This whole comment is a psy-op. It was a mistake for me to leave a comment up above in the first place, and I came to my senses and deleted it literally less than a minute after I hit “enter,” but that didn’t stop Zack from replying twenty minutes later and now we have a thread so fine, whatever.
When Zack’s weird baggage leaks into his attempted rationality lessons, he calls people insane and then writes multi-thousand-word screeds based on his flawed interpretations, which he magnanimously says the other person is perfectly welcome to correct! leaving people the following options:
Spend hours and hours of their scant remaining lifetimes laboriously correcting the thousand-yard sprint he already took down the wrong trailhead, or
Leave his uncanny valley misinterpretation there, unaddressed, where it will forever anchor subsequent interpretations, pulling them toward an attractor, and also make the author seem churlish or suspiciously unable-to-rebut (which lends his interpretation further apparent strength)
… which makes being here exhausting and intolerable.
Zack could, of course, just not do this. It’s entirely within his power! He could (for instance), when he forms a knee-jerk interpretation of someone else’s statement that he finds crazy or upsetting, simply ask whether that was the interpretation the author intended, before charging full-steam ahead with a preemptive critique or rebuttal.
(You know, the way you would if you were here to collaborate, and had a shred of respect for your interlocutors.)
This is even easier! It requires less effort! It doesn’t require e.g. being charitable, which for some reason Zack would rather die than do.
But Zack does not do this, because, for whatever reason, Zack values [preserving his god-given right to be a jump-to-conclusions asshole] over things like that. He’ll claim to be sad about our inability to communicate well, but he’s not actually sad enough to cut it out, or even just cut back a little.
(I think it’s wise to be suspicious of people who claim to feel an emotion like sorrow or regret, but do not behave in the ways that someone-feeling-sorrow or someone-feeling-regret would behave; often they have mislabeled something in their experience.)
After cutting him more slack than I cut anybody else for months, the essay where I finally gave up was clearly a partial draft posted by mistake (it petered out after two sections into random fragments and bullet points and scraps of unconnected paragraphs), and it literally said, at the top, sentences to the effect of “these initial short summaries allow for multiple interpretations, some of which I do not intend; please do not shoot off an objection before reading the expansion below, where that interpretation might already have been addressed.”
But within mere minutes, Zack, willfully ignoring that straightforward request, ignoring the obvious incomplete nature of the essay, and ignoring the text wherein his objection was, in fact, addressed, shot off a comment saying that what I was recommending was insane, and then knocking over a strawman.
This was not an aberrant event. It was typical. It was one more straw on the camel’s back. The most parsimonious explanation for why Zack does this instead of any number of more productive moves is that Zack wants his interlocutors to be wrong, so that Zack can be the one to go “look! Look!” and everyone will appreciate how clever he was in pointing out the hole in the argument. He wants me to be wrong badly enough that he’ll distort my point however far he needs to in order to justify writing an essay allegedly “in response.”
(I’m perfectly free to correct him! All I have to do is let him take my hours and my spoons hostage!)
And given that, and given that I eventually could not stand his counterproductive anti-epistemic soul-sucking time wastery any longer, he has the temerity to insinuate that he’s morally superior because he’d never block anyone, no, sir. Or that it’s my fault that we don’t have a line of communication, because he’s happy to talk with me.
FUCK.
Enjoy your sanctimony. You are choosing to make the world worse.
the essay where I finally gave up [...] This was not an aberrant event. [...] one more straw on the camel’s back
Yes, that December 2021 incident was over the line. I’m sorry. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that—but if I had taken a few more moments to think, I would have been able to see it without retrospect. That was really stupid of me, and it made things worse for both of us.
You’re also correct to notice that the bad behavior that I don’t endorse on reflection can be seen as a more extreme version of milder behavior that I do endorse on reflection. (Thus the idiom “over the line”, suggesting that things that don’t go over the line are OK.) I wish I had been smart enough to only do the mild version, and never overshoot into the extreme version.
ignoring the text wherein his objection was, in fact, addressed
Are you referring to the paragraph that begins, “If two people disagree, it’s tempting for them to attempt to converge with each other [...]”? In a comment to Phil H., I explained why that paragraph didn’t satisfy me. (Although, as I acknowledged to Phil, it’s plausible that I should have quoted and acknowledged that paragraph in my post, to make it clearer to readers what you weren’t saying; I’ll probably do so if I get around to revising the post.)
If you’re not referring to that paragraph, I’m not sure where you think my objection has been addressed.
(I think I would have noticed if that paragraph had been in the December 2021 version, but if you say it was, I’ll take your word for it—which would imply that my December 2021 behavior was even worse than I’ve already admitted; I owe you a much bigger apology in that case.)
leaving people the following options
I agree that this is an unpleasant dilemma for an author to face, but to me, it seems like an inextricable feature of intellectual life? Sometimes, other authors have a perspective contrary to yours that they argue for in public, and they might sometimes refer to your writings in the course of arguing for their perspective. I don’t see any “policy” solution here.
simply ask whether that was the interpretation the author intended
Why isn’t this relevantly similar to what Said does, though?
I’m worried that your preferred norms make it way too easy for an author to censor legitimate criticisms. If the critic does too little interpretive labor (just asking questions and expecting the author to be able to answer, like Said), the author can dismiss them for not trying hard enough. If the critic does too much interpretive labor (writing multi-thousand word posts explaining in detail what they think the problem is, without necessarily expecting the author to have time to reply, like me), the author can dismiss them for attacking a strawman.
I imagine you don’t agree with that characterization, but I hope you can see why it looks like a potential problem to me?
if you were here to collaborate
I’m not always here to collaborate. Sometimes I’m here to criticize. I endorse this on reflection.
had a shred of respect for your interlocutors.
I mean, I respect some of your work. For two concrete examples, I link to “In My Culture” sometimes, and I think “Split and Commit” is a useful reminder to try to live in multiple possible worlds instead of assuming that your “max likelihood” map is equal to the territory. (I think I need to practice this one more.)
But more generally, when people think they’re entitled to my respect rather than having to earn it, that does, actually, make me respect them less than I otherwise would. That might be what you’re picking up on when you perceive that I don’t have a shred of respect for my interlocutors?
suspicious of people who claim to feel an emotion like sorrow or regret, but do not behave in the ways that someone-feeling-sorrow or someone-feeling-regret would behave; often they have mislabeled something in their experience
That’s a good observation, thanks. I think the thing I initially labeled as “sad” is really just … wishing we weren’t in this slapfight?
Since you did try to hold me culpable, I had an interest in responding to that … and here we are. This seems like a bad possible world to live in. I think it’s unpleasant for both of us, and I think it’s wasting a lot of time that both of us could spend doing more productive things.
I could have avoided this outcome by not writing posts about my objections to your Fifth Guideline or Rob’s Ninth Element … but then the Fifth Guideline and the Ninth Element would have been accepted into the local culture unchallenged. That would be a problem for me. I think it was worth my effort try to prevent that outcome, even though it resulted in this outcome, which is unpleasant and expensive.
I think that’s what I meant by “sad”, in more words.
so that Zack can be the one to go “look! Look!” and everyone will appreciate how clever he was in pointing out the hole in the argument
… I think I’m going to bite this bullet? Yes, I sometimes take pride and pleasure in criticizing work that I think is importantly mistaken. The reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically (I think it’s fine if someone gets excited about poking holes in my arguments), and because I think the combination of me and the community is pretty good at distinguishing good criticisms from bad criticisms.
He wants me to be wrong badly enough
I don’t think it’s personal. As you’ve noticed, I’m hyper-sensitive to attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness, because I’m viscerally terrified of what I think they’ll degrade to in practice. You’ll notice that I also argued against Rob’s Ninth Element, not just your Fifth Guideline. It’s not about Rob. It’s not about you. It’s about protecting my interests.
You are choosing to make the world worse.
We’re definitely steering the world in different directions. It looks like some of the things I think are net-positive (having more good aspects than bad aspects) are things that you think are net-negative, which puts us in conflict sometimes. That’s unfortunate.
(I think I would have noticed if that paragraph had been in the December 2021 version, but if you say it was, I’ll take your word for it—which would imply that my December 2021 behavior was even worse than I’ve already admitted; I owe you a much bigger apology in that case.)
It was. That’s why I was (and remain) so furious with you (Edit: and also am by default highly mistrustful of your summaries of others’ positions).
Thanks for telling me (strong-upvoted). That makes sense as a reason for you to be furious with me. As the grandparent says, I owe you a bigger apology than my previous apology, which appears below.
I hereby apologize for my blog comment of 4 December 2021, on an earlier revision of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”. In addition to the reasons that it was a bad comment in context that I listed in my previous apology, it was also a bad comment for failing to acknowledge that the text of the post contained a paragraph addressing the comment’s main objection, which is a much more serious error. I am embarrassed at my negligence. To avoid such errors in the future, I will endeavor to take some time to emotionally cool down and read more carefully before posting a comment, when I notice that I’m tempted to post a comment while emotionally activated.
If you’d like me to post a variation of this in a more prominent location (like Facebook or Twitter), I’d be willing to do that. (I think I’d want to spend a few more minutes to rewrite the lesser reasons that the comment was bad in context as its own sentence, rather than linking to the previous apology.)
I don’t know what to say in response. Empirically, this apology did zero to reduce the extremely strong deterrent of “God dammit, if I try to post something on LessWrong, one way or another Zack and Said are going to find a way to make that experience miserable and net negative,” which, in combination with the energy that this thread burned up, has indeed resulted in me not posting, where counterfactually I would’ve posted three essays.
(I’m only here now because you’re bumping the threads.)
(Like, there are three specific, known essays that I have not posted, because of my expectations coming off of this thread and the chilling effect of “I’ll have to deal with Zack and Said’s responses.”)
(Also the reason my Basics post ended up being so long-winded was because, after my experience with the partial draft going up by mistake, I was trying quite hard to leave a future Zack no ways to make me regret publishing/no exposed surfaces upon which I could be attacked. I ended up putting in about 20 extra hours because of my past experience with you, which clearly did not end up paying off; I underestimated just how motivated you would be to adversarially interpret and twist things around.)
I tried blocking, and that wasn’t enough to get you to leave me alone.
I’m worried that your preferred norms make it way too easy for an author to censor legitimate criticisms. If the critic does too little interpretive labor (just asking questions and expecting the author to be able to answer, like Said), the author can dismiss them for not trying hard enough. If the critic does too much interpretive labor (writing multi-thousand word posts explaining in detail what they think the problem is, without necessarily expecting the author to have time to reply, like me), the author can dismiss them for attacking a strawman.
Literally only you and Said have these twin problems (among long-lasting prolific LW participants). This is you saying “but but but if you claim ZERO is too little and a BILLION is too much, then how is there any room for legitimate criticism to exist?”
It’s somewhere between zero and a billion, like every other person on LessWrong manages to do just fine all the time.
Late edit: we have a term for this thing; it’s called “fallacy of the grey.”
Literally only you and Said have these twin problems (among long-lasting prolific LW participants). This is you saying “but but but if you claim ZERO is too little and a BILLION is too much, then how is there any room for legitimate criticism to exist?”
It’s somewhere between zero and a billion, like every other person on LessWrong manages to do just fine all the time.
I think it’s important to note survivorship bias here; I think there are other people who used to post on LessWrong and do not anymore, and perhaps this was because of changes in norms like this one.[1] It also seems somewhat likely to me that Said and Zack think that there’s too little legitimate criticism on LW. (I often see critical points by Zack or Said that I haven’t yet seen made by others and which I agree with; are they just faster or are they counterfactual? I would guess the latter, at least some of the time.)
As well, Zack’s worry is that even if the guideline is written by people who have a sense that criticism should be between 4 and 12, establishing the rule with user-chosen values (like, for example, LW has done for a lot of post moderation) will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6; if it will be obvious to you when some other post author has adopted that standard, and you’ll call them out on it in a way that protects Zack’s ability to criticize them, that seems like relevant info from Zack’s perspective.
(From this comment I instead have a sense that your position is “look, we’re over here playing a game with everyone who understands these rules, and Zack and Said don’t, which means they should stop playing our game.”)
[1] To be clear, I don’t miss everyone who has stopped posting on LW; the hope with rules and guidelines like this is that you filter well. I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I don’t think I am making this request.
I do strongly predict that if I made free to verbally abuse Zack in the same fashion Zack verbally abuses others, I would be punished more for it, in part because people would be like “well, yeah, but Zack just kinda is like that; you should do better, Duncan” and in part because people would be like “DUDE, Zack had a traumatic experience with the medical system, you calling him insane is WAY WORSE than calling someone else insane” and “well, if you’re not gonna follow your own discourse rules, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
It’s an asymmetric situation that favors the assholes; people tend not to notice “oh, Duncan rearmed with these weapons he advocates disarming because his interlocutors refused to join the peace treaty.”
Sure, I buy that any functional garden doesn’t just punish hypocrisy, but also failing to follow the rules of the garden, which I’m imputing as a motivation for your second and third paragraphs. (I also buy that lots of “let people choose how to be” approaches favor assholes.)
But… I think there’s some other message in them, that I can’t construct correctly? It seems to me like we’re in a broader cultural environment where postmodern dissolution of moral standards means the only reliable vice to attack others for is hypocrisy. I see your second and third paragraphs as, like, a mixture of disagreeing with this (‘I should not be criticized for hypocrisy as strongly as I predict I would be if I were hypocritical’) and maybe making a counteraccusation of hypocrisy (‘if there were evenly applied standards of conduct, I would be protected from Zack’s misbehavior, but as is I am prevented from attacking Zack but the reverse is not true’).
But I don’t think I really agree with either of those points, as I understand them. I do think hypocrisy is a pretty strong argument against the proposed rules, and also that double standards can make sense (certainly I try to hold LW moderators to higher standards than LW users).
“I’d like for us to not have a culture wherein it’s considered perfectly kosher to walk around responding to other users’ posts with e.g. ‘This is insane’ without clearing a pretty high bar of, y’know, the thing actually being insane. To the extent that Zack is saying ‘hey, it’s fine, you can verbally abuse me, too!’ this is not a viable solution.”
Fortunately, it seems that LessWrong generally agrees; both my suggested norms and Robbie’s suggested norms were substantially more popular than either of Zack’s weirdly impassioned defenses-of-being-a-jerk.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “neutral norms” if you don’t mean either “the norms Duncan’s proposing, that are in line with what Julia Galef and Scott Alexander and Dan Keys and Eric Rogstad and Oliver Habryka and Vaniver and so on and so forth would do by default,” or “the norms Zack is proposing, in which you act like a dick and defend it by saying ‘it’s important to me that I be able to speak plainly and directly.’”
I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I instead have a sense that your position is “look, we’re over here playing a game with everyone who understands these rules, and Zack and Said don’t, which means they should stop playing our game.”
No, I’m not saying Zack and Said should stop playing the game, I’m saying they should stop being sanctimonious about their inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
I would be surprised to hear you claim that the valid critical points that Zack and Said make are contingent on them continuing to do the shitty things of (respectively) leaping to conclusions about A definitely implying B, or refusing to believe that A implies A until someone logically proves A→A. The times I’ve seen Zack and Said being useful or perceptive were when they weren’t doing these useless and unproductive moves, but rather just saying what they thought.
When Zack says what he thinks, instead of going “hey, everybody, look how abhorrent my strawman of Rob’s position is!” and trying to trick everyone into thinking that was Rob’s position and that he is the sole bastion of epistemic virtue holding back the tides of evil, it’s often useful.
When Said says what he thinks, instead of demanding that people rigorously define “sky,” “blue,” and “is” before allowing the conversation to move on from the premise “the sky is blue today,” it’s often useful.
There’s absolutely nothing that Zack is currently accomplishing that couldn’t have been accomplished if he’d first written a comment to Rob saying “did you mean X?”
He could’ve even gone off and drafted his post while waiting on an answer; it needn’t have even delayed his longer rant, if Rob failed to reply.
Acting like a refusal to employ that bare minimum of social grace is a virtue is bullshit, and I think Zack acts like it is. If you’re that hostile to your fellow LWers, then I think you are making a mistake being here.
There’s absolutely nothing that Zack is currently accomplishing that couldn’t have been accomplished if he’d first written a comment to Rob saying “did you mean X?” [...] Acting like a refusal to employ that bare minimum of social grace is a virtue is bullshit
It’s not that I think refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace is a virtue. It’s that I wasn’t aware—in fact, am still not aware—that confirming interpretations with the original author before publishing a critical essay constitutes the bare minimum of social grace. The idea that it’s somehow bad behavior for intellectuals to publish essays about other intellectuals’ essays without checking with the original author first is something I’ve never heard before; I think unilaterally publishing critical essays is a completely normal thing that intellectuals do all the time, and I see no particular reason for self-identified “rationalist” intellectuals to behave any differently.
For an arbitrary example from our local subculture, Yudkowsky once wrote “A Reply to Francois Chollet” criticizing Chollet’s essay on the purported impossibility of an intelligence explosion. Did Yudkowsky first write an email to Chollet saying “did you mean X”? I don’t know, but I would guess not; if Chollet stands by the text he published, and Yudkowsky doesn’t feel uncertain about how to interpret the text, it’s not clear how either of their interests would be served by Yudkowsky sending an email first rather than just publishing the post.
I didn’t check with Leong beforehand. I didn’t check with Yudkowsky beforehand. I didn’t check with Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. No one told me I should have checked with Leong or Yudkowsky or Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. It’s just never been brought up as a problem or an offense before, ever.
Most of these authors are much more important people than me who are probably very busy. If someone had told me I should have checked with the authors beforehand, I think I would have said, “Wouldn’t that be disrespectful of their time?”
I do often notify the author after I’ve published a reaction piece. In the case of the current post, I unfortunately neglected to do so, but after seeing your comment, I did reach out to Rob, and he left afewcomments. Notably, in response to my comment about my motivations for writing this post, Rob writes:
Seems great to me! I share your intuition that Goodwill seems a bit odd to include. I think it’s right to push back on proposed norms like these and talk about how justified they are, and I hope my list can be the start of a conversation like that rather than the end.
This would seem to be pretty strong counterevidence against the claim that I failed to employ the bare minimum of social grace (at least as that minimum is construed by Rob himself)?
… inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
My objection to this sort of claim is basically the same as my objection to this, from an earlier comment of yours:
[Interacting with Said] has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer
And similar to my objection in a much earlier discussion (which I can’t seem to find now, apologies) about Double Crux (I think), wherein (I am summarizing from memory) you said that you have usually been able to easily explain and apply the concept when teaching it to people in person, as a CFAR instructor; to which I asked how you could distinguish between your interlocutor/student really understanding you, vs. the social pressure of the situation (the student/teacher frame, your personal charisma, etc.) causing them, perhaps, to persuade themselves that they’ve understood, when in fact they have not.
In short, the problem is this:
If “sharing interpretive labor”, “making intellectual progress”, etc., just boils down to “agreeing with you, without necessarily getting any closer to (or perhaps even getting further away from) the truth”, then of course you would observe exactly what you say you observe, yes?
And yet it would, in this scenario, be very bad if you self-selected into discussions where everyone had (it would seem to you) an easy time “sharing interpretive labor”, where you routinely made (or so you would think) plenty of “intellectual progress”, etc.
No doubt you disagree with this view of things. But on what basis? How can you tell that this isn’t what’s happening?
That’s not what I meant. I affirm Vaniver’s interpretation (“Zack’s worry is that [...] establishing the rule with user-chosen values [...] will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6”).
(In my culture, it’s important that I say “That’s not what I meant” rather than “That’s a strawman”, because the former is agnostic about who is “at fault”. In my culture, there’s a much stronger duty on writers to write clearly than there is on readers to maintain uncertainty about the author’s intent; if I’m unhappy that the text I wrote led someone to jump to the wrong conclusion, I more often think that I should have written better text, rather than that the reader shouldn’t have jumped.)
Another attempt to explain the concern (if Vaniver’s “above 8 and below 6” remark wasn’t sufficient): suppose there were a dishonest author named Mallory, who never, ever admitted she was wrong, even when she was obviously wrong. How can Less Wrong protect against Mallory polluting our shared map with bad ideas?
My preferred solution (it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I have) is to have a culture that values unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse. That is, if Mallory writes a post that I think is bad, I can write a comment (or even a top-level reply or reaction post, if I have a lot to say) explaining why I think the post is bad. The hope is that if my criticism is good, then people will upvote my criticism and downvote Mallory’s post, and if my criticism is bad—for example, by mischaracterizing the text of Mallory’s post—then Mallory or someone else can write a comment to me explaining why my reply mischaracterizes the text of Mallory’s post, and people will upvote the meta-criticism and downvote my reply.
It’s crucial to the functioning of this system that criticism does not require Mallory’s consent. If we instead had a culture that enthusiastically supported Mallory banning commenters who (in Mallory’s personal judgement) aren’t trying hard enough to see reasons why they’re the one that’s missing something and Mallory is in the right, or who don’t feel collaborative or cooperative to interact with (to Mallory), or who are anchoring readers with uncanny-valley interpretations (according to Mallory), I think that would be a problem, because there would be nothing to stop Mallory from motivatedly categorizing everyone who saw real errors in her thinking as un-collaborative and therefore unfit to speak.
The culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse isn’t without its costs, but if someone wanted to persuade me to try something else, I would want to hear about how their culture reacts to Mallory.
This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
(e.g. repeatedly asserting that Y is tantamount to X and underplaying or outright ignoring the ways in which Y is not X; if you vehemently shout “Carthage delenda est” enough times people do indeed start becoming more and more afraid of Carthage regardless of whether or nor this is justified.)
You basically extort effort from people, with your long-winded bad takes, leaving the author with a choice between:
a) allowing your demagoguery to take over everyone’s perceptions of their point, now that you’ve dragged it toward a nearby (usually terrible) attractor, such that even though it said Y everybody’s going to subsequently view it through the filter of your X-interpretation, or
b) effortfully rebutting every little bit of your flood of usually-motivated-by-antipathy words.
Eventually, this becomes exhausting enough that the correct move is to kick Mallory out of the garden, where they do not belong and are making everything worse far disproportionate to their contribution.
Mallory can go write their rebuttals in any of the other ten thousand places on the internet that aren’t specifically trying to collaborate on clear thinking, clear communication, and truth-seeking.
The garden of LessWrong is not particularly well-kept, though.
This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
This does not seem like it should be possible for arbitrary X and Y, and so if Zack manages to pull it off in some cases, it seems likely that those cases are precisely those in which the original post’s claims were somewhat fuzzy or ill-characterized—
(not necessarily through the fault of the author! perhaps the subject matter itself is simply fuzzy and hard to characterize!)
—in which case it seems that devoting more cognitive effort (and words) to the topic might be a useful sort of thing to do, in general? I don’t think one needs to resort to a hypothesis of active malice or antipathy to explain this effect; I think people writing about confusing things is generally a good thing (and if that writing ends up being highly upvoted, I’m generally suspicious of explanations like “the author is really, really good at confusing people” when “the subject itself was confusing to begin with” seems like a strictly simpler explanation).
(Considering the general problem of how forum moderation should work, rather than my specific guilt or innocence in the dispute at hand) I think positing non-truth-tracking motivations (which can be more general than “malice or antipathy”) makes sense, and that there is a real problem here: namely, that what I called “the culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse” in the great-grandparent grants a structural advantage to people who have more time to burn arguing on the internet, analogously to how adversarial court systems grant a structural advantage to litigants who can afford a better lawyer.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see any solutions to this problem that don’t themselves have much more serious problems? Realistically, I think just letting the debate or trial process play out (including the motivated efforts of slick commenters or lawyers) results in better shared maps than trusting a benevolent moderator or judge to decide who deserves to speak.
To the extent that Less Wrong has the potential to do better than other forums, I think it’s because our culture and userbase is analogous to a court with a savvier, more intelligent jury (that requires lawyers to make solid arguments, rather than just appealing to their prejudices), not because we’ve moved beyond the need for non-collaborative debate (even though idealized Bayesian reasoners would not need to debate).
(It’s not a hypothesis; Zack makes his antipathy in these cases fairly explicit, e.g. “this is the egregore I’m fighting against tooth and nail” or similar. Generally speaking, I have not found Zack’s writing to be confusion-inducing when it’s not coming from his being triggered or angry or defensive or what-have-you.)
Separately: I’m having a real hard time finding a coherently principled position that says “that’s a strawman” is off-limits because it’s too accusatory and reads too much into the mind of the author, but is fine with “this is insane.”
This whole comment is a psy-op. It was a mistake for me to leave a comment up above in the first place, and I came to my senses and deleted it literally less than a minute after I hit “enter,” but that didn’t stop Zack from replying twenty minutes later and now we have a thread so fine, whatever.
When Zack’s weird baggage leaks into his attempted rationality lessons, he calls people insane and then writes multi-thousand-word screeds based on his flawed interpretations, which he magnanimously says the other person is perfectly welcome to correct! leaving people the following options:
Spend hours and hours of their scant remaining lifetimes laboriously correcting the thousand-yard sprint he already took down the wrong trailhead, or
Leave his uncanny valley misinterpretation there, unaddressed, where it will forever anchor subsequent interpretations, pulling them toward an attractor, and also make the author seem churlish or suspiciously unable-to-rebut (which lends his interpretation further apparent strength)
… which makes being here exhausting and intolerable.
Zack could, of course, just not do this. It’s entirely within his power! He could (for instance), when he forms a knee-jerk interpretation of someone else’s statement that he finds crazy or upsetting, simply ask whether that was the interpretation the author intended, before charging full-steam ahead with a preemptive critique or rebuttal.
(You know, the way you would if you were here to collaborate, and had a shred of respect for your interlocutors.)
This is even easier! It requires less effort! It doesn’t require e.g. being charitable, which for some reason Zack would rather die than do.
But Zack does not do this, because, for whatever reason, Zack values [preserving his god-given right to be a jump-to-conclusions asshole] over things like that. He’ll claim to be sad about our inability to communicate well, but he’s not actually sad enough to cut it out, or even just cut back a little.
(I think it’s wise to be suspicious of people who claim to feel an emotion like sorrow or regret, but do not behave in the ways that someone-feeling-sorrow or someone-feeling-regret would behave; often they have mislabeled something in their experience.)
After cutting him more slack than I cut anybody else for months, the essay where I finally gave up was clearly a partial draft posted by mistake (it petered out after two sections into random fragments and bullet points and scraps of unconnected paragraphs), and it literally said, at the top, sentences to the effect of “these initial short summaries allow for multiple interpretations, some of which I do not intend; please do not shoot off an objection before reading the expansion below, where that interpretation might already have been addressed.”
But within mere minutes, Zack, willfully ignoring that straightforward request, ignoring the obvious incomplete nature of the essay, and ignoring the text wherein his objection was, in fact, addressed, shot off a comment saying that what I was recommending was insane, and then knocking over a strawman.
This was not an aberrant event. It was typical. It was one more straw on the camel’s back. The most parsimonious explanation for why Zack does this instead of any number of more productive moves is that Zack wants his interlocutors to be wrong, so that Zack can be the one to go “look! Look!” and everyone will appreciate how clever he was in pointing out the hole in the argument. He wants me to be wrong badly enough that he’ll distort my point however far he needs to in order to justify writing an essay allegedly “in response.”
(I’m perfectly free to correct him! All I have to do is let him take my hours and my spoons hostage!)
And given that, and given that I eventually could not stand his counterproductive anti-epistemic soul-sucking time wastery any longer, he has the temerity to insinuate that he’s morally superior because he’d never block anyone, no, sir. Or that it’s my fault that we don’t have a line of communication, because he’s happy to talk with me.
FUCK.
Enjoy your sanctimony. You are choosing to make the world worse.
Thanks for your thoughts. (Strong-upvoted.)
Yes, that December 2021 incident was over the line. I’m sorry. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that—but if I had taken a few more moments to think, I would have been able to see it without retrospect. That was really stupid of me, and it made things worse for both of us.
You’re also correct to notice that the bad behavior that I don’t endorse on reflection can be seen as a more extreme version of milder behavior that I do endorse on reflection. (Thus the idiom “over the line”, suggesting that things that don’t go over the line are OK.) I wish I had been smart enough to only do the mild version, and never overshoot into the extreme version.
Are you referring to the paragraph that begins, “If two people disagree, it’s tempting for them to attempt to converge with each other [...]”? In a comment to Phil H., I explained why that paragraph didn’t satisfy me. (Although, as I acknowledged to Phil, it’s plausible that I should have quoted and acknowledged that paragraph in my post, to make it clearer to readers what you weren’t saying; I’ll probably do so if I get around to revising the post.)
If you’re not referring to that paragraph, I’m not sure where you think my objection has been addressed.
(I think I would have noticed if that paragraph had been in the December 2021 version, but if you say it was, I’ll take your word for it—which would imply that my December 2021 behavior was even worse than I’ve already admitted; I owe you a much bigger apology in that case.)
I agree that this is an unpleasant dilemma for an author to face, but to me, it seems like an inextricable feature of intellectual life? Sometimes, other authors have a perspective contrary to yours that they argue for in public, and they might sometimes refer to your writings in the course of arguing for their perspective. I don’t see any “policy” solution here.
Why isn’t this relevantly similar to what Said does, though?
I’m worried that your preferred norms make it way too easy for an author to censor legitimate criticisms. If the critic does too little interpretive labor (just asking questions and expecting the author to be able to answer, like Said), the author can dismiss them for not trying hard enough. If the critic does too much interpretive labor (writing multi-thousand word posts explaining in detail what they think the problem is, without necessarily expecting the author to have time to reply, like me), the author can dismiss them for attacking a strawman.
I imagine you don’t agree with that characterization, but I hope you can see why it looks like a potential problem to me?
I’m not always here to collaborate. Sometimes I’m here to criticize. I endorse this on reflection.
I mean, I respect some of your work. For two concrete examples, I link to “In My Culture” sometimes, and I think “Split and Commit” is a useful reminder to try to live in multiple possible worlds instead of assuming that your “max likelihood” map is equal to the territory. (I think I need to practice this one more.)
But more generally, when people think they’re entitled to my respect rather than having to earn it, that does, actually, make me respect them less than I otherwise would. That might be what you’re picking up on when you perceive that I don’t have a shred of respect for my interlocutors?
That’s a good observation, thanks. I think the thing I initially labeled as “sad” is really just … wishing we weren’t in this slapfight?
I would prefer to live in one of the possible worlds where you either addressed my objections, or silently ignored my posts, or said that you thought my posts were bad in ways that you didn’t have the time to explain but without suggesting I’m culpable of strawmanning without specifically pointing to what I’m getting wrong.
Since you did try to hold me culpable, I had an interest in responding to that … and here we are. This seems like a bad possible world to live in. I think it’s unpleasant for both of us, and I think it’s wasting a lot of time that both of us could spend doing more productive things.
I could have avoided this outcome by not writing posts about my objections to your Fifth Guideline or Rob’s Ninth Element … but then the Fifth Guideline and the Ninth Element would have been accepted into the local culture unchallenged. That would be a problem for me. I think it was worth my effort try to prevent that outcome, even though it resulted in this outcome, which is unpleasant and expensive.
I think that’s what I meant by “sad”, in more words.
… I think I’m going to bite this bullet? Yes, I sometimes take pride and pleasure in criticizing work that I think is importantly mistaken. The reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically (I think it’s fine if someone gets excited about poking holes in my arguments), and because I think the combination of me and the community is pretty good at distinguishing good criticisms from bad criticisms.
I don’t think it’s personal. As you’ve noticed, I’m hyper-sensitive to attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness, because I’m viscerally terrified of what I think they’ll degrade to in practice. You’ll notice that I also argued against Rob’s Ninth Element, not just your Fifth Guideline. It’s not about Rob. It’s not about you. It’s about protecting my interests.
We’re definitely steering the world in different directions. It looks like some of the things I think are net-positive (having more good aspects than bad aspects) are things that you think are net-negative, which puts us in conflict sometimes. That’s unfortunate.
It was. That’s why I was (and remain) so furious with you (Edit: and also am by default highly mistrustful of your summaries of others’ positions).
Thanks for telling me (strong-upvoted). That makes sense as a reason for you to be furious with me. As the grandparent says, I owe you a bigger apology than my previous apology, which appears below.
I hereby apologize for my blog comment of 4 December 2021, on an earlier revision of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”. In addition to the reasons that it was a bad comment in context that I listed in my previous apology, it was also a bad comment for failing to acknowledge that the text of the post contained a paragraph addressing the comment’s main objection, which is a much more serious error. I am embarrassed at my negligence. To avoid such errors in the future, I will endeavor to take some time to emotionally cool down and read more carefully before posting a comment, when I notice that I’m tempted to post a comment while emotionally activated.
If you’d like me to post a variation of this in a more prominent location (like Facebook or Twitter), I’d be willing to do that. (I think I’d want to spend a few more minutes to rewrite the lesser reasons that the comment was bad in context as its own sentence, rather than linking to the previous apology.)
I don’t know what to say in response. Empirically, this apology did zero to reduce the extremely strong deterrent of “God dammit, if I try to post something on LessWrong, one way or another Zack and Said are going to find a way to make that experience miserable and net negative,” which, in combination with the energy that this thread burned up, has indeed resulted in me not posting, where counterfactually I would’ve posted three essays.
(I’m only here now because you’re bumping the threads.)
(Like, there are three specific, known essays that I have not posted, because of my expectations coming off of this thread and the chilling effect of “I’ll have to deal with Zack and Said’s responses.”)
(Also the reason my Basics post ended up being so long-winded was because, after my experience with the partial draft going up by mistake, I was trying quite hard to leave a future Zack no ways to make me regret publishing/no exposed surfaces upon which I could be attacked. I ended up putting in about 20 extra hours because of my past experience with you, which clearly did not end up paying off; I underestimated just how motivated you would be to adversarially interpret and twist things around.)
I tried blocking, and that wasn’t enough to get you to leave me alone.
Sounds like you win.
Literally only you and Said have these twin problems (among long-lasting prolific LW participants). This is you saying “but but but if you claim ZERO is too little and a BILLION is too much, then how is there any room for legitimate criticism to exist?”
It’s somewhere between zero and a billion, like every other person on LessWrong manages to do just fine all the time.
Late edit: we have a term for this thing; it’s called “fallacy of the grey.”
I think it’s important to note survivorship bias here; I think there are other people who used to post on LessWrong and do not anymore, and perhaps this was because of changes in norms like this one.[1] It also seems somewhat likely to me that Said and Zack think that there’s too little legitimate criticism on LW. (I often see critical points by Zack or Said that I haven’t yet seen made by others and which I agree with; are they just faster or are they counterfactual? I would guess the latter, at least some of the time.)
As well, Zack’s worry is that even if the guideline is written by people who have a sense that criticism should be between 4 and 12, establishing the rule with user-chosen values (like, for example, LW has done for a lot of post moderation) will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6; if it will be obvious to you when some other post author has adopted that standard, and you’ll call them out on it in a way that protects Zack’s ability to criticize them, that seems like relevant info from Zack’s perspective.
(From this comment I instead have a sense that your position is “look, we’re over here playing a game with everyone who understands these rules, and Zack and Said don’t, which means they should stop playing our game.”)
[1] To be clear, I don’t miss everyone who has stopped posting on LW; the hope with rules and guidelines like this is that you filter well. I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I don’t think I am making this request.
I do strongly predict that if I made free to verbally abuse Zack in the same fashion Zack verbally abuses others, I would be punished more for it, in part because people would be like “well, yeah, but Zack just kinda is like that; you should do better, Duncan” and in part because people would be like “DUDE, Zack had a traumatic experience with the medical system, you calling him insane is WAY WORSE than calling someone else insane” and “well, if you’re not gonna follow your own discourse rules, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
It’s an asymmetric situation that favors the assholes; people tend not to notice “oh, Duncan rearmed with these weapons he advocates disarming because his interlocutors refused to join the peace treaty.”
Sure, I buy that any functional garden doesn’t just punish hypocrisy, but also failing to follow the rules of the garden, which I’m imputing as a motivation for your second and third paragraphs. (I also buy that lots of “let people choose how to be” approaches favor assholes.)
But… I think there’s some other message in them, that I can’t construct correctly? It seems to me like we’re in a broader cultural environment where postmodern dissolution of moral standards means the only reliable vice to attack others for is hypocrisy. I see your second and third paragraphs as, like, a mixture of disagreeing with this (‘I should not be criticized for hypocrisy as strongly as I predict I would be if I were hypocritical’) and maybe making a counteraccusation of hypocrisy (‘if there were evenly applied standards of conduct, I would be protected from Zack’s misbehavior, but as is I am prevented from attacking Zack but the reverse is not true’).
But I don’t think I really agree with either of those points, as I understand them. I do think hypocrisy is a pretty strong argument against the proposed rules, and also that double standards can make sense (certainly I try to hold LW moderators to higher standards than LW users).
I’m saying:
“I’d like for us to not have a culture wherein it’s considered perfectly kosher to walk around responding to other users’ posts with e.g. ‘This is insane’ without clearing a pretty high bar of, y’know, the thing actually being insane. To the extent that Zack is saying ‘hey, it’s fine, you can verbally abuse me, too!’ this is not a viable solution.”
Fortunately, it seems that LessWrong generally agrees; both my suggested norms and Robbie’s suggested norms were substantially more popular than either of Zack’s weirdly impassioned defenses-of-being-a-jerk.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “neutral norms” if you don’t mean either “the norms Duncan’s proposing, that are in line with what Julia Galef and Scott Alexander and Dan Keys and Eric Rogstad and Oliver Habryka and Vaniver and so on and so forth would do by default,” or “the norms Zack is proposing, in which you act like a dick and defend it by saying ‘it’s important to me that I be able to speak plainly and directly.’”
I endorse this observation.
No, I’m not saying Zack and Said should stop playing the game, I’m saying they should stop being sanctimonious about their inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
I would be surprised to hear you claim that the valid critical points that Zack and Said make are contingent on them continuing to do the shitty things of (respectively) leaping to conclusions about A definitely implying B, or refusing to believe that A implies A until someone logically proves A→A. The times I’ve seen Zack and Said being useful or perceptive were when they weren’t doing these useless and unproductive moves, but rather just saying what they thought.
When Zack says what he thinks, instead of going “hey, everybody, look how abhorrent my strawman of Rob’s position is!” and trying to trick everyone into thinking that was Rob’s position and that he is the sole bastion of epistemic virtue holding back the tides of evil, it’s often useful.
When Said says what he thinks, instead of demanding that people rigorously define “sky,” “blue,” and “is” before allowing the conversation to move on from the premise “the sky is blue today,” it’s often useful.
There’s absolutely nothing that Zack is currently accomplishing that couldn’t have been accomplished if he’d first written a comment to Rob saying “did you mean X?”
He could’ve even gone off and drafted his post while waiting on an answer; it needn’t have even delayed his longer rant, if Rob failed to reply.
Acting like a refusal to employ that bare minimum of social grace is a virtue is bullshit, and I think Zack acts like it is. If you’re that hostile to your fellow LWers, then I think you are making a mistake being here.
It’s not that I think refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace is a virtue. It’s that I wasn’t aware—in fact, am still not aware—that confirming interpretations with the original author before publishing a critical essay constitutes the bare minimum of social grace. The idea that it’s somehow bad behavior for intellectuals to publish essays about other intellectuals’ essays without checking with the original author first is something I’ve never heard before; I think unilaterally publishing critical essays is a completely normal thing that intellectuals do all the time, and I see no particular reason for self-identified “rationalist” intellectuals to behave any differently.
For an arbitrary example from our local subculture, Yudkowsky once wrote “A Reply to Francois Chollet” criticizing Chollet’s essay on the purported impossibility of an intelligence explosion. Did Yudkowsky first write an email to Chollet saying “did you mean X”? I don’t know, but I would guess not; if Chollet stands by the text he published, and Yudkowsky doesn’t feel uncertain about how to interpret the text, it’s not clear how either of their interests would be served by Yudkowsky sending an email first rather than just publishing the post.
As far as my own work goes, “Aiming for Convergence” and “‘Physicist Motors’” aren’t the first times I’ve written reaction posts to popular Less Wrong posts that I didn’t like. Previously, I wrote “Relevance Norms” in reaction to Chris Leong (following John Nerst) on contextualizing vs. decoupling norms, and “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think” in reaction to Yudkowsky on meta-honesty.
I’ve also written other commentary posts that said some critical things about an article, without being so negative overall, such as “Comment on ‘Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization’” (reacting to an article by University of California–Irvine professors James Weatherall and Cailin O’Connor) and “Comment on ‘Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society’” (reacting to an article by Nick Bostrom and Carl Shulman).
I didn’t check with Leong beforehand. I didn’t check with Yudkowsky beforehand. I didn’t check with Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. No one told me I should have checked with Leong or Yudkowsky or Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. It’s just never been brought up as a problem or an offense before, ever.
Most of these authors are much more important people than me who are probably very busy. If someone had told me I should have checked with the authors beforehand, I think I would have said, “Wouldn’t that be disrespectful of their time?”
I do often notify the author after I’ve published a reaction piece. In the case of the current post, I unfortunately neglected to do so, but after seeing your comment, I did reach out to Rob, and he left a few comments. Notably, in response to my comment about my motivations for writing this post, Rob writes:
This would seem to be pretty strong counterevidence against the claim that I failed to employ the bare minimum of social grace (at least as that minimum is construed by Rob himself)?
My objection to this sort of claim is basically the same as my objection to this, from an earlier comment of yours:
And similar to my objection in a much earlier discussion (which I can’t seem to find now, apologies) about Double Crux (I think), wherein (I am summarizing from memory) you said that you have usually been able to easily explain and apply the concept when teaching it to people in person, as a CFAR instructor; to which I asked how you could distinguish between your interlocutor/student really understanding you, vs. the social pressure of the situation (the student/teacher frame, your personal charisma, etc.) causing them, perhaps, to persuade themselves that they’ve understood, when in fact they have not.
In short, the problem is this:
If “sharing interpretive labor”, “making intellectual progress”, etc., just boils down to “agreeing with you, without necessarily getting any closer to (or perhaps even getting further away from) the truth”, then of course you would observe exactly what you say you observe, yes?
And yet it would, in this scenario, be very bad if you self-selected into discussions where everyone had (it would seem to you) an easy time “sharing interpretive labor”, where you routinely made (or so you would think) plenty of “intellectual progress”, etc.
No doubt you disagree with this view of things. But on what basis? How can you tell that this isn’t what’s happening?
I object to this characterization, which is inaccurate and tendentious.
That’s not what I meant. I affirm Vaniver’s interpretation (“Zack’s worry is that [...] establishing the rule with user-chosen values [...] will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6”).
(In my culture, it’s important that I say “That’s not what I meant” rather than “That’s a strawman”, because the former is agnostic about who is “at fault”. In my culture, there’s a much stronger duty on writers to write clearly than there is on readers to maintain uncertainty about the author’s intent; if I’m unhappy that the text I wrote led someone to jump to the wrong conclusion, I more often think that I should have written better text, rather than that the reader shouldn’t have jumped.)
Another attempt to explain the concern (if Vaniver’s “above 8 and below 6” remark wasn’t sufficient): suppose there were a dishonest author named Mallory, who never, ever admitted she was wrong, even when she was obviously wrong. How can Less Wrong protect against Mallory polluting our shared map with bad ideas?
My preferred solution (it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I have) is to have a culture that values unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse. That is, if Mallory writes a post that I think is bad, I can write a comment (or even a top-level reply or reaction post, if I have a lot to say) explaining why I think the post is bad. The hope is that if my criticism is good, then people will upvote my criticism and downvote Mallory’s post, and if my criticism is bad—for example, by mischaracterizing the text of Mallory’s post—then Mallory or someone else can write a comment to me explaining why my reply mischaracterizes the text of Mallory’s post, and people will upvote the meta-criticism and downvote my reply.
It’s crucial to the functioning of this system that criticism does not require Mallory’s consent. If we instead had a culture that enthusiastically supported Mallory banning commenters who (in Mallory’s personal judgement) aren’t trying hard enough to see reasons why they’re the one that’s missing something and Mallory is in the right, or who don’t feel collaborative or cooperative to interact with (to Mallory), or who are anchoring readers with uncanny-valley interpretations (according to Mallory), I think that would be a problem, because there would be nothing to stop Mallory from motivatedly categorizing everyone who saw real errors in her thinking as un-collaborative and therefore unfit to speak.
The culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse isn’t without its costs, but if someone wanted to persuade me to try something else, I would want to hear about how their culture reacts to Mallory.
This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
(e.g. repeatedly asserting that Y is tantamount to X and underplaying or outright ignoring the ways in which Y is not X; if you vehemently shout “Carthage delenda est” enough times people do indeed start becoming more and more afraid of Carthage regardless of whether or nor this is justified.)
You basically extort effort from people, with your long-winded bad takes, leaving the author with a choice between:
a) allowing your demagoguery to take over everyone’s perceptions of their point, now that you’ve dragged it toward a nearby (usually terrible) attractor, such that even though it said Y everybody’s going to subsequently view it through the filter of your X-interpretation, or
b) effortfully rebutting every little bit of your flood of usually-motivated-by-antipathy words.
Eventually, this becomes exhausting enough that the correct move is to kick Mallory out of the garden, where they do not belong and are making everything worse far disproportionate to their contribution.
Mallory can go write their rebuttals in any of the other ten thousand places on the internet that aren’t specifically trying to collaborate on clear thinking, clear communication, and truth-seeking.
The garden of LessWrong is not particularly well-kept, though.
This does not seem like it should be possible for arbitrary X and Y, and so if Zack manages to pull it off in some cases, it seems likely that those cases are precisely those in which the original post’s claims were somewhat fuzzy or ill-characterized—
(not necessarily through the fault of the author! perhaps the subject matter itself is simply fuzzy and hard to characterize!)
—in which case it seems that devoting more cognitive effort (and words) to the topic might be a useful sort of thing to do, in general? I don’t think one needs to resort to a hypothesis of active malice or antipathy to explain this effect; I think people writing about confusing things is generally a good thing (and if that writing ends up being highly upvoted, I’m generally suspicious of explanations like “the author is really, really good at confusing people” when “the subject itself was confusing to begin with” seems like a strictly simpler explanation).
(Considering the general problem of how forum moderation should work, rather than my specific guilt or innocence in the dispute at hand) I think positing non-truth-tracking motivations (which can be more general than “malice or antipathy”) makes sense, and that there is a real problem here: namely, that what I called “the culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse” in the great-grandparent grants a structural advantage to people who have more time to burn arguing on the internet, analogously to how adversarial court systems grant a structural advantage to litigants who can afford a better lawyer.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see any solutions to this problem that don’t themselves have much more serious problems? Realistically, I think just letting the debate or trial process play out (including the motivated efforts of slick commenters or lawyers) results in better shared maps than trusting a benevolent moderator or judge to decide who deserves to speak.
To the extent that Less Wrong has the potential to do better than other forums, I think it’s because our culture and userbase is analogous to a court with a savvier, more intelligent jury (that requires lawyers to make solid arguments, rather than just appealing to their prejudices), not because we’ve moved beyond the need for non-collaborative debate (even though idealized Bayesian reasoners would not need to debate).
(It’s not a hypothesis; Zack makes his antipathy in these cases fairly explicit, e.g. “this is the egregore I’m fighting against tooth and nail” or similar. Generally speaking, I have not found Zack’s writing to be confusion-inducing when it’s not coming from his being triggered or angry or defensive or what-have-you.)
Separately: I’m having a real hard time finding a coherently principled position that says “that’s a strawman” is off-limits because it’s too accusatory and reads too much into the mind of the author, but is fine with “this is insane.”