Scott 2021: why do rationalists take so many psychedelic drugs? Must be Vassar’s bad influence.
Btw, I hate to pick on Scott, since he’s likely the sanest person in the whole community, but he’s also one of the most influential people there, possibly even more than Eliezer, therefore I find his lack of self awareness disturbing.
Scott: if you believe that people have auras that can implant demons into your mind then you’re clearly insane and you should seek medical help.
Also Scott: beware this charismatic Vassar guy, he can give you psychosis!
These so obviously aren’t the same thing- what’s your point here? If just general nonsense snark, I would be more inclined to appreciate it if it weren’t masquerading as an actual argument.
People do not have auras that implant demons into your mind, and alleging so is… I wish I could be more measured somehow. But it’s insane and you should probably seek medical help. On the other hand, people who are really charismatic can in fact manipulate others in really damaging ways, especially when combined with drugs etc. These are both simultaneously true, and their relationship is superficial.
Personally, when I read the cactus person thing I thought it was a joke about how using drugs to seek “enlightenment” was dumb, and aside from that it was just entertainment? That Aella thing is a single link in a sea of 40 from 5 years ago, so I don’t care. I don’t know who Vinay Gupta is- from reading Scott’s comments on that thread I get the impression he also didn’t really know who he was?
I’ll add a fourth silly piece of evidence to this list for laughs. In Unsong, the prominent villain known as the Drug Lord is evil and brainwashes people. Must be some sort of hidden message about Michael Vassar, huh? He warned us in advance!
I’m surprised that this comment is receiving positive reception. I don’t know the author, but I strong strong-downvoted the comment as it seems like a sufficiently uncharitable (e.g., calling one mention in Scott’s link posts “acritically signal-boosting”) and low-evidence (e.g., calling Luna a scam) take that it wouldn’t be taken seriously if it were written by an unknown person. If there is something important to be said here, it could have been done much better.
I appreciate the pointing out of apparent inconsistency but feel the humor is kind of mean-spirited/attacky, which maybe we should have some amount of. I wouldn’t want to see comments trending in this direction of snark too much.
I was gonna weak-upvote because I enjoyed the sass, but then the number of false/misleading claims got too high for me and I downvoted. Scott practically has a sequence about why he’s wary of psychedelics (and ‘Universal Love’ is sort of part of that sequence, riffing on the question of secret unverifiable revelations), and vV_Vv could have mentioned that!
I was like: “finally a snarky comment that I can upvote”. :D
To be able to laugh at yourself and criticism of yourself, is a mark of mental health. I am happy this community still has it. Especially in the context of discussing cultishness, suprresion of criticism, mental health, etc.
What is true is already true; if we are hypocritical about something, I would prefer to be aware of it. Furthermore, I would prefer to be told so in a friendly way and here, rather than in a hostile way and somewhere else. Because sooner or later someone else will notice it, too.
To address specific points, well… cactus person is a fiction, not a biography. MIRI/CFAR is not a cult; some things were problematic, but they can talk about them openly and fix them. Leverage… needs a separate longer conversation instead of a sidenote for a snarky comment; and frankly we do not have lot of data about them, though that fact itself is also some kind of evidence. Vassarites are not a cult, but Michael is a person you should not introduce to people you care about. Zizians… I didn’t even know they existed until I read this article, probably also not a cult, but a very unhealthy community nonetheless (for some reason they remind me of the “incel” subreddits, with all that self-reinforcing all-encompassing negativity).
I believe that the more “mentally fragile” someone is, the easier it is to push them over the edge. Vassar seems to seek out fragile people. So rather than “avoid Vassar, he can give you psychosis”, it is “if you are biologically prone to have a psychosis someday, avoid Vassar, he can trigger it, and he considers that the right thing to do”. Otherwise, talk to him freely, you may find him impressive or boring; either way, say no to the drugs he will recommend to you.
The drugs seem to be in the Bay Area water supply (metaphorically or literally? no one really knows for sure), that is another reason to move somewhere else sooner rather than later. In Bay Area, you probably can’t avoid meeting junkies every day, this shifts your “Overton window”—you assume that if you take 100 times less drugs than them, you are okay; but you don’t realize it is still 100 times more than the rest of the planet. Sometimes the easiest way to change yourself is to change your environment.
To be able to laugh at yourself and criticism of yourself, is a mark of mental health. I am happy this community still has it. Especially in the context of discussing cultishness, suprresion of criticism, mental health, etc.
Yeah, but I don’t see how you get from there to “therefore, we should invite/promote/incentivize unfair criticism”. And we definitely don’t do this in general, so there has to be something special about vV_Vv’s comment. I guess it’s probably the humor that I’m honestly not seeing in this case. The comment just seems straight-forwardly spiteful to me.
Also, there is a chance that my perception is wrong. I made my decision unconsciously; my System 1 decided so for reasons not completely transparent to me, and then it took some effort to also see it from the opposite perspective. (I suppose the line “now, some snark” is something that an actually hostile person would not write; they would just do it, without labeling it as such.)
That’s actually very interesting. Up until this reply I didn’t realize that you would go as far as to call it counter-signaling, implying that the intent of the comment wasn’t to be mean (?). I assumed that your model was “the person was mean but also funny, and that makes it ok”. (When you said it’s important to be able to laugh at oneself, did you mean to say that vV_Vv’s comment was doing that? That doesn’t seem right given that they’re not really a part of the community.)
I tend to think that I have unusually good sensors for whether someone did or didn’t intend to be mean. (I think it’s related to having status-regulating emotions.) Even after rereading the comment, I still get fairly strong “this person was trying to be mean” vibes.
In general, I think being easily offended correlates with not being successful in life, as does feeling status-regulating emotions. I have this pet theory that both are underrepresented among rationalists, which would make me an extreme exception. So maybe what was going on is that most people read it and misinterpreted it as counter-signaling, whereas a few unlucky easily-offended people like me interpreted it correctly. But it’s also possible that I’m totally wrong.
Hah, seems like I was wrong after all! Wow, I am a little disappointed—not for being wrong, but for the comment not being as funny as I believed it was. :( Because people should sometimes make jokes in situations like this, in my opinion.
My interpretation of the Cactus Person post is that it was a fictionalized account of personal experiences and and an expression of frustration about not being able to gather any real knowledge out of them, which is therefore entertained as a reasonable hypothesis to have in the first place. If I’m mistaken then I apologize to Scott, however the post is ambigious enough that I’m likely not the only person to have interpreted this way.
He also wrote one post about the early psychedelicists that ends with “There seems to me at least a moderate chance that [ psychedelics ] will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.”, and he linked to Aella describing her massive LSD use, which he commented as “what happens when you take LSD once a week for a year?” (it should have been “what happens when this person takes LSD once a week for a year, don’t try this at home, or you might end up in a padded cell or a coffin”).
I’ve never interacted with the rationalist community IRL, and in fact for the last 5 or so years my exposure to them was mostly through SSC/ACX + the occasional tweet from rat-adjacent accounts that I follow, but my impression is that psychedelic drug use was rampant in the community, with leading figures, including Scott, either partaking themselves or at least knowing about it and condoning it as nothing more than an interesting quirk. Therefore, blaming it all on a single person sounds like scapegoating, which I found something interesting to note in a funny way.
As you say, psychedelics might be just a Bay Area thing, and maybe Vassar and his Vassarites were taking it to a different level compared to the rat/Bay Aryan baseline, I don’t know them so it could be possible, in which case the finger pointing would make more sense. Still, whenever you have a formal or informal norm, you’re going to have excesses at the tails of the distribution. If your norm is “no illegal drugs, only alcohol in moderation”, the excesses will be some people who binge drink or smoke joints, if your norm is “psychedelics in moderation”, the excesses will be people who fry their brains with LSD.
As for the cultish aspects, I get the impression that while not overall a cult, the IRL rat community tends to naturally coalesce into very tightly-knit subcommunities of highly non-neurotypical (and possibly “mentally fragile”) people who hang together with little boundaries between workplace, cohabitation, friendship, dating, “spiritual” mentorship, with prevalence of questionable therapy/bonding practices (“debugging”, “circling”) and isolation from outsiders (“normies”). These subcommunites gravitate around charismatic individuals (e.g. Eliezer, Anna, Geoff, Vassar, Ziz) with very strong opinions that they argue forcefully, and are regarded as infallible leaders by their followers. I don’t know to what extend these leaders encourage this idolatry delibrately and to what extent they just find themselves in the eye of the storm, so to speak, but in any case, looking from outside, whether you call it cultish or not, it doesn’t appear like a healthy social dynamics.
The drugs seem to be in the Bay Area water supply (metaphorically or literally? no one really knows for sure), that is another reason to move somewhere else sooner rather than later. In Bay Area, you probably can’t avoid meeting junkies every day, this shifts your “Overton window”
In a bunch of comments on this post, people are giving opinions about “drugs.” I think this is the wrong level of abstraction, sorta like having an opinion about whether food is good or bad.
No offense, but the article you linked is quite terrible because it compares total deaths while completely disregarding the base rates of use. By the same logic, cycling is more dangerous than base jumping.
This said, yes, some drugs are more dangerous than others, but good policies need to be simple, unambiguous and easy to enforce. A policy of “no illegal drugs” satisfies these criteria, while a policy of “do your own research and use your own judgment” in practice means “junkies welcome”.
On the meta level, this “hey, not all drugs are bad, I can find some research online, and decide which ones are safe” way of thinking seems like what gave us the problem.
I think something like Jim’s point of overcorrecting from a coarse view of “all drugs are bad” to a coarse view of “hey, the authorities lied to us about drugs and they’re probably okay to use casually” is closer to what gave us the problem.
What does being a cult space monkey feel like from the inside?
This entire depressing thread is reminding me a little of how long it took folks who watch Rick and Morty to realize Rick is an awful abusive person, because he’s the show’s main character, and isn’t “coded” as a villain.
Ilya, I respect your expertise in causal modeling, and I appreciate when you make contributions to the site sharing things you’ve learned and helping others see the parts of the world you understand, like this and this and this. In contrast your last 5 comments on the site have net negative karma scores, getting into politics and substance-less snark on the community. A number of your comments are just short and snarky and political (example, example) or gossiping about the site (many of your comments are just complaining about Eliezer and rationalists).
I’m pretty excited about your contributions to the site when they’re substantive Ilya, but this comment is a warning that if you continue to have a string of net negative comments without contributing a lot of great stuff too, the most likely outcome is that I’ll ban you.
1. Thank you for all your effort to make LW valuable.
2. I think there’s something pretty valuable about this particular comment of Ilya’s. I’m not tracking all the tradeoffs, thinking through what it would be like if every comment this rude and judgemental were allowed, etc.; so I’ll just try to say what I think is valuable about it, without trying to make an overall judgement. It’s something like, from inside [the thing Ilya is calling a cult, insofar as it’s a thing at all], we’re at risk of feedback loopy dynamics. For example, (mis)information cascades, where people keep updating on each other’s judgements (which are only discretized summaries of previous evidence), rather than updating on each other’s observations exactly once (which would be harder). For example, narrative pyramid schemes, where stories about where a group will put its effort gain political capital in a way disconnected from object-level evaluations of consequences of plans. For example, fear of retribution materializing out of nothing, by people seeing each other act as though they’re afraid of retribution and inferring that they themselves have something to fear.
So, these feedback dynamics are bad, and also very natural. It seems valuable to have some Ilyas, who are rightly viewed as having some weight by our own supposed values, and who will break all frames of political “respect”. Frames of political respect sometimes become mechanisms for propagating pyramid schemes, and sometimes cause people to infer that those around them are deferring out of fear and so the leaders are to be feared rather than reasoned about. So, political frames contribute to mostly bad feedback dynamics, and Ilyas break political frames.
Speaking more phenomenally and less theoretically: sometimes an Ilya says something that gives me a “jolt”, and then I seem to suddenly have more access to peeking behind certain things, or being able to occupy, maybe temporarily, an outlook that’s like “a different Normal”. And this feels basically good to me, like it seems less like I’m being tugged around, and more like I’ve jumped to another spot and now I can get triangulation / parallax on more things.
Strong-upvoted for raising this consideration to mind; this is exactly the sort of object-level analysis I hoped to see more of on this topic.
My sense here is that the thing you’re talking about is quite valuable; I think the main source of divergence is likely to be located in considerations like: (1) how effectively comments like Ilya’s actually provide [the thing], and (2) how possible it is to get [the thing] without the corresponding negatives associated with comments like Ilya’s. I recognize that these points may be part of the “tradeoffs” you explicitly said you weren’t trying to track in your comment, so I don’t intend this as a request that you pivot to discussing said points (though naturally I would be thrilled if somebody did).
The thing that comes to mind, that might get us a bit of insight into (1) and (2) simultaneously, is in attempting to craft a comment that serves a similar purpose as that described in your comment, preserving the positives while (ideally) mitigating the negatives. I admit to not having a strong sense of how to create the “jolt” effect you describe, but I’ll start anyway. (I have a strong expectation that whatever I come up with be imperfect along many axes, so I welcome feedback.)
For reference, Ilya’s original comment:
“MIRI/CFAR is not a cult.”
What does being a cult space monkey feel like from the inside?
This entire depressing thread is reminding me a little of how long it took folks who watch Rick and Morty to realize Rick is an awful abusive person, because he’s the show’s main character, and isn’t “coded” as a villain.
My model is that there are two components here that are critical to creating a sufficiently sharp “jolt”: the short, pithy nature of the comment, and the obvious way in which it disregards what you (TekhneMakre) characterized as “political frames of respect”. I think these are obviously tied to, but not identical with, the norm-violating aspects of the comment that I perceived as problematic; here is my attempt at a similar comment that preserves both components without the norm-violating aspects:
“MIRI/CFAR is not a cult.”
Saying this does not make it true.
I think this comment scores approximately as well as Ilya’s on the “ignoring political frames” axis, and actually scores quite a bit better on the “shorty and pithy” axis, all while being significantly less norm-violating than his original comment.
(To be clear, I would still expect such a comment to receive negative karma, but I would expect it to receive substantially less negative karma, and also would likely not have prompted me to initiate a discussion of potential moderator action. (Though that second part would also depend heavily on whether Ilya’s counterfactual comment history were substantially different, since my decision to call him out was based [in part] on multiple past observed norm violations.))
I’d be interested in learning whether my version of the comment hits the same note for you (or other users who shared your original sense that Ilya’s comment was doing something valuable). I think there’s strong potential for updates here, especially since (as I mentioned) I don’t have a strong model of [the thing].
(Note that this exercise is not intended as a suggestion that Ilya or likeminded commenters try to post fewer things like Ilya’s original comment, and more things like mine. Not only do I expect such a suggestion to be ineffective, my model of Ilya is unlikely to be moved by the concerns outlined here; this is because I expect that [the thing] TekhneMakre was pointing to was not in fact a deliberate aim of Ilya’s comment—to the extent that it produced a positive reaction from at least some users, I expect that to be largely coincidental. The exercise is really not about Ilya, and much more about the [potentially valuable] reactions that his comment produced, intentional or otherwise.)
That phrase annoys me in general. “Saying this does not make it true” can be a reply to just about any descriptive claim someone can make? Taken at face value, it suggests the previous speaker was being dumb in a weirdly specific way that in this case (and IME usually when the phrase is used) we have no reason to think they were. Like, Villiam might be wrong about MIRI/CFAR being a cult, but he’s probably not wrong because he thinks saying they’re not a cult makes them not a cult.
My sense is that it’s mostly used to just mean “[citation needed]” but it comes across more condescending than that?
But “[citation needed]” isn’t as good either, because Ilya’s original comment was pointing at a specific possible failure mode, that I’d put in long form as something like: “people who are in cults think they’re not in cults too, so this is the kind of thing we should be especially careful about not simply believing on the strength of the normal sorts of evidence that make people believe things”. I do think this is in general good to remember. (But just because Villiam didn’t specifically acknowledge it doesn’t mean he’d forgotten it. Also, some people might go full “well I guess I’ll never know if my monthly casual D&D meet is a cult, it doesn’t feel like one but” and that would be a mistake.)
To compress again, my suggested replacement for Ilya’s comment would be simply: “what does being in a cult feel like from the inside?” Which, yeah, I still wouldn’t like as a comment, it’s still dismissive and I think not very insightful. But I think it’s at least less aggressive, and still gets across what value I think is there.
(Possibly relevant: I don’t recognize the term “space monkey” and don’t know what it means either denotatively or connotatively, except that the connotation is clearly negative. Something drug related?)
(Possibly relevant: I don’t recognize the term “space monkey” and don’t know what it means either denotatively or connotatively, except that the connotation is clearly negative. Something drug related?)
Thanks for this comment, upvote. Currently just writing a short comment, with some hope to reply more this weekend. Agree there’s strong positive from having commenters who will break all frames of “political respect”.
This comment raises to mind an interesting question, which is: to what lengths does a commenter have to go, to what extent do they have to make it clear that they are not interested in the least to contributing to productive discussion (and moreover very interested in detracting from it), before the moderation team of LW decides to take coordinated action?
I ask, not as a thinly veiled attempt to suggest that Ilya be banned (though I will opine that, were he to be banned, he would not much be missed), but because his commenting pattern is the most obvious example I can think of in recent memory of something that is clearly against, not just the stated norms of LW, but the norms of any forum interested in anything like collaborative truthseeking. It is an invitation to turn the comments section into something like a factionalized battleground, something more closely resembling the current iteration of Reddit than any vision anyone might have of something better. The fact that these invitations have so far been ignored does not obviate the fact that that is clearly and obviously what they are.
So I think this is an excellent opportunity to inquire into LW moderation policy. If such things as Ilya’s “contributions” to this thread are not considered worthy of moderator action, what factors might actually be sufficient to prompt such action? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
False!—I would miss him. I agree that comments like the grandparent are not great, but Ilya is a bona fidesubject matter expert (his Ph.D. advisor was Judea Pearl), so when he contributes references or explanations, that’s really valuable. Why escalate to banning a user when individual bad comments can be safely downvoted to invisibility?
I’m aware of Ilya’s subject matter expertise (as well as his connection to Pearl), yes. My decision to avoid mentioning said expertise was motivated in part by precisely a curiosity as to whether it would be brought up as a relevant factor in replies (for the record: I predicted that it would), and indeed it seems my prediction was borne out.
Now, recognizing that you (Zack) obviously don’t speak for the moderation team, I’d nonetheless like to ask you (and any other bystanders or—indeed—moderators who might happen to be reading this): what role do you think things like subject matter expertise ought to play in deciding whether to evict a user from an online forum?
Note 1: Despite the somewhat snide-sounding tone of the above, I do intend my question as a genuine, non-rhetorical question; I am open to the answer being something other than “none whatsoever”. I do think, however, that whatever the correct norm is here, it would benefit from being made common knowledge, even if that involves making somewhat ugly-sounding statements like “The LW moderation team will treat you differently if you are a subject matter expert compared to if you are not.”
Note 2: I also don’t mean to imply that, if Ilya were not a subject matter expert who occasionally contributes comments of real value, the comments he made here would in and of themselves be ban-worthy. This is the other part of the reason why I avoided talking about Ilya’s credentials until it was brought up by someone else: I’m entirely open to the answer to my original question (“what does it take to get a LW mod to ban somebody”) being something like, “We have a bunch of red lines, which have nothing to do with credentials, and also which Ilya’s comments entirely fail to cross, such that our decision not to ban (or take any other administrative action against) him would hold even if Ilya was not a subject matter expert.”
Note 3: Having said that, suppose it is the case that whether a commenter is ban-worthy is dependent, not purely on whether they cross some set of red lines, but on some kind of cost-benefit calculation. Then to what degree do a commenter’s non-constructive (or outright destructive) comments have to outnumber their productive contributions before the scales are considered to have tipped? Looking at Ilya’s recent comment history, the ratio of “useless” comments to “useful” comments seems quite heavily skewed in favor of “useless”, and that’s without counting the slew of comments he’s left on this post. Is the argument here that “useless” comments are in some sense “okay”, because they can all be “downvoted into invisibility”, such that the implied ratio is actually infinite, i.e. someone can make as many terrible comments as they want, as long as they’ve made at least one positive contribution in the past? Or is it merely that the ratio is some really large number? Or something else entirely?
Note 4: Perhaps the ratio isn’t the right way to think about it at all. Perhaps the idea is simply that banning a user from LW is a really serious thing to do (which somewhat lines up with Zack calling it an “escalation”), and each instance of a ban requires an in-depth discussion (cf. the decision to ban Brent’s account), such that the effort involved isn’t worth it unless the harms are really huge and obviously visible?
It’s not clear to me what the right way is to think about this. What I do know is that the impulse which triggered my initial comment was a thought along the lines of “If this was my personal blog or Facebook wall, I would consider multiple comments as bad as Ilya’s to be a ban-worthy offense.” To the extent that LW moderation norms differ from those of a personal blog or Facebook wall (and again, I am entirely open to the idea that they do differ, for sensible, important reasons!), I think it’s useful to have an open, transparent discussion of how, where, and why.
If someone’s producing lots of great ideas and posts on the site, but they’re sometimes aggressive or rude or spiky, then I will put in more effort to give them feedback and give them a lot more rope than if (on the other end of the spectrum) they’re a first time poster. If Ilya’s comment was an account’s first comment, I’d ban the account and delete the comment. That sort of new user growth is bad for the site.
Responding to this situation in particular: I had the perception that Ilya had in the past contributed substantially to the site (in large part on the topic of causal modeling), and have (in my head) been giving him leeway for that. Also I met him once at LessWrong thing in Cambridge UK when I was 16 and he was friendly, and that gave me a sense he would be open to conversation and feedback if it came. That said, looking over his past comments was much more heat to light than I expected (lots more random unpleasant and rude comments and way fewer substantive contributions), so I am a bit surprised.
Personally, I lean laissez faire on moderation: I consider banning a non-spam user from the whole website to be quite serious, and that the karma system makes a decently large (but definitely not infinite!) ratio of useless-to-useful comments acceptable. Separately from that, I admit that applying different rules to celebrities would be pretty unprincipled, but I fear that my gut feeling actually is leaning that way.
It is an invitation to turn the comments section into something like a factionalized battleground
If you want to avoid letting a comments section descend into a factionalized battleground, you also might want to avoid saying that people “would not much be missed” if they are banned. From my perspective, you’re now at about Ilya’s level, but with a lot more words (and a lot more people in your faction).
From my perspective, the commenters here have, with very few exceptions, performed admirably at not turning this thread into a factionalized battleground. (Note that my use of “admirably” here is only in relation to my already-high expectations for LW users; in the context of the broader Internet a more proper adverb might be “incredibly”.) You may note, for example, that prior to my comment, Ilya’s comment had not received a single response, indicating that no one found his bait worth biting on. Given this, I was (and remain) quite confident that my statement that Ilya “would not much be missed” would not have the factionalizing effect you imply it might have had; and indeed the resulting comments would seem to favor my prediction over yours.
Furthermore, since this observation is something you cannot possibly have missed prior to writing your comment, it seems to me quite likely that you wrote what you did for rhetorical effect; but I confess myself unclear on what, precisely, you intended to suggest with your rhetorical approach here. A surface-level reading would seem to suggest an interpretation along the lines that what I wrote and what Ilya wrote were equally bad; is this in fact what you meant? If so, I find that claim… implausible, to say the least; you may note that nowhere in my comment, for example, did I refer to Ilya as a “cult space monkey”, or attempt to draw conclusions about his character based on a televised American cartoon.
To the extent that you mean to suggest that the contents of these two comments are literally equivalent, I would submit that you need to provide (much) more argument in favor of that conclusion than you did. To the extent that you meant to equate them not in degree, but in kind… well, I suppose I can grant that to some extent; certainly I did not intend my statement that Ilya “would not much be missed” in a friendly way. But even if that’s so, I think you can agree that I’m being stunningly generous with this interpretation; without the benefit of such generosity I think it’s fair to say that your comment erases such distinctions quite badly. (This tendency to erase distinctions is a pattern I have observed from you in other threads as well, to be clear; though in your case I didn’t think your engagement style was quite bad enough to be worth calling out explicitly, at least until you basically elicited it with your reply here.)
Re-reading my comments in this thread, I think there’s a topic that’s worth treating more deeply here, without that treatment being contained within (and fettered to) a confrontational context. To be clear, I still endorse my above reply to hg00, whose comment I continue to think was bad and deserved to be called out—but I also feel there’s an analysis here that can’t be conducted while simultaneously responding to someone else’s (conflict-oriented) comment.
I’ll start with this bit in particular, since I suspect this is the part that hg00 (and others who share their concerns) would consider most directly relevant:
I ask, not as a thinly veiled attempt to suggest that Ilya be banned (though I will opine that, were he to be banned, he would not much be missed)
I think it’s entirely fair to say that the inclusion of the parenthetical clause was unnecessary, in the sense that my point could have been made just as well without it, and (as long as we’re on the topic) it was moreover likely a slight-to-moderate impediment to the advancement of my broader goal (initiating a discussion of LW’s moderation policy), since it diverts the readers’ mental cycles in an unproductive direction. It’s also fair to say that, at the time of writing my initial comment, such considerations largely did not factor into my decision to include said clause.
What did factor into my decision? I think there’s a part I endorse and a part I don’t (which is why, on the whole, I don’t think I can say I fully regret writing what I did). The part I don’t endorse is pretty simple, so I’ll start with that: it was a sense of tit-for-that, of defecting-to-punish-defection, where “defection” in this case is intended to indicate [something like] making an obviously adversarial remark with no purpose other than to be adversarial. I don’t endorse this because it’s negative-sum: repeated iterations of this action burn the commons, without trading it for anything I’d consider worthwhile.
The part I do endorse, on the other hand, is something like… I’d call it “stating the obvious”? “Identifying what others refuse to identify”? I don’t quite like that second phrase, because it makes the whole thing sound weirdly heroic and messianic, in a way that I really don’t think it is; my view is that I’d like this behavior to become more common, and that second phrase kind of construes it as the exact opposite of that. But still, I think it captures something important, which is… like...
What does being a cult space monkey feel like from the inside?
This entire depressing thread is reminding me a little of how long it took folks who watch Rick and Morty to realize Rick is an awful abusive person, because he’s the show’s main character, and isn’t “coded” as a villain.
I think this comment is terrible. Full-stop. Like, it seems uniquely terrible to me, in a way that the supermajority of comments on LessWrong are not. There’s no attempt at all to disguise this as something resembling productive criticism; it transparently and nakedly presents itself as exactly what it is: a series of ad hominem attacks with no merit whatsoever. I think, given that I’m going to talk about this at all, it would feel almost… dishonest? … to not include a part somewhere that just outright states, “Yes, this is terrible. It’s not just your imagination; I’m not going to dance around it or awkwardly imply that I dislike it less than I do; it is simply and straightforwardly terrible, and I would not miss it if it were gone.”
The alternative, it seems to me, is that some minority of commenters (including Ilya) continue to post terrible comments, and somehow despite how manifestly terrible they are it never becomes common knowledge how terrible they are (because no one ever outright says it—just downvotes and moves on, or worse, replies politely and inquisitively and in a way that never at all suggests that posting comments like this on the regular isn’t okay), and it just keeps happening over and over, death-by-a-thousand-cuts style, and meanwhile I’m standing here on the sidelines shouting HEY Y’ALL WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING--
Anyway. I don’t regret that part. I think that if a commenter (especially a well-respected one! especially a credentialed one, especially one with “celebrity” status) starts to post comments that, if they came from a new account with zero karma, would get them a moderator warning almost immediately, and somehow manage to continue doing so for years on end without so much as a single comment asking “hey what’s going on here is this okay?”, it is absolutely predictable that there will be people looking at the situation and saying to themselves, “hmm, I wonder if that kind of behavior just… passes, around these parts?” And if someone (not necessarily me, I’d have been thrilled if it wasn’t me) were to finally step in and call attention to the thing, and if in the process they included a rather impolitely worded remark to the effect that they “wouldn’t miss you if you were gone”… I can’t bring myself to entirely disendorse that behavior.
I’m standing here on the sidelines shouting HEY Y’ALL WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING--
Curiously, “HEY Y’ALL WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING” is how I read Ilya’s comment.
I’m not interested in the c-word, but the more this goes on, the more wary I am of having anything to do with MIRI, CFAR, Leverage 2.0, and any related organisations, as well as some of the individuals spoken of. Not that I ever have done, but until now that was only because I’m on another continent, and I don’t do community anyway.
And I think it’s also reasonable, given the above context, to squint suspiciously at anyone who looks at the two initial comments in question in sequence, and then says something like this:
From my perspective, you’re now at about Ilya’s level, but with a lot more words
(I already took this sentiment apart in the grandparent, of course, but the additional context should make it clear why I laser-focused on that part of the comment. And of course, it’s also helpful to have the same sentiment expressed without the cloaking of a snide, adversarial framing.)
It’s not obvious to me that Ilya meant his comment as aggressively as you took it. We’re all primates and it can be useful to be reminded of that, even if we’re primates that go to space sometimes. Asking yourself “would I be responding similar to how I’m responding now if I was, in fact, in a cult” seems potentially useful. It’s also worth remembering that people coded as good aren’t always good.
Your comment was less crass than Ilya’s, but it felt like you were slipping “we all agree my opponent is a clear norm violator” into a larger argument without providing any supporting evidence. I was triggered by a perception of manipulativeness and aggressive conformism, which put me in a more factionalistic mindset.
So, there are a number of things I want to say to this. It might first be meaningful to establish the following, however:
Asking yourself “would I be responding similar to how I’m responding now if I was, in fact, in a cult” seems potentially useful.
I don’t think I’m in a cult. (Separately, I don’t think the MIRI/CFAR associated social circle is a cult.)
The reason I include the qualifier “separately” is because, in my case, these are very much two separate claims: I do not live in the Bay Area or any other rationalist community “hot spot”, I have had (to my knowledge) no physical contact with any member of the rationalist community, “core” or otherwise, and the surrounding social fabric I’m embedded in is about as far from cult-like as you can get. So even if MIRI/CFAR were a cult—that is to say, even if the second of my claims were false—they could not have transmitted their “cultishness” to me except by means of writing stuff on the Internet… and at that point I very much dispute that “cultishness” is even the right framing to be using.
(Yes, memes are proof that ideas can propagate without a supporting social fabric. However, I have seen little evidence that the idea cluster associated with MIRI is particularly “memetically fit”, except in the entirely ordinary sense that the ideas they peddle seemingly make sense to quite a lot of people who aren’t physically part of the rationalist community—which you would also observe if they were just, y’know, true.)
There’s more I want to say about your framing; I think it misses the mark in several other ways, the most prominent of which is the amount of emphasis you give to the meta level as opposed to the object level (and in fact the comment I just linked is also downthread of a reply to you). But I think it’s best to circumscribe different topics of discussion to different threads, so if you have anything to say about that topic, I’d ask that you reply to the linked comment instead of this one.
As far as the topic of this comment thread is concerned… no, I don’t think your impression was mistaken. That is to say, the thing you sensed from me, which you described as
“we all agree my opponent is a clear norm violator”
is something I intended to convey with my comment… well, not really the part about Ilya being my “opponent” (and I’m also not sure what you mean by “slipping [it] into a larger argument”, mind you)--but the part about norm violations is absolutely a correct reading of my intentions. I think (and continue to think) that Ilya’s comment was in blatant violation of a bunch of norms, and I maintain that calling it out was the right thing to do. There is no plausible interpretation I can imagine under which calling somebody a “cult space monkey” can remotely be construed as non-norm-violating; to the extent that you disagree with this, I think you are simply, straightforwardly incorrect.
(It sounds like you view statements like the above as an expression of “aggressive conformism”. I could go on about how I disagree with that, but instead I’ll simply note that under a slight swap of priors, one could easily make the argument that it was the original comment by Ilya that’s an example of “aggressive conformism”. And yet I note that for some reason your perception of aggressive conformism was only triggered in response to a comment attacking a position with which you happen to agree, rather than by the initial comment itself. I think it’s quite fair to call this a worrisome flag—by your own standards, no less.)
To be absolutely clear: it sounds as though you are under the impression that I criticized Ilya’s comment because he called MIRI/CFAR a cult, and since I disagreed with that, I tried to label him a “norm violator” in order to invalidate his assertion. (This would make sense of your use of the word “opponent”, and also nails down the “larger argument” I presume you presumed I was insinuating.) This is not the case. I criticized Ilya’s comment because (not to put too fine a point on it) it was a fucking terrible comment, and because I don’t visit LW so I can see people compare each other to characters from Rick and Morty (or call people fascists, or accuse people of health fraud, or whatever the hell this is). Contrary to what you may be inclined to think, not everyone here selectively levels criticism at things they disagree with.
Separately, I don’t think the MIRI/CFAR associated social circle is a cult.
Nor do I. (I’ve donated money to at least one of those organizations.) [Edit: I think they might be too tribal for their own good—many groups are—but the word “cult” seems too strong.]
I do think MIRI/CFAR is to some degree an “internet tribe”. You’ve probably noticed that those can be pathological.
Anyway, you’re writing a lot of words here. There’s plenty of space to propose or cite a specific norm, explain why you think it’s a generally good norm, and explain why Ilya violated it. I think if you did that, and left off the rest of the rhetoric, it would read as more transparent and less manipulative to me. A norm against “people [comparing] each other to characters from Rick and Morty” seems suspiciously specific to this case (and also not necessarily a great norm in general).
Basically I’m getting more of an “ostracize him!” vibe than a “how can we keep the garden clean?” vibe—you were pretending to do the second one in your earlier comment, but I think the cursing here makes it clear that your true intention is more like the first. I don’t like mob justice, even if the person is guilty. (BTW, proposing specific norms also helps keep you honest, e.g. if your proposed norm was “don’t be crass”, cursing would violate that norm.)
(It sounds like you view statements like the above as an expression of “aggressive conformism”. I could go on about how I disagree with that, but instead I’ll simply note that under a slight swap of priors, one could easily make the argument that it was the original comment by Ilya that’s an example of “aggressive conformism”. And yet I note that for some reason your perception of aggressive conformism was only triggered in response to a comment attacking a position with which you happen to agree, rather than by the initial comment itself. I think it’s quite fair to call this a worrisome flag—by your own standards, no less.)
Ilya’s position is not one I agree with.
I’m annoyed by aggressive conformism wherever I see it. When it comes to MIRI/CFAR, my instinct is to defend them in venues where everyone criticizes them, and criticize them in venues where everyone defends them.
I’ll let you have the last word in this thread. Hopefully that will cut down on unwanted meta-level discussion.
Basically I’m getting more of an “ostracize him!” vibe than a “how can we keep the garden clean?” vibe—you were pretending to do the second one in your earlier comment, but I think the cursing here makes it clear that your true intention is more like the first.
I didn’t respond to this earlier, but I think I’d also like to flag here that I don’t appreciate this (inaccurate) attempt to impute my intentions. I will state it outright: your reading of my intention is incorrect, and also seems to me to be based on a very flimsy reasoning process.
(To expand on that last part: I don’t believe “cursing” acts a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular. Certainly I intended my words to have a certain rhetorical effect there, else I would not have chosen the words I did—but the part where you immediately draw from that some conclusion about my “true intention” seems to me invalid, both in general and in this specific case.)
META: I debated with myself for a while about whether to post the parent comment, and—if I posted it—whether to adjust the wording to come across as less sharp. In the end, I judged that posting the comment I did was the best option given the circumstances, but I’d like to offer some further commentary on my thought process here.
From my perspective, conversations that occur under an adversarial framing are (mostly) not productive, and it was (and remains) quite obvious to me that my reply above is largely adversarial. I mostly view this as an inescapable cost of replying in this case; when someone alleges that your comments have some nefarious intention behind them, the adversarial framing is pretty much baked in, and if you want to defuse that framing there’s really no way to do it outside of ignoring the allegation entirely… which I did contemplate doing. (Which is why my other, earlier reply was was short, and addressed only what I saw as the main concern.)
I ultimately decided against remaining silent here because I judged that the impact of allowing such an allegation to stand would be to weaken the impact of all of my other comments in this subthread, including ones that make points I think are important. I am nonetheless saddened that there is no way to address such a claim without shifting the conversation at least somewhat back towards the adversarial frame, and thusly I am annoyed and frustrated that such a conversational move was rendered necessary. (If anyone has suggestions for how to better navigate this tradeoff in the future, I am open to hearing them.)
Separately: I suspect a large part of the adversarial interpretation here in fact arises directly from the role of the person posting the comment. When I wrote the parent comment, I attempted to include some neutral observations on the reasoning of the grandparent (e.g. “I don’t believe ‘cursing’ acts as a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular”). And I’m quite confident that, had this remark been made by a third party, it would be interpreted for the most part as a neutral observation. But I anticipate that, because the remark in question was made by me (the person against whom the initial allegation was leveled), it will acquire a subtext that it would not otherwise possess.
I currently also see this as a mostly unavoidable consequence of the framing here. I don’t see a good way to circumvent this, but at the same time I find myself rather keenly aware (and, if I’m to be honest, slightly resentful) of the way in which this prevents otherwise ordinary commentary from having the same effect it normally would. The net effect of this dynamic, I expect, is to discourage people from posting “neutral observations” in situations where they might reasonably expect that those observations will come across as adversarially coded.
Again: I don’t have a good model of how to mitigate this effect (ideally while retaining the benefits of the heuristic in question); it’s plausible to me that this may be intractable as long as we’re dealing with humans. It nonetheless feels particularly salient to me at the moment, so I think I want to draw attention to it.
When I wrote the parent comment, I attempted to include some neutral observations on the reasoning of the grandparent (e.g. “I don’t believe ‘cursing’ acts as a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular”). And I’m quite confident that, had this remark been made by a third party, it would be interpreted for the most part as a neutral observation.
I’m happy to endorse the content of the parent comment. I’m a fan of (constructive, gentle-but-firm) pushback against people making large assertions about the contents of other people’s thoughts and intentions, without much more substantial evidence.
Anyway, you’re writing a lot of words here. There’s plenty of space to propose or cite a specific norm, explain why you think it’s a generally good norm, and explain why Ilya violated it. I think if you did that, and left off the rest of the rhetoric, it would read as more transparent and less manipulative to me. A norm against “people [comparing] each other to characters from Rick and Morty” seems suspiciously specific to this case (and also not necessarily a great norm in general).
Okay, sure. I think LW should (and for the most part, does) have a norm against personal attacks. I think LW should also (and again, for the most part, does) have a norm against low-effort sniping. I think Ilya’s comment[ing pattern] runs afoul of both of these norms (and does so rather obviously to boot), neither of which (I claim) is “suspiciously specific” in the way you describe.
IlyaShpister’s comments are worthy of moderator attention, I’m looking at them now.
The recent community discussion threads, this one alone at 741 comments, have exceeded the team’s (or at least my) capacity to read and review every comment. Maybe we should set up a way for us to at least review every negative karma comment.
Thanks for your reply. I didn’t intend my comment to impose any kind of implicit obligation on you or any other member of the mod team (especially if your capacity is as strained as it is), so to the extent that my initial comment came across as exerting social pressure for you to shift your priorities away from other more pressing concerns, I regret wording things the way I did, and hereby explicitly disavow that interpretation.
These are important questions, though, that you’ve raised. I consider it a piece of “integrity debt” (as Ray would call it) that we don’t have clear transparent moderation policies posted anywhere. I hope to get to that soonish and hopefully I can at least answer some of the questions you raised tomorrow.
Dusting off this old account of mine just to say I told you so.
Now, some snark:
“Leverage is a cult!”
“No, MIRI/CFAR is a cult!”
“No, the Vassarites are a cult!”
“No, the Zizians are a cult!”
Scott: if you believe that people have auras that can implant demons into your mind then you’re clearly insane and you should seek medical help.
Also Scott: beware this charismatic Vassar guy, he can give you psychosis!
Scott 2015: Universal love, said the cactus person
Scott 2016: acritically signal boosts Aella talking about her inordinate drug use.
Scott 2018: promotes a scamcoin by Aella and Vinay Gupta, a differently sane tech entrepreneur-cum-spiritual guru, who apparently burned his brain during a “collaborative celebration” session.
Scott 2021: why do rationalists take so many psychedelic drugs? Must be Vassar’s bad influence.
Btw, I hate to pick on Scott, since he’s likely the sanest person in the whole community, but he’s also one of the most influential people there, possibly even more than Eliezer, therefore I find his lack of self awareness disturbing.
That’s all folks
These so obviously aren’t the same thing- what’s your point here? If just general nonsense snark, I would be more inclined to appreciate it if it weren’t masquerading as an actual argument.
People do not have auras that implant demons into your mind, and alleging so is… I wish I could be more measured somehow. But it’s insane and you should probably seek medical help. On the other hand, people who are really charismatic can in fact manipulate others in really damaging ways, especially when combined with drugs etc. These are both simultaneously true, and their relationship is superficial.
Personally, when I read the cactus person thing I thought it was a joke about how using drugs to seek “enlightenment” was dumb, and aside from that it was just entertainment? That Aella thing is a single link in a sea of 40 from 5 years ago, so I don’t care. I don’t know who Vinay Gupta is- from reading Scott’s comments on that thread I get the impression he also didn’t really know who he was?
I’ll add a fourth silly piece of evidence to this list for laughs. In Unsong, the prominent villain known as the Drug Lord is evil and brainwashes people. Must be some sort of hidden message about Michael Vassar, huh? He warned us in advance!
I’m surprised that this comment is receiving positive reception. I don’t know the author, but I strong strong-downvoted the comment as it seems like a sufficiently uncharitable (e.g., calling one mention in Scott’s link posts “acritically signal-boosting”) and low-evidence (e.g., calling Luna a scam) take that it wouldn’t be taken seriously if it were written by an unknown person. If there is something important to be said here, it could have been done much better.
I enjoyed it (and upvoted) for humor plus IMO having a point. Humor is great after a thread this long.
I appreciate the pointing out of apparent inconsistency but feel the humor is kind of mean-spirited/attacky, which maybe we should have some amount of. I wouldn’t want to see comments trending in this direction of snark too much.
I didn’t vote either way.
I was gonna weak-upvote because I enjoyed the sass, but then the number of false/misleading claims got too high for me and I downvoted. Scott practically has a sequence about why he’s wary of psychedelics (and ‘Universal Love’ is sort of part of that sequence, riffing on the question of secret unverifiable revelations), and vV_Vv could have mentioned that!
I was like: “finally a snarky comment that I can upvote”. :D
To be able to laugh at yourself and criticism of yourself, is a mark of mental health. I am happy this community still has it. Especially in the context of discussing cultishness, suprresion of criticism, mental health, etc.
What is true is already true; if we are hypocritical about something, I would prefer to be aware of it. Furthermore, I would prefer to be told so in a friendly way and here, rather than in a hostile way and somewhere else. Because sooner or later someone else will notice it, too.
To address specific points, well… cactus person is a fiction, not a biography. MIRI/CFAR is not a cult; some things were problematic, but they can talk about them openly and fix them. Leverage… needs a separate longer conversation instead of a sidenote for a snarky comment; and frankly we do not have lot of data about them, though that fact itself is also some kind of evidence. Vassarites are not a cult, but Michael is a person you should not introduce to people you care about. Zizians… I didn’t even know they existed until I read this article, probably also not a cult, but a very unhealthy community nonetheless (for some reason they remind me of the “incel” subreddits, with all that self-reinforcing all-encompassing negativity).
I believe that the more “mentally fragile” someone is, the easier it is to push them over the edge. Vassar seems to seek out fragile people. So rather than “avoid Vassar, he can give you psychosis”, it is “if you are biologically prone to have a psychosis someday, avoid Vassar, he can trigger it, and he considers that the right thing to do”. Otherwise, talk to him freely, you may find him impressive or boring; either way, say no to the drugs he will recommend to you.
The drugs seem to be in the Bay Area water supply (metaphorically or literally? no one really knows for sure), that is another reason to move somewhere else sooner rather than later. In Bay Area, you probably can’t avoid meeting junkies every day, this shifts your “Overton window”—you assume that if you take 100 times less drugs than them, you are okay; but you don’t realize it is still 100 times more than the rest of the planet. Sometimes the easiest way to change yourself is to change your environment.
Yeah, but I don’t see how you get from there to “therefore, we should invite/promote/incentivize unfair criticism”. And we definitely don’t do this in general, so there has to be something special about vV_Vv’s comment. I guess it’s probably the humor that I’m honestly not seeing in this case. The comment just seems straight-forwardly spiteful to me.
Yes, humor makes the difference between “unfair” and “hyperbolic”. (Or the hyperbole makes the humor. Uhhh… explaining humor isn’t my forte.)
However, countersignaling is risky, and your reaction is an evidence for that.
Also, there is a chance that my perception is wrong. I made my decision unconsciously; my System 1 decided so for reasons not completely transparent to me, and then it took some effort to also see it from the opposite perspective. (I suppose the line “now, some snark” is something that an actually hostile person would not write; they would just do it, without labeling it as such.)
That’s actually very interesting. Up until this reply I didn’t realize that you would go as far as to call it counter-signaling, implying that the intent of the comment wasn’t to be mean (?). I assumed that your model was “the person was mean but also funny, and that makes it ok”. (When you said it’s important to be able to laugh at oneself, did you mean to say that vV_Vv’s comment was doing that? That doesn’t seem right given that they’re not really a part of the community.)
I tend to think that I have unusually good sensors for whether someone did or didn’t intend to be mean. (I think it’s related to having status-regulating emotions.) Even after rereading the comment, I still get fairly strong “this person was trying to be mean” vibes.
In general, I think being easily offended correlates with not being successful in life, as does feeling status-regulating emotions. I have this pet theory that both are underrepresented among rationalists, which would make me an extreme exception. So maybe what was going on is that most people read it and misinterpreted it as counter-signaling, whereas a few unlucky easily-offended people like me interpreted it correctly. But it’s also possible that I’m totally wrong.
Hah, seems like I was wrong after all! Wow, I am a little disappointed—not for being wrong, but for the comment not being as funny as I believed it was. :( Because people should sometimes make jokes in situations like this, in my opinion.
My interpretation of the Cactus Person post is that it was a fictionalized account of personal experiences and and an expression of frustration about not being able to gather any real knowledge out of them, which is therefore entertained as a reasonable hypothesis to have in the first place. If I’m mistaken then I apologize to Scott, however the post is ambigious enough that I’m likely not the only person to have interpreted this way.
He also wrote one post about the early psychedelicists that ends with “There seems to me at least a moderate chance that [ psychedelics ] will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.”, and he linked to Aella describing her massive LSD use, which he commented as “what happens when you take LSD once a week for a year?” (it should have been “what happens when this person takes LSD once a week for a year, don’t try this at home, or you might end up in a padded cell or a coffin”).
I’ve never interacted with the rationalist community IRL, and in fact for the last 5 or so years my exposure to them was mostly through SSC/ACX + the occasional tweet from rat-adjacent accounts that I follow, but my impression is that psychedelic drug use was rampant in the community, with leading figures, including Scott, either partaking themselves or at least knowing about it and condoning it as nothing more than an interesting quirk. Therefore, blaming it all on a single person sounds like scapegoating, which I found something interesting to note in a funny way.
As you say, psychedelics might be just a Bay Area thing, and maybe Vassar and his Vassarites were taking it to a different level compared to the rat/Bay Aryan baseline, I don’t know them so it could be possible, in which case the finger pointing would make more sense. Still, whenever you have a formal or informal norm, you’re going to have excesses at the tails of the distribution. If your norm is “no illegal drugs, only alcohol in moderation”, the excesses will be some people who binge drink or smoke joints, if your norm is “psychedelics in moderation”, the excesses will be people who fry their brains with LSD.
As for the cultish aspects, I get the impression that while not overall a cult, the IRL rat community tends to naturally coalesce into very tightly-knit subcommunities of highly non-neurotypical (and possibly “mentally fragile”) people who hang together with little boundaries between workplace, cohabitation, friendship, dating, “spiritual” mentorship, with prevalence of questionable therapy/bonding practices (“debugging”, “circling”) and isolation from outsiders (“normies”). These subcommunites gravitate around charismatic individuals (e.g. Eliezer, Anna, Geoff, Vassar, Ziz) with very strong opinions that they argue forcefully, and are regarded as infallible leaders by their followers. I don’t know to what extend these leaders encourage this idolatry delibrately and to what extent they just find themselves in the eye of the storm, so to speak, but in any case, looking from outside, whether you call it cultish or not, it doesn’t appear like a healthy social dynamics.
In a bunch of comments on this post, people are giving opinions about “drugs.” I think this is the wrong level of abstraction, sorta like having an opinion about whether food is good or bad.
Different drugs have wildly different effect and risk profiles – it doesn’t make sense to lump them all together into one category.
No offense, but the article you linked is quite terrible because it compares total deaths while completely disregarding the base rates of use. By the same logic, cycling is more dangerous than base jumping.
This said, yes, some drugs are more dangerous than others, but good policies need to be simple, unambiguous and easy to enforce. A policy of “no illegal drugs” satisfies these criteria, while a policy of “do your own research and use your own judgment” in practice means “junkies welcome”.
Technically, yes.
On the meta level, this “hey, not all drugs are bad, I can find some research online, and decide which ones are safe” way of thinking seems like what gave us the problem.
I think something like Jim’s point of overcorrecting from a coarse view of “all drugs are bad” to a coarse view of “hey, the authorities lied to us about drugs and they’re probably okay to use casually” is closer to what gave us the problem.
“MIRI/CFAR is not a cult.”
What does being a cult space monkey feel like from the inside?
This entire depressing thread is reminding me a little of how long it took folks who watch Rick and Morty to realize Rick is an awful abusive person, because he’s the show’s main character, and isn’t “coded” as a villain.
Ilya, I respect your expertise in causal modeling, and I appreciate when you make contributions to the site sharing things you’ve learned and helping others see the parts of the world you understand, like this and this and this. In contrast your last 5 comments on the site have net negative karma scores, getting into politics and substance-less snark on the community. A number of your comments are just short and snarky and political (example, example) or gossiping about the site (many of your comments are just complaining about Eliezer and rationalists).
I’m pretty excited about your contributions to the site when they’re substantive Ilya, but this comment is a warning that if you continue to have a string of net negative comments without contributing a lot of great stuff too, the most likely outcome is that I’ll ban you.
1. Thank you for all your effort to make LW valuable.
2. I think there’s something pretty valuable about this particular comment of Ilya’s. I’m not tracking all the tradeoffs, thinking through what it would be like if every comment this rude and judgemental were allowed, etc.; so I’ll just try to say what I think is valuable about it, without trying to make an overall judgement. It’s something like, from inside [the thing Ilya is calling a cult, insofar as it’s a thing at all], we’re at risk of feedback loopy dynamics. For example, (mis)information cascades, where people keep updating on each other’s judgements (which are only discretized summaries of previous evidence), rather than updating on each other’s observations exactly once (which would be harder). For example, narrative pyramid schemes, where stories about where a group will put its effort gain political capital in a way disconnected from object-level evaluations of consequences of plans. For example, fear of retribution materializing out of nothing, by people seeing each other act as though they’re afraid of retribution and inferring that they themselves have something to fear.
So, these feedback dynamics are bad, and also very natural. It seems valuable to have some Ilyas, who are rightly viewed as having some weight by our own supposed values, and who will break all frames of political “respect”. Frames of political respect sometimes become mechanisms for propagating pyramid schemes, and sometimes cause people to infer that those around them are deferring out of fear and so the leaders are to be feared rather than reasoned about. So, political frames contribute to mostly bad feedback dynamics, and Ilyas break political frames.
Speaking more phenomenally and less theoretically: sometimes an Ilya says something that gives me a “jolt”, and then I seem to suddenly have more access to peeking behind certain things, or being able to occupy, maybe temporarily, an outlook that’s like “a different Normal”. And this feels basically good to me, like it seems less like I’m being tugged around, and more like I’ve jumped to another spot and now I can get triangulation / parallax on more things.
Strong-upvoted for raising this consideration to mind; this is exactly the sort of object-level analysis I hoped to see more of on this topic.
My sense here is that the thing you’re talking about is quite valuable; I think the main source of divergence is likely to be located in considerations like: (1) how effectively comments like Ilya’s actually provide [the thing], and (2) how possible it is to get [the thing] without the corresponding negatives associated with comments like Ilya’s. I recognize that these points may be part of the “tradeoffs” you explicitly said you weren’t trying to track in your comment, so I don’t intend this as a request that you pivot to discussing said points (though naturally I would be thrilled if somebody did).
The thing that comes to mind, that might get us a bit of insight into (1) and (2) simultaneously, is in attempting to craft a comment that serves a similar purpose as that described in your comment, preserving the positives while (ideally) mitigating the negatives. I admit to not having a strong sense of how to create the “jolt” effect you describe, but I’ll start anyway. (I have a strong expectation that whatever I come up with be imperfect along many axes, so I welcome feedback.)
For reference, Ilya’s original comment:
My model is that there are two components here that are critical to creating a sufficiently sharp “jolt”: the short, pithy nature of the comment, and the obvious way in which it disregards what you (TekhneMakre) characterized as “political frames of respect”. I think these are obviously tied to, but not identical with, the norm-violating aspects of the comment that I perceived as problematic; here is my attempt at a similar comment that preserves both components without the norm-violating aspects:
I think this comment scores approximately as well as Ilya’s on the “ignoring political frames” axis, and actually scores quite a bit better on the “shorty and pithy” axis, all while being significantly less norm-violating than his original comment.
(To be clear, I would still expect such a comment to receive negative karma, but I would expect it to receive substantially less negative karma, and also would likely not have prompted me to initiate a discussion of potential moderator action. (Though that second part would also depend heavily on whether Ilya’s counterfactual comment history were substantially different, since my decision to call him out was based [in part] on multiple past observed norm violations.))
I’d be interested in learning whether my version of the comment hits the same note for you (or other users who shared your original sense that Ilya’s comment was doing something valuable). I think there’s strong potential for updates here, especially since (as I mentioned) I don’t have a strong model of [the thing].
(Note that this exercise is not intended as a suggestion that Ilya or likeminded commenters try to post fewer things like Ilya’s original comment, and more things like mine. Not only do I expect such a suggestion to be ineffective, my model of Ilya is unlikely to be moved by the concerns outlined here; this is because I expect that [the thing] TekhneMakre was pointing to was not in fact a deliberate aim of Ilya’s comment—to the extent that it produced a positive reaction from at least some users, I expect that to be largely coincidental. The exercise is really not about Ilya, and much more about the [potentially valuable] reactions that his comment produced, intentional or otherwise.)
I think your suggestion doesn’t work as well.
That phrase annoys me in general. “Saying this does not make it true” can be a reply to just about any descriptive claim someone can make? Taken at face value, it suggests the previous speaker was being dumb in a weirdly specific way that in this case (and IME usually when the phrase is used) we have no reason to think they were. Like, Villiam might be wrong about MIRI/CFAR being a cult, but he’s probably not wrong because he thinks saying they’re not a cult makes them not a cult.
My sense is that it’s mostly used to just mean “[citation needed]” but it comes across more condescending than that?
But “[citation needed]” isn’t as good either, because Ilya’s original comment was pointing at a specific possible failure mode, that I’d put in long form as something like: “people who are in cults think they’re not in cults too, so this is the kind of thing we should be especially careful about not simply believing on the strength of the normal sorts of evidence that make people believe things”. I do think this is in general good to remember. (But just because Villiam didn’t specifically acknowledge it doesn’t mean he’d forgotten it. Also, some people might go full “well I guess I’ll never know if my monthly casual D&D meet is a cult, it doesn’t feel like one but” and that would be a mistake.)
To compress again, my suggested replacement for Ilya’s comment would be simply: “what does being in a cult feel like from the inside?” Which, yeah, I still wouldn’t like as a comment, it’s still dismissive and I think not very insightful. But I think it’s at least less aggressive, and still gets across what value I think is there.
(Possibly relevant: I don’t recognize the term “space monkey” and don’t know what it means either denotatively or connotatively, except that the connotation is clearly negative. Something drug related?)
I would guess it’s a reference to the movie Fight Club.
Thanks for this comment, upvote. Currently just writing a short comment, with some hope to reply more this weekend. Agree there’s strong positive from having commenters who will break all frames of “political respect”.
This comment raises to mind an interesting question, which is: to what lengths does a commenter have to go, to what extent do they have to make it clear that they are not interested in the least to contributing to productive discussion (and moreover very interested in detracting from it), before the moderation team of LW decides to take coordinated action?
I ask, not as a thinly veiled attempt to suggest that Ilya be banned (though I will opine that, were he to be banned, he would not much be missed), but because his commenting pattern is the most obvious example I can think of in recent memory of something that is clearly against, not just the stated norms of LW, but the norms of any forum interested in anything like collaborative truthseeking. It is an invitation to turn the comments section into something like a factionalized battleground, something more closely resembling the current iteration of Reddit than any vision anyone might have of something better. The fact that these invitations have so far been ignored does not obviate the fact that that is clearly and obviously what they are.
So I think this is an excellent opportunity to inquire into LW moderation policy. If such things as Ilya’s “contributions” to this thread are not considered worthy of moderator action, what factors might actually be sufficient to prompt such action? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
False!—I would miss him. I agree that comments like the grandparent are not great, but Ilya is a bona fide subject matter expert (his Ph.D. advisor was Judea Pearl), so when he contributes references or explanations, that’s really valuable. Why escalate to banning a user when individual bad comments can be safely downvoted to invisibility?
I’m aware of Ilya’s subject matter expertise (as well as his connection to Pearl), yes. My decision to avoid mentioning said expertise was motivated in part by precisely a curiosity as to whether it would be brought up as a relevant factor in replies (for the record: I predicted that it would), and indeed it seems my prediction was borne out.
Now, recognizing that you (Zack) obviously don’t speak for the moderation team, I’d nonetheless like to ask you (and any other bystanders or—indeed—moderators who might happen to be reading this): what role do you think things like subject matter expertise ought to play in deciding whether to evict a user from an online forum?
Note 1: Despite the somewhat snide-sounding tone of the above, I do intend my question as a genuine, non-rhetorical question; I am open to the answer being something other than “none whatsoever”. I do think, however, that whatever the correct norm is here, it would benefit from being made common knowledge, even if that involves making somewhat ugly-sounding statements like “The LW moderation team will treat you differently if you are a subject matter expert compared to if you are not.”
Note 2: I also don’t mean to imply that, if Ilya were not a subject matter expert who occasionally contributes comments of real value, the comments he made here would in and of themselves be ban-worthy. This is the other part of the reason why I avoided talking about Ilya’s credentials until it was brought up by someone else: I’m entirely open to the answer to my original question (“what does it take to get a LW mod to ban somebody”) being something like, “We have a bunch of red lines, which have nothing to do with credentials, and also which Ilya’s comments entirely fail to cross, such that our decision not to ban (or take any other administrative action against) him would hold even if Ilya was not a subject matter expert.”
Note 3: Having said that, suppose it is the case that whether a commenter is ban-worthy is dependent, not purely on whether they cross some set of red lines, but on some kind of cost-benefit calculation. Then to what degree do a commenter’s non-constructive (or outright destructive) comments have to outnumber their productive contributions before the scales are considered to have tipped? Looking at Ilya’s recent comment history, the ratio of “useless” comments to “useful” comments seems quite heavily skewed in favor of “useless”, and that’s without counting the slew of comments he’s left on this post. Is the argument here that “useless” comments are in some sense “okay”, because they can all be “downvoted into invisibility”, such that the implied ratio is actually infinite, i.e. someone can make as many terrible comments as they want, as long as they’ve made at least one positive contribution in the past? Or is it merely that the ratio is some really large number? Or something else entirely?
Note 4: Perhaps the ratio isn’t the right way to think about it at all. Perhaps the idea is simply that banning a user from LW is a really serious thing to do (which somewhat lines up with Zack calling it an “escalation”), and each instance of a ban requires an in-depth discussion (cf. the decision to ban Brent’s account), such that the effort involved isn’t worth it unless the harms are really huge and obviously visible?
It’s not clear to me what the right way is to think about this. What I do know is that the impulse which triggered my initial comment was a thought along the lines of “If this was my personal blog or Facebook wall, I would consider multiple comments as bad as Ilya’s to be a ban-worthy offense.” To the extent that LW moderation norms differ from those of a personal blog or Facebook wall (and again, I am entirely open to the idea that they do differ, for sensible, important reasons!), I think it’s useful to have an open, transparent discussion of how, where, and why.
I do a cost-benefit calculation.
If someone’s producing lots of great ideas and posts on the site, but they’re sometimes aggressive or rude or spiky, then I will put in more effort to give them feedback and give them a lot more rope than if (on the other end of the spectrum) they’re a first time poster. If Ilya’s comment was an account’s first comment, I’d ban the account and delete the comment. That sort of new user growth is bad for the site.
Responding to this situation in particular: I had the perception that Ilya had in the past contributed substantially to the site (in large part on the topic of causal modeling), and have (in my head) been giving him leeway for that. Also I met him once at LessWrong thing in Cambridge UK when I was 16 and he was friendly, and that gave me a sense he would be open to conversation and feedback if it came. That said, looking over his past comments was much more heat to light than I expected (lots more random unpleasant and rude comments and way fewer substantive contributions), so I am a bit surprised.
I’ve now given Ilya a warning upthread.
Thanks for replying; strong-upvote for displaying transparency.
Personally, I lean laissez faire on moderation: I consider banning a non-spam user from the whole website to be quite serious, and that the karma system makes a decently large (but definitely not infinite!) ratio of useless-to-useful comments acceptable. Separately from that, I admit that applying different rules to celebrities would be pretty unprincipled, but I fear that my gut feeling actually is leaning that way.
If you want to avoid letting a comments section descend into a factionalized battleground, you also might want to avoid saying that people “would not much be missed” if they are banned. From my perspective, you’re now at about Ilya’s level, but with a lot more words (and a lot more people in your faction).
From my perspective, the commenters here have, with very few exceptions, performed admirably at not turning this thread into a factionalized battleground. (Note that my use of “admirably” here is only in relation to my already-high expectations for LW users; in the context of the broader Internet a more proper adverb might be “incredibly”.) You may note, for example, that prior to my comment, Ilya’s comment had not received a single response, indicating that no one found his bait worth biting on. Given this, I was (and remain) quite confident that my statement that Ilya “would not much be missed” would not have the factionalizing effect you imply it might have had; and indeed the resulting comments would seem to favor my prediction over yours.
Furthermore, since this observation is something you cannot possibly have missed prior to writing your comment, it seems to me quite likely that you wrote what you did for rhetorical effect; but I confess myself unclear on what, precisely, you intended to suggest with your rhetorical approach here. A surface-level reading would seem to suggest an interpretation along the lines that what I wrote and what Ilya wrote were equally bad; is this in fact what you meant? If so, I find that claim… implausible, to say the least; you may note that nowhere in my comment, for example, did I refer to Ilya as a “cult space monkey”, or attempt to draw conclusions about his character based on a televised American cartoon.
To the extent that you mean to suggest that the contents of these two comments are literally equivalent, I would submit that you need to provide (much) more argument in favor of that conclusion than you did. To the extent that you meant to equate them not in degree, but in kind… well, I suppose I can grant that to some extent; certainly I did not intend my statement that Ilya “would not much be missed” in a friendly way. But even if that’s so, I think you can agree that I’m being stunningly generous with this interpretation; without the benefit of such generosity I think it’s fair to say that your comment erases such distinctions quite badly. (This tendency to erase distinctions is a pattern I have observed from you in other threads as well, to be clear; though in your case I didn’t think your engagement style was quite bad enough to be worth calling out explicitly, at least until you basically elicited it with your reply here.)
Re-reading my comments in this thread, I think there’s a topic that’s worth treating more deeply here, without that treatment being contained within (and fettered to) a confrontational context. To be clear, I still endorse my above reply to hg00, whose comment I continue to think was bad and deserved to be called out—but I also feel there’s an analysis here that can’t be conducted while simultaneously responding to someone else’s (conflict-oriented) comment.
I’ll start with this bit in particular, since I suspect this is the part that hg00 (and others who share their concerns) would consider most directly relevant:
I think it’s entirely fair to say that the inclusion of the parenthetical clause was unnecessary, in the sense that my point could have been made just as well without it, and (as long as we’re on the topic) it was moreover likely a slight-to-moderate impediment to the advancement of my broader goal (initiating a discussion of LW’s moderation policy), since it diverts the readers’ mental cycles in an unproductive direction. It’s also fair to say that, at the time of writing my initial comment, such considerations largely did not factor into my decision to include said clause.
What did factor into my decision? I think there’s a part I endorse and a part I don’t (which is why, on the whole, I don’t think I can say I fully regret writing what I did). The part I don’t endorse is pretty simple, so I’ll start with that: it was a sense of tit-for-that, of defecting-to-punish-defection, where “defection” in this case is intended to indicate [something like] making an obviously adversarial remark with no purpose other than to be adversarial. I don’t endorse this because it’s negative-sum: repeated iterations of this action burn the commons, without trading it for anything I’d consider worthwhile.
The part I do endorse, on the other hand, is something like… I’d call it “stating the obvious”? “Identifying what others refuse to identify”? I don’t quite like that second phrase, because it makes the whole thing sound weirdly heroic and messianic, in a way that I really don’t think it is; my view is that I’d like this behavior to become more common, and that second phrase kind of construes it as the exact opposite of that. But still, I think it captures something important, which is… like...
I think this comment is terrible. Full-stop. Like, it seems uniquely terrible to me, in a way that the supermajority of comments on LessWrong are not. There’s no attempt at all to disguise this as something resembling productive criticism; it transparently and nakedly presents itself as exactly what it is: a series of ad hominem attacks with no merit whatsoever. I think, given that I’m going to talk about this at all, it would feel almost… dishonest? … to not include a part somewhere that just outright states, “Yes, this is terrible. It’s not just your imagination; I’m not going to dance around it or awkwardly imply that I dislike it less than I do; it is simply and straightforwardly terrible, and I would not miss it if it were gone.”
The alternative, it seems to me, is that some minority of commenters (including Ilya) continue to post terrible comments, and somehow despite how manifestly terrible they are it never becomes common knowledge how terrible they are (because no one ever outright says it—just downvotes and moves on, or worse, replies politely and inquisitively and in a way that never at all suggests that posting comments like this on the regular isn’t okay), and it just keeps happening over and over, death-by-a-thousand-cuts style, and meanwhile I’m standing here on the sidelines shouting HEY Y’ALL WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING--
Anyway. I don’t regret that part. I think that if a commenter (especially a well-respected one! especially a credentialed one, especially one with “celebrity” status) starts to post comments that, if they came from a new account with zero karma, would get them a moderator warning almost immediately, and somehow manage to continue doing so for years on end without so much as a single comment asking “hey what’s going on here is this okay?”, it is absolutely predictable that there will be people looking at the situation and saying to themselves, “hmm, I wonder if that kind of behavior just… passes, around these parts?” And if someone (not necessarily me, I’d have been thrilled if it wasn’t me) were to finally step in and call attention to the thing, and if in the process they included a rather impolitely worded remark to the effect that they “wouldn’t miss you if you were gone”… I can’t bring myself to entirely disendorse that behavior.
Curiously, “HEY Y’ALL WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING” is how I read Ilya’s comment.
I’m not interested in the c-word, but the more this goes on, the more wary I am of having anything to do with MIRI, CFAR, Leverage 2.0, and any related organisations, as well as some of the individuals spoken of. Not that I ever have done, but until now that was only because I’m on another continent, and I don’t do community anyway.
And I think it’s also reasonable, given the above context, to squint suspiciously at anyone who looks at the two initial comments in question in sequence, and then says something like this:
(I already took this sentiment apart in the grandparent, of course, but the additional context should make it clear why I laser-focused on that part of the comment. And of course, it’s also helpful to have the same sentiment expressed without the cloaking of a snide, adversarial framing.)
It’s not obvious to me that Ilya meant his comment as aggressively as you took it. We’re all primates and it can be useful to be reminded of that, even if we’re primates that go to space sometimes. Asking yourself “would I be responding similar to how I’m responding now if I was, in fact, in a cult” seems potentially useful. It’s also worth remembering that people coded as good aren’t always good.
Your comment was less crass than Ilya’s, but it felt like you were slipping “we all agree my opponent is a clear norm violator” into a larger argument without providing any supporting evidence. I was triggered by a perception of manipulativeness and aggressive conformism, which put me in a more factionalistic mindset.
So, there are a number of things I want to say to this. It might first be meaningful to establish the following, however:
I don’t think I’m in a cult. (Separately, I don’t think the MIRI/CFAR associated social circle is a cult.)
The reason I include the qualifier “separately” is because, in my case, these are very much two separate claims: I do not live in the Bay Area or any other rationalist community “hot spot”, I have had (to my knowledge) no physical contact with any member of the rationalist community, “core” or otherwise, and the surrounding social fabric I’m embedded in is about as far from cult-like as you can get. So even if MIRI/CFAR were a cult—that is to say, even if the second of my claims were false—they could not have transmitted their “cultishness” to me except by means of writing stuff on the Internet… and at that point I very much dispute that “cultishness” is even the right framing to be using.
(Yes, memes are proof that ideas can propagate without a supporting social fabric. However, I have seen little evidence that the idea cluster associated with MIRI is particularly “memetically fit”, except in the entirely ordinary sense that the ideas they peddle seemingly make sense to quite a lot of people who aren’t physically part of the rationalist community—which you would also observe if they were just, y’know, true.)
There’s more I want to say about your framing; I think it misses the mark in several other ways, the most prominent of which is the amount of emphasis you give to the meta level as opposed to the object level (and in fact the comment I just linked is also downthread of a reply to you). But I think it’s best to circumscribe different topics of discussion to different threads, so if you have anything to say about that topic, I’d ask that you reply to the linked comment instead of this one.
As far as the topic of this comment thread is concerned… no, I don’t think your impression was mistaken. That is to say, the thing you sensed from me, which you described as
is something I intended to convey with my comment… well, not really the part about Ilya being my “opponent” (and I’m also not sure what you mean by “slipping [it] into a larger argument”, mind you)--but the part about norm violations is absolutely a correct reading of my intentions. I think (and continue to think) that Ilya’s comment was in blatant violation of a bunch of norms, and I maintain that calling it out was the right thing to do. There is no plausible interpretation I can imagine under which calling somebody a “cult space monkey” can remotely be construed as non-norm-violating; to the extent that you disagree with this, I think you are simply, straightforwardly incorrect.
(It sounds like you view statements like the above as an expression of “aggressive conformism”. I could go on about how I disagree with that, but instead I’ll simply note that under a slight swap of priors, one could easily make the argument that it was the original comment by Ilya that’s an example of “aggressive conformism”. And yet I note that for some reason your perception of aggressive conformism was only triggered in response to a comment attacking a position with which you happen to agree, rather than by the initial comment itself. I think it’s quite fair to call this a worrisome flag—by your own standards, no less.)
To be absolutely clear: it sounds as though you are under the impression that I criticized Ilya’s comment because he called MIRI/CFAR a cult, and since I disagreed with that, I tried to label him a “norm violator” in order to invalidate his assertion. (This would make sense of your use of the word “opponent”, and also nails down the “larger argument” I presume you presumed I was insinuating.) This is not the case. I criticized Ilya’s comment because (not to put too fine a point on it) it was a fucking terrible comment, and because I don’t visit LW so I can see people compare each other to characters from Rick and Morty (or call people fascists, or accuse people of health fraud, or whatever the hell this is). Contrary to what you may be inclined to think, not everyone here selectively levels criticism at things they disagree with.
Nor do I. (I’ve donated money to at least one of those organizations.) [Edit: I think they might be too tribal for their own good—many groups are—but the word “cult” seems too strong.]
I do think MIRI/CFAR is to some degree an “internet tribe”. You’ve probably noticed that those can be pathological.
Anyway, you’re writing a lot of words here. There’s plenty of space to propose or cite a specific norm, explain why you think it’s a generally good norm, and explain why Ilya violated it. I think if you did that, and left off the rest of the rhetoric, it would read as more transparent and less manipulative to me. A norm against “people [comparing] each other to characters from Rick and Morty” seems suspiciously specific to this case (and also not necessarily a great norm in general).
Basically I’m getting more of an “ostracize him!” vibe than a “how can we keep the garden clean?” vibe—you were pretending to do the second one in your earlier comment, but I think the cursing here makes it clear that your true intention is more like the first. I don’t like mob justice, even if the person is guilty. (BTW, proposing specific norms also helps keep you honest, e.g. if your proposed norm was “don’t be crass”, cursing would violate that norm.)
Ilya’s position is not one I agree with.
I’m annoyed by aggressive conformism wherever I see it. When it comes to MIRI/CFAR, my instinct is to defend them in venues where everyone criticizes them, and criticize them in venues where everyone defends them.
I’ll let you have the last word in this thread. Hopefully that will cut down on unwanted meta-level discussion.
I didn’t respond to this earlier, but I think I’d also like to flag here that I don’t appreciate this (inaccurate) attempt to impute my intentions. I will state it outright: your reading of my intention is incorrect, and also seems to me to be based on a very flimsy reasoning process.
(To expand on that last part: I don’t believe “cursing” acts a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular. Certainly I intended my words to have a certain rhetorical effect there, else I would not have chosen the words I did—but the part where you immediately draw from that some conclusion about my “true intention” seems to me invalid, both in general and in this specific case.)
META: I debated with myself for a while about whether to post the parent comment, and—if I posted it—whether to adjust the wording to come across as less sharp. In the end, I judged that posting the comment I did was the best option given the circumstances, but I’d like to offer some further commentary on my thought process here.
From my perspective, conversations that occur under an adversarial framing are (mostly) not productive, and it was (and remains) quite obvious to me that my reply above is largely adversarial. I mostly view this as an inescapable cost of replying in this case; when someone alleges that your comments have some nefarious intention behind them, the adversarial framing is pretty much baked in, and if you want to defuse that framing there’s really no way to do it outside of ignoring the allegation entirely… which I did contemplate doing. (Which is why my other, earlier reply was was short, and addressed only what I saw as the main concern.)
I ultimately decided against remaining silent here because I judged that the impact of allowing such an allegation to stand would be to weaken the impact of all of my other comments in this subthread, including ones that make points I think are important. I am nonetheless saddened that there is no way to address such a claim without shifting the conversation at least somewhat back towards the adversarial frame, and thusly I am annoyed and frustrated that such a conversational move was rendered necessary. (If anyone has suggestions for how to better navigate this tradeoff in the future, I am open to hearing them.)
Separately: I suspect a large part of the adversarial interpretation here in fact arises directly from the role of the person posting the comment. When I wrote the parent comment, I attempted to include some neutral observations on the reasoning of the grandparent (e.g. “I don’t believe ‘cursing’ acts as a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular”). And I’m quite confident that, had this remark been made by a third party, it would be interpreted for the most part as a neutral observation. But I anticipate that, because the remark in question was made by me (the person against whom the initial allegation was leveled), it will acquire a subtext that it would not otherwise possess.
I currently also see this as a mostly unavoidable consequence of the framing here. I don’t see a good way to circumvent this, but at the same time I find myself rather keenly aware (and, if I’m to be honest, slightly resentful) of the way in which this prevents otherwise ordinary commentary from having the same effect it normally would. The net effect of this dynamic, I expect, is to discourage people from posting “neutral observations” in situations where they might reasonably expect that those observations will come across as adversarially coded.
Again: I don’t have a good model of how to mitigate this effect (ideally while retaining the benefits of the heuristic in question); it’s plausible to me that this may be intractable as long as we’re dealing with humans. It nonetheless feels particularly salient to me at the moment, so I think I want to draw attention to it.
I’m happy to endorse the content of the parent comment. I’m a fan of (constructive, gentle-but-firm) pushback against people making large assertions about the contents of other people’s thoughts and intentions, without much more substantial evidence.
Okay, sure. I think LW should (and for the most part, does) have a norm against personal attacks. I think LW should also (and again, for the most part, does) have a norm against low-effort sniping. I think Ilya’s comment[ing pattern] runs afoul of both of these norms (and does so rather obviously to boot), neither of which (I claim) is “suspiciously specific” in the way you describe.
IlyaShpister’s comments are worthy of moderator attention, I’m looking at them now.
The recent community discussion threads, this one alone at 741 comments, have exceeded the team’s (or at least my) capacity to read and review every comment. Maybe we should set up a way for us to at least review every negative karma comment.
Thanks for your reply. I didn’t intend my comment to impose any kind of implicit obligation on you or any other member of the mod team (especially if your capacity is as strained as it is), so to the extent that my initial comment came across as exerting social pressure for you to shift your priorities away from other more pressing concerns, I regret wording things the way I did, and hereby explicitly disavow that interpretation.
I appreciate the considerateness!
These are important questions, though, that you’ve raised. I consider it a piece of “integrity debt” (as Ray would call it) that we don’t have clear transparent moderation policies posted anywhere. I hope to get to that soonish and hopefully I can at least answer some of the questions you raised tomorrow.