incredibly valuable, and I will start to do that more. And anyway, this probably isn’t a trade-off, and there may be solutions that do not impose a cost on either party.
As far as I know, Said seems to believe that moderation of comments should not be left to post authors because this creates a conflict of interest. Its consequences are simple: I get less value out of your posts and by extension, LW. Raemon’s decision to create an archipelago-like ecosystem makes sense to me given his goals and assumptions laid out in the post, but you seem to want more aggressive action against people whose criticisms you dislike.
“You don’t much care if This Rando doesn’t get it”, and I would be fine with that if you weren’t taking actions that have clear externalities for readers like me by making Said’s critiquing comments and comments of a similar nature by other people less welcome on LessWrong—both as a social norm and at the moderator level.
Pulling up a thought from another subthread:
Basically, I’m claiming that there are competing access needs, here, such as can be found in a classroom in which some students need things to be still and silent, and other students need to fidget and stim.
The Socrati and the Athenians are not entirely in a zero-sum game, but their dynamic has nonzero zero-sum nature. The thing that Socrates needs is inimical to the thing the Athenians need, and vice versa.
I think that’s just … visibly, straightforwardly true, here on LW; you can actually just see how, as the culture has shifted Socratesward, many authors have left.
Other authors have arrived! Socrates had many followers! There were a lot of people who liked his whole deal, and were enjoying the vibe!
But I’m claiming that the current tradeoff leans in the direction of “make things optimal for mesaoptimizer and suboptimal for Duncan_Sabien,” and separately that “things being optimal for mesaoptimizer actually makes LessWrong as a whole more likely to dry up and shut down, since LW depends on people being willing to write essays.”
(The Socrati mode being better for commenters than authors, and the Athenian mode being better for authors than for (some) commenters (such as mesaoptimizer).)
This response has completely sidestepped the crucial piece, which is to what extent [that kind of commentary] drives authors away entirely.
You’re acting as if you always have fodder for that sort of engagement, and you in fact don’t; enough jesters, and there are no kings left to critique.
Given what Zack writes about, I think he has no choice but to write this way. If he was brief, there would be politically-motivated misreadings of his posts. His only option is to write a long post which preemptively rules those out.
(Sorry for triple reply, trying to keep threads separate such that each can be responded to individually.)
I claim that the LW of 2023 is worse at correctly identifying the most serious weaknesses of a given argument than the LW of 2018.
Relative to the LW of 2018, I have the subjective sense that there’s much much more strawmanning and zeroing-in-on-non-cruxes and eliding the distinctions between “A somewhat implies B,” “A strongly implies B,” and “A is tantamount to B.”
I would genuinely expect that a hypothetical LWer who gets the gist of my arguments mostly from comments written in disagreement is, in fact, getting the gist of a cardboard cutout created by people who (say) don’t actually read the thing that I wrote, but instead spend a few minutes on the first paragraph and then leap to reply “this is insane.”
(That user has since apologized for that specific thing that they did, and I wouldn’t harp on it except that I think it’s genuinely representative of, and emblematic of, the thing that LW is more of now than it used to be five years ago. The recent response to my Basics post, for instance, contained loads and loads of stuff that I straightforwardly agree with, presented as if it was contra my claims, and it simply wasn’t.)
A user who waits to read the top couple of disagreeing comments is a user who’s gonna very quickly build a shoulder strawman without even noticing that that’s what they’re doing.
FYI I think I disagree with the 2018 vs 2023 claim here, I think everything you’re pointing at was in fact worse in 2018 (i.e. there were more users actively pushing for it, and most of them kinda left since then)
I would trust you to have a better sense of the overall LW experience, so this is evidence that this might be a my-posts problem, but it’s definitely gotten worse for me specifically. It was not this hard to get people to let go of their strawmen even with stuff like Punch Bug (which is a topic people have very strong preconceptions and feelings about).
Huh. I am surprised about that.
From another comment on this post: