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.)
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.)